The Angels Weep (31 page)

For another hour he listened, sinking lower and still lower in
his chair and scowling at the lawyers opposite him, until Aaron
Fagan asked humbly: ‘Does that mean in your opinion my
client has not fulfilled the requirements of Section 27 B Clause
Five read in conjunction with Section 7 Bis?’

‘Well, Mr Fagan, we would first have to examine the
question of due performance as set out in Section 31,’
replied the pack leader carefully, smoothing his moustache and
glancing at his assistants who nodded brightly again in concert.
‘In terms of that section—’

Abruptly Ralph reached the far frontier of his patience. He
brought his boots down off the table onto the floor with a crash
that startled the four grey-suited men across the table. One of
them knocked his folder onto the floor, and papers flew like the
feathers when a red caracal cat gets into the henhouse.

‘I may not know the difference between “due
performance” and the aperture between your buttocks,’
announced Ralph in a voice that made the leader pale and shrink
in size. Like all men of words, he had a horror of violence, and
that was what he sensed in the gaze with which Ralph fixed him.
‘However, I do know a wagonload of horse manure when I see
one. And this, gentlemen, is grade-one horse manure you are
giving me.’

‘Mr Ballantyne.’ One of the younger assistants was
bolder than his chief. ‘I must protest your use of
language! Your insinuation—’

‘It is not an insinuation,’ Ralph rounded on him.
‘I am telling you outright that you are a bunch of bandits,
is that still not clear enough? How about robbers then, or
pirates?’

‘Sir—’ The assitant sprang to his feet,
flushed with indignation, and Ralph reached across the table and
caught him by the front of his stock. He twisted it sharply,
cutting off the man’s protest before it emerged.

‘Pray be silent, my good fellow, I am speaking,’
Ralph admonished him, and then went on, ‘I am sick of
dealing with little thieves. I want to speak to the head bandit.
Where is Mr Rhodes?’

At that moment a locomotive down in the shunting-yards
whistled. The sound only just carried even in the silence which
followed Ralph’s question, and Ralph remembered
Jordan’s excuse for ending lunch the previous day. He
released the struggling lawyer so abruptly that the man collapsed
back into his chair, fighting for breath.

‘Aaron,’ Ralph demanded. ‘What time is
it?’

‘Eight minutes of noon.’

‘He was fobbing me off – the cunning bastard was
fobbing me off!’

Ralph whirled and ran from the boardroom.

T
here were half
a dozen horses at the hitching rack outside the front of the De
Beers building. Without checking his speed, Ralph decided on a
big strong-looking bay and ran to it. He clinched the girth,
unhitched the reins, and turned its head out into the road.

‘Hey, you,’ shouted the janitor.
‘That’s Sir Randolph’s mount!’

‘Tell Sir Randolph he can have his suite back,’
Ralph called, and vaulted to the saddle. It had been a good
choice, the bay drove strongly between his knees. They galloped
past the mine stagings, through the gap between the hillocks
formed by the high tailing dumps and Ralph saw Mr Rhodes’
private train.

It was already crossing the points at the southern end of the
yards and running out into the open country. The locomotive was
hauling four coaches, steam spurted from the pistons of the
driving wheels with each stroke. The signal arm was down and the
lights were green. The locomotive was picking up speed
swiftly.

‘Come boy,’ Ralph encouraged the bay, swinging it
towards the barbed-wire fence beside the track. The horse
steadied himself, pricking his ears forward as he judged the
wire. Then he went for it boldly. ‘Oh good boy.’
Ralph lifted him with hands and knees.

They flew over it with two feet to spare and landed neatly.
There was flat open ground ahead, and the railway tracks curved
slightly. Ralph aimed to cut the curve. He lay against the
horse’s neck, watching the stony ground for holes. Five
hundred yards ahead the train was pulling gradually away from
them, but the bay ran on gamely.

Then the locomotive hit the gradient of the Magersfontein
Hills and the huffing of the boiler changed its beat and slowed.
They caught it a quarter of a mile from the crest, and Ralph
pushed the bay in close enough for him to lean from the saddle
and grab the handrail of the rear balcony on the last coach.
Ralph swung across the gap and scrambled up onto the balcony. He
looked back. The bay was already grazing contentedly on the
Karroo bush beside the tracks.

‘Somehow, I knew you were coming.’ Ralph turned
quickly. Jordan was standing in the door of the coach. ‘I
even had a bed made up for you in one of the guest
compartments.’

‘Where is he?’ Ralph demanded.

‘Waiting for you in the saloon. He watched your
daredevil riding with interest. I won a guinea on you.’

Ostensibly the train was for the use of all the directors of
De Beers, though none of them, apart from the Chairman of the
Board, had yet shown the temerity to exercise that right.

The exteriors of the coaches and the locomotive were varnished
in chocolate brown and gold. The interiors were as luxurious as
unlimited expenditure could make them, from the fitted Wilton
carpets and cut-glass chandeliers in the saloon to the solid gold
and onyx fittings in the bathrooms.

Mr Rhodes was slumped in a buttoned calf-leather chair beside
the wide picture window in his private car. There were sheaves of
paper on the Italian gold-embossed leather top of his bureau, and
a crystal glass of whisky at his elbow. He looked tired and ill.
His face was bloated and blotched with livid purple. There was
more silver than ruddy gold in his moustache and wavy hair now,
but his eyes were still that pale fanatical blue and his voice
high and sharp.

‘Sit down, Ballantyne,’ he said. ‘Jordan,
get your brother a drink.’

Jordan placed a silver tray with a ship’s decanter, a
Stuart crystal glass and a matching claret jug of water on the
table beside Ralph. While he did so, Mr Rhodes addressed himself
once more to the papers in front of him.

‘What is the most important asset of any nation,
Ballantyne?’ he demanded suddenly, without looking up
again.

‘Diamonds?’ suggested Ralph mockingly, and he
heard Jordan draw breath sharply behind him.

‘Men,’ said Mr Rhodes, as though he had not heard.
‘Young, bright men, imbued during the most susceptible
period of their lives with the grand design. Young men like you,
Ralph, Englishmen with all the manly virtues.’ Mr Rhodes
paused. ‘I am endowing a series of scholarships in my will.
I want these young men to be chosen carefully and sent to Oxford
University.’ For the first time he looked up at Ralph.
‘You see, it is utterly unacceptable that a man’s
noblest thoughts should cease, merely because the man dies. These
will be my living thoughts. Through these young men, I shall live
for ever.’

‘How will you select them?’ Ralph asked, intrigued
despite himself by this design for immortality, devised by a
giant with a crippled heart.

‘I am working on that now.’ Rhodes rearranged the
papers on his bureau. ‘Literary and scholastic achievement,
of course, success at manly sports, powers of
leadership.’

‘Where would you find them?’ For the moment, Ralph
had set aside his anger and frustration. ‘From England, all
of them?’

‘No, no,’ Mr Rhodes shook his shaggy leonine head.
‘From every corner of the Empire – Africa, Canada,
Australia, New Zealand, even from America. Thirteen from America
each year, one for every state.’

Ralph suppressed a smile. The colossus of Africa, of whom Mark
Twain had written ‘When he stands on Table Mountain, his
shadow falls on the Zambezi’, had blind spots in his vast
scheming mind. He still believed that America consisted of the
original thirteen states. Such small imperfections gave Ralph
courage to face him, to oppose him. He did not touch the decanter
at his elbow. He would need all his wits to find any other
weakness to exploit.

‘And after men?’ Rhodes asked. ‘What is the
next most precious asset of a new land? Diamonds, as you suggest,
or gold perhaps?’ He shook his head. ‘It is the power
that drives the railways, that turns the mine headgears, that
fuels the blast furnaces, the power that makes all the wheels go
round. Coal.’

Then they were both silent, staring at each other. Ralph felt
every muscle in his body under stress, the hackles at the back of
his neck rising in an atavistic passion. The young bull facing up
to the herd bull in their first trial of strength.

‘It is very simple, Ralph, the coal deposits in
Wankie’s country must be retained in responsible
hands.’

‘The hands of the British South Africa Company?’
Ralph asked grimly.

Mr Rhodes did not have to reply. He merely went on staring
into Ralph’s eyes.

‘By what means will you take them?’ Ralph broke
the silence.

‘By any means that are necessary.’

‘Legal or otherwise?’

‘Come on, Ralph, you know it is totally within my power
to legalize anything I do in Rhodesia.’ Not Matabeleland or
Mashonaland, Ralph noted, but Rhodesia. The megalo-manic dream of
grandeur was complete. ‘Of course, you will be compensated
– land, gold claims – whatever you choose. What will
it be, Ralph?’

Ralph shook his head. ‘I want the coal deposits that I
discovered and that I pegged. They are mine. I will fight you for
them.’

Rhodes sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘Very
well, I withdraw my offer of compensation. Instead, let me point
out a few facts to you of which you are probably unaware. There
are two Company linesmen who have sworn an affidavit before the
Administrator in Bulawayo that they saw you personally cutting
telegraph lines south of the town on Monday the fourth at 4
p.m.’

‘They are lying,’ said Ralph, and turned to look
at his brother. Only he could have made the deduction and pointed
it out to Mr Rhodes. Jordan sat quietly in an armchair at the end
of the saloon. He did not look up from the shorthand pad on his
lap, and his beautiful face was serene. Ralph tasted the sourness
of treachery on the back of his tongue, and he turned back to
face his adversary.

‘They may be lying,’ Mr Rhodes agreed softly.
‘But they are prepared to testify under oath.’

‘Malicious damage to Company property,’ Ralph
raised an eyebrow. ‘Is that a capital offence
now?’

‘You still do not understand, do you? Any contract made
under a deliberate misrepresentation can be set aside by a court
of law. If Roelof Zeederberg could prove that when you and he
signed your little agreement, you were fully aware of the
epidemic of rinderpest which is sweeping Rhodesia,’ (that
name again) ‘and that you had committed a criminal act to
keep that fact from him—’ Mr Rhodes did not finish.
Instead he sighed again and rubbed his chin, the silver stubble
rasped under his thumb. ‘On the fourth, your father, Major
Zouga Ballantyne, sold five thousand head of breeding stock to
Gwaai Cattle Ranches, one of my own companies. Three days later,
half of them were dead of rinderpest, and the rest will soon be
destroyed by the Company anti-rinderpest measures. Already
Zeederberg Brothers have lost sixty per cent of the bullocks you
sold them, they have two hundred wagons and their loads stranded
on the great north road. Don’t you see, Ralph, both your
contract of sale and your father’s could be declared null
and void. Both of you forced to refund the purchase monies you
received and to take back thousands of dead and dying
animals.’

Ralph’s face was stony, but his skin had yellowed like a
man five days in fever. Now with a jerky movement he poured the
crystal tumbler half full of whisky, and he swallowed a mouthful
as though it were broken glass. Mr Rhodes let the subject of
rinderpest lie between them like a coiled adder, and he seemed to
go off in another direction.

‘I hope that my legal advisers followed my instructions
and apprised you of the mining and prospecting laws that have
been adopted for the Charter territories. We have decided to
apply the American law, as opposed to the Transvaal law.’
Mr Rhodes sipped from his glass, and then twisted it between his
fingers. The base had left a wet circle on the expensive Italian
leather. ‘There are some peculiar features of these
American laws. I doubt that you have had an opportunity to study
all of them, so I will take the liberty of pointing one out to
you. In terms of Section 23, any mineral claim pegged between
sunset of one day and sunrise of the following day shall be void
and the title in those claims liable to be set aside by an order
of the mining commissioner. Did you know that?’

Ralph nodded his head. ‘They told me.’

‘There is an affidavit on the Administrator’s desk
at this moment, made in the presence of a Justice of the Peace by
one Jan Cheroot, a Hottentot in the domestic service of Major
Zouga Ballantyne, to the effect that certain claims registered by
the Rhodesian Land and Mining Company, of which you are the major
shareholder, which claims are known as the Harkness Mine, were
pegged during the hours of darkness, and therefore liable to be
declared void.’

Ralph started so that his glass rattled against the silver
tray, and whisky slopped over the rim.

‘Before you chastise this unfortunate Hottentot, let me
hasten to assure you that he believed he was acting in the best
interests of you and his master when he swore this
affidavit.’

This time the silence drew out for many minutes, while Mr
Rhodes peered out of the window at the bleak treeless sunbleached
spaces of the Karroo under a milky blue sky.

Then quite suddenly Mr Rhodes spoke again. ‘I understand
that you have already committed yourself to the purchase of
mining machinery for the Harkness Mine, and that you have signed
personal sureties for over thirty thousand pounds. The choice
before you is simple enough then. Give up all claim to the Wankie
coal deposits, or lose not only them, but the Zeederberg contract
and the Harkness claims. Walk away still a rich man by any
standards, or—’