The Angels Weep (40 page)

‘But,’ he blubbered, ‘but—’ And
then he could think of no further protest. His pince-nez misted
and his lower lip stuck out like a sulky child’s.

‘Sit down,’ Ralph ordered gently, and he sank back
miserably into his chair.

‘I will have to ask you to make a deposit,’ Silver
made one last effort.

‘How much will you need?’

‘Forty thousand pounds.’

Ralph opened his cheque-book on the edge of the desk, and took
one of David Silver’s pens from the rack. The squeak of the
nib was the only sound in the hot little office, until Ralph sat
back and fanned the cheque to dry the ink.

‘There is just one thing more,’ he said.
‘Nobody outside these four walls, nobody is ever to know
that I am the principal in this transaction.’

‘You have my word.’

‘Or your testicles,’ Ralph warned him, as he
leaned close to hand him the cheque, and though he smiled, his
eyes were such a cold green that David Silver shivered, and he
felt a sharp pang of anticipation in his threatened parts.

I
t was a
typical highveld Boer homestead set on a rocky ridge above an
undulating treeless plain of silver grass. The roof was of
galvanized corrugated iron which had begun to rust through in
patches. The house was surrounded by wide verandas, and the
whitewash was discoloured and flaking from the wall. There was a
windmill on a skeletal tower behind the house. The vanes blurred
against the pale cloudless sky, spinning in the dry dusty wind,
and at each weary crank of the plunger, a cupful of cloudy green
water spilled into the circular concrete cistern beside the
kitchen door.

There was no attempt at a garden or lawn. A dozen scrawny
speckled fowls scratched at the bare baked earth, or perched
disconsolately on the derelict Cape wagon and the other ruined
equipment that always seemed to ornament the yard of every Boer
homestead. On the side of the prevailing wind stood a tall
Australian eucalyptus tree with the old bark hanging in tatters
from the silver trunk like the skin of a moulting serpent. In its
scant shade were tethered eight sturdy brown ponies.

As Ralph dismounted below the veranda, a pack of mongrel
hounds came snapping and snarling about his boots, and he
scattered them yelping and howling with a few kicks and a hissing
cut from his hippo-hide sjambok.

‘
U kom ‘n bietjie laat, meneer
.’ A
man had come out onto the veranda. He was in shirtsleeves with
braces holding up the baggy brown trousers that left his bare
ankles exposed. On his feet, he wore rawhide velskoen without
socks.

‘
Jammer
,’ Ralph apologized for being late.
Using the simplified form of Dutch, which the Boer called the
taal
, the language.

The man held the door open for Ralph and he stooped through it
into the windowless living-room. It smelled of stale smoke and
dead ash from the open fireplace. The floor was covered with rush
mats and animal-skins. There was a single table down the centre
of the room, of heavy crudely fashioned dark wood. There was a
single hanging on the wall opposite the fireplace, an embroidered
copy of the ten commandments in High Dutch script. The only book
in the room lay open on the bare table-top. It was an enormous
Dutch Bible with leather cover and bindings of brass.

On leather-thonged chairs, eight men sat down the length of
both sides of the table. They all looked up at Ralph as he
entered. There was not a man amongst them younger than fifty
years old, for the Boers valued experience and acquired wisdom in
their leaders. Most of them were bearded and all of them wore
rough hard-worn clothing, and were solemn and unsmiling. The man
who had greeted Ralph followed him in and silently indicated an
empty chair. Ralph sat down and every shaggy bearded head turned
away from him towards the figure at the end of the table.

He was the biggest man in the room, monumentally ugly, as a
bulldog or one of the great anthropoids is ugly. His beard was a
grey scraggly fringe, but his upper lip was shaven. His face hung
in folds and bags, the skin was darkly burned by ten thousand
fierce African suns, and it was lumped and stained with warts and
with the speckles of benign skin cancer, like the foxing on the
pages of a very old book. One eyelid drooped to give him a crafty
suspicious expression. His toffee-brown eyes had also been
affected by the white sun glare of Africa, and by the scouring
dust of the hunting veld and the battlefield, so they were now
perpetually bloodshot, sore and inflamed-looking. His people
called him Oom Paul, Uncle Paul, and held him in only slightly
less veneration than they did their Old Testament God.

Paul Kruger began to read aloud again from the open Bible
before him. He read slowly, followed the text with his finger.
The thumb was missing from his hand. It had been blown off by a
bursting gunbarrel thirty years before. His voice was a rumbling
basso profundo
.

Ralph watched him intently, studying the huge slumped body,
the shoulders so wide that the ugly head seemed to perch upon
them like a bedraggled bird on a mountaintop, and he thought of
the legend that surrounded this strange man.

Paul Kruger had been nine years old when his father and uncles
had packed their wagons and gathered their herds and trekked
northwards, away from British rule, driven on by the memory of
their folk heroes hanged at Slachters Nek by the Redcoats. The
Krugers trekked from the injustice of having their slaves turned
free, from the English black circuit courts, from judges who did
not speak their language, from taxes levied on land that was
theirs and from the foreign troops who seized their beloved herds
to pay those taxes.

The year had been 1835 and on that hard trek Paul Kruger
became a man at an age when most boys are still playing with
kites and marbles. Each day he was given a single bullet and a
charge of powder and sent out to provide meat for the family. If
he failed to bring back a buck, his father beat him. He became,
by necessity, an expert marksman.

It was one of his duties to scout ahead for water and good
grazing, and to lead the caravan to it. He became a skilled
horseman and developed an almost mystical affinity for the veld,
and the herds of fat-tailed sheep and multi-hued cattle that were
his family’s wealth. Like a Matabele
mujiba
, he knew
every beast by name, and could pick out an ailing animal from the
herd at a mile distant.

When Mzilikazi, the Matabele emperor, sent his impis with
their long shields swarming down upon the little caravan of
wagons, little Paul took his place with the other men at the
barricades. There were thirty-three Boer fighting men inside the
circle of wagons. The wagon trucks were lashed together with trek
chains, and the openings between the wheels latticed with woven
thorn-branches.

The Matabele
amadoda
were uncountable. Regiment after
regiment they charged, hissing their deep ringing
‘Jee!’ They attacked for six hours without respite,
and when the bullets ran low, the Boer women smelted and cast
lead in the midst of the battle. When the Matabele fell back at
last, their dead lay chest-deep around the wagons and little Paul
had become a man, for he had killed a man – many men.

Strangely, it was another four years before he killed his
first lion, sending a hardened ball through its heart as it
sprang upon his horse’s back. By now he was able to test a
new horse by galloping it over broken ground. If it fell, young
Paul would land catlike, on his feet, shake his head with
disapproval, and walk away. When hunting buffalo, he would mount
facing his horse’s tail so as to have a steadier shot when
the beasts chased his horse, as they invariably did. This unusual
seat in no way hampered his control of the horse, and he could
change to face ahead so swiftly and smoothly as not to upset his
mount’s stride in full gallop.

About this time he showed a gift of extra-sensory powers.
Before a hunt, standing at his horse’s head, he would go
into a self-induced trance and begin describing the surrounding
countryside and the wild animals in it. ‘One hour’s
ride to the north there is a small muddy pan. A herd of quagga
are drinking there, and five fat eland are coming down the path
to the water. On the hill above it, under a camel-thorn tree, a
pride of lion are resting,
‘n ou swart maanhaar
, an
old blackmane, and two lionesses. In the valleys beyond, three
giraffe.’ The hunters would find the animals, or the signs
they had left, exactly as young Paul described them.

At sixteen, he was entitled, as a man, to ride off two farms,
as much land as a horseman could encircle in a day. Each of them
was approximately sixteen thousand acres. They were the first of
the vast land-holdings he acquired and held during his lifetime,
sometimes bartering sixteen thousand acres of prime pasture for a
plough or a bag of sugar.

At twenty he was a field cornet, an elected office which was
something between magistrate and sheriff; at such tender years to
be chosen by men who venerated age marked him as somebody
unusual. About this time, he ran a foot race against a horseman
on a picked steed over a course of a mile, and won by a length.
Then during a battle against the black chief Sekukuni, the Boer
General was shot through the head and tumbled over the edge of
the kopje. The General was a big bulky man, two hundred and forty
pounds weight, but Paul Kruger leaped down the krans, picked up
the body and ran back up the hillside under the musket-fire of
Sekukuni’s men.

When he set off to claim his bride, he found his way blocked
by the wide Vaal river in raging spate, the carcasses of cattle
and wild game rolling by in the flood. Despite cries of warning
from the ferryman, and without even removing his boots, he urged
his horse into the brown waters and swam across. Flooded rivers
would not stop a man like Paul Kruger.

After having fought Moshesh and Mzilikazi, and every other
warlike tribe south of the Limpopo river, after having burned Dr
David Livingstone’s mission on the suspicion that he was
supplying arms to the tribes, after having fought even his own
people, the rebellious Boers of the Orange Free State, he was
made Commandant-in-Chief of the army, and still later the
President of the South African Republic.

It was this indomitable, courageous, immensely physically
powerful, ugly, obstinate, devout and cantankerous old man, rich
in land and herds, who now lifted his head from the Bible and
finished his reading with a simple injunction to the men who
waited upon him attentively.

‘Fear God, and distrust the English,’ he said, and
closed the Bible.

Then still without taking his bloodshot eyes from
Ralph’s face, he bellowed with shocking force, ‘Bring
coffee!’ and a coloured maid bustled in with a tin tray
loaded with steaming mugs. The men around the table exchanged
pouches of black Magaliesberg shag, and charged their pipes,
watching Ralph with closed and guarded expressions. Once the oily
blue smoke had veiled the air, Kruger spoke again.

‘You asked to see me,
mijn heer
?’

‘Alone,’ said Ralph.

‘These men I trust.’

‘Very well.’

They used the
taal
. Ralph knew that Kruger could speak
English with some fluency, and that he would not do so as a
matter of principle. Ralph had learned to speak the
taal
on the diamond-diggings. It was the simplest of all European
languages, suited to the everyday life of an uncomplicated
society of hunters and farmers, though even they, for the
purposes of political discussion or worship, fell back upon the
sophistication of High Dutch.

‘My name is Ballantyne.’

‘I know who you are. Your father was the
elephant-hunter. A strong man, they say, and straight – but
you,’ and now a world of loathing entered the old
man’s tone, ‘you belong to that heathen,
Rhodes.’ And though Ralph shook his head, he went on,
‘Do not think I have not heard his blasphemies. I know that
when he was asked if he believed there was a God, he
replied,’ and here he broke into heavily accented English
for the first time, ‘“I give God a fifty-fifty chance
of existing.”’ Kruger shook his head slowly.
‘He will pay for that one day, for the Lord has commanded,
“Thou shalt not take My name in vain.”’

‘Perhaps that day of payment is already at hand,’
said Ralph softly. ‘And perhaps you are God’s chosen
instrument.’

‘Do you dare to blaspheme, also?’ the old man
demanded sharply.

‘No,’ Ralph shook his head. ‘I come to
deliver the blasphemer into your hands.’ And he laid an
envelope on the dark wood, then with a flick slid it down the
length of the table until it lay in front of the president.
‘A list of the arms he has sent secretly into Johannesburg,
and where they are held. The names of the rebels who intend to
use them. The size and force of the commando gathered on your
borders at Pitsani, the route they will take to join the rebels
in Johannesburg, and the date on which they intend to
ride.’

Every man at the table had stiffened with shock, only the old
man still puffed calmly at his pipe. He made no effort to touch
the envelope.

‘Why do you come to me with this?’

‘When I see a thief about to break into a
neighbour’s home, I take it as my duty to warn
him.’

Kruger removed the pipe from his mouth and flicked a spurt of
yellow tobacco juice from the stem onto the dung-floor beside his
chair.

‘We are neighbours,’ Ralph explained. ‘We
are white men living in Africa. We have a common destiny. We have
many enemies, and one day we may be required to fight them
together.’