Kitabı oku: «Master of the Game»

Chapter One

‘By God, this is a real donderstorm!’ Jamie McGregor said. He had grown up amid the wild storms of the Scottish Highlands, but he had never witnessed anything as violent as this. The afternoon sky had been suddenly obliterated by enormous clouds of sand, instantly turning day into night. The dusty sky was lit by flashes of lightning – weerlig, the Afrikaners called it – that scorched the air, followed by donderslag – thunder. Then the deluge. Sheets of rain that smashed against the army of tents and tin huts and turned the dirt streets of Klipdrift into frenzied streams of mud. The sky was aroar with rolling peals of thunder, one following the other like artillery in some celestial war.

Jamie McGregor quickly stepped aside as a house built of raw brick dissolved into mud, and he wondered whether the town of Klipdrift was going to survive.

Klipdrift was not really a town. It was a sprawling canvas village, a seething mass of tents and huts and wagons crowding the banks of the Vaal River, populated by wild-eyed dreamers drawn to South Africa from all parts of the world by the same obsession: diamonds.

Jamie McGregor was one of the dreamers. He was barely eighteen, a handsome lad, tall and fair-haired, with startlingly light grey eyes. There was an attractive ingenuousness about him, an eagerness to please that was endearing. He had a lighthearted disposition and a soul filled with optimism.

He had travelled almost eight thousand miles from his father’s farm in the Highlands of Scotland to Edinburgh, London, Cape Town and now Klipdrift. He had given up his rights to the share of the farm that he and his brothers tilled with their father, but Jamie McGregor had no regrets. He knew he was going to be rewarded ten thousand times over. He had left the security of the only life he had ever known and had come to this distant, desolate place because he dreamed of being rich. Jamie was not afraid of hard work, but the rewards of tilling the rocky little farm north of Aberdeen were meager. He worked from sunup to sundown, along with his brothers, his sister, Mary, and his mother and father, and they had little to show for it. He had once attended a fair in Edinburgh and had seen the wondrous things of beauty that money could buy. Money was to make your life easy when you were well, and to take care of your needs when you were ailing. Jamie had seen too many friends and neighbours live and die in poverty.

He remembered his excitement when he first heard about the latest diamond strike in South Africa. The biggest diamond in the world had been found there, lying loose in the sand, and the whole area was rumoured to be a great treasure chest waiting to be opened.

He had broken the news to his family after dinner on a Saturday night. They were seated around an uncleared table in the rude, timbered kitchen when Jamie spoke, his voice shy and at the same time proud. ‘I’m going to South Africa to find diamonds. I’ll be on my way next week.’

Five pairs of eyes stared at him as though he were crazy.

‘You’re goin’ chasing after diamonds?’ his father asked. ‘You must be daft, lad. That’s all a fairy tale – a temptation of the devil to keep men from doin’ an honest day’s work.’

‘Why do you nae tell us where you’re gettin’ the money to go?’ his brother Ian asked. ‘It’s halfway ’round the world. You hae no money.’

‘If I had money,’ Jamie retorted, ‘I wouldn’t have to go looking for diamonds, would I? Nobody there has money. I’ll be an equal with all of them. I’ve got brains and a strong back. I’ll not fail.’

His sister, Mary, said, ‘Annie Cord will be disappointed. She expects to be your bride one day, Jamie.’

Jamie adored his sister. She was older than he. Twenty-four, and she looked forty. She had never owned a beautiful thing in her life. I’ll change that, Jamie promised himself.

His mother silently picked up the platter that held the remains of the steaming haggis and walked over to the iron sink.

Late that night she came to Jamie’s bedside. She gently placed one hand on Jamie’s shoulder, and her strength flooded into him. ‘You do what you must, Son. I dinna ken if there be diamonds there, but if there be, you’ll find them.’ She brought out from behind her a worn leather pouch. ‘I’ve put by a few pounds. You needn’t say nothin’ to the others. God bless you, Jamie.’

When he left for Edinburgh, he had fifty pounds in the pouch.

It was an arduous journey to South Africa, and it took Jamie McGregor almost a year to make it. He got a job as a waiter in a workingman’s restaurant in Edinburgh until he added another fifty pounds to the pouch. Then it was on to London. Jamie was awed by the size of the city, the huge crowds, the noise and the large horse-drawn omnibuses that raced along at five miles an hour. There were hansom cabs everywhere, carrying beautiful women in large hats and swirling skirts and dainty little high-button shoes. He watched in wonder as the ladies alighted from the cabs and carriages to shop at Burlington Arcade, a dazzling cornucopia of silver and dishes and dresses and furs and pottery and apothecary shops crammed with mysterious bottles and jars.

Jamie found lodging at a house at 32 Fitzroy Street. It cost ten shillings a week, but it was the cheapest he could find. He spent his days at the docks, seeking a ship that would take him to South Africa, and his evenings seeing the wondrous sights of London town. One evening he caught a glimpse of Edward, the Prince of Wales, entering a restaurant near Covent Garden by the side door, a beautiful young lady on his arm. She wore a large-flowered hat, and Jamie thought how nice it would look on his sister.

Jamie attended a concert at the Crystal Palace, built for The Great Exhibition in 1851. He visited Drury Lane and at intermission sneaked into the Savoy Theatre, where they had installed the first electric lighting in a British public building. Some streets were lighted by electricity, and Jamie heard that it was possible to talk to someone on the other side of town by means of a wonderful new machine, the telephone. Jamie felt that he was looking at the future.

In spite of all the innovations and activity, England was in the midst of a growing economic crisis that winter. The streets were filled with the unemployed and the hungry, and there were mass demonstrations and street fighting. I’ve got to get away from here, Jamie thought. I came to escape poverty. The following day, Jamie signed on as a steward on the Walmer Castle, bound for Cape Town, South Africa.

The sea journey lasted three weeks, with stops at Madeira and St Helena to take on more coal for fuel. It was a rough, turbulent voyage in the dead of winter, and Jamie was seasick from the moment the ship sailed. But he never lost his cheerfulness, for every day brought him nearer to his treasure chest. As the ship moved towards the equator, the climate changed. Miraculously, winter began to thaw into summer, and as they approached the African coast, the days and nights became hot and steamy.

The Walmer Castle arrived in Cape Town at early dawn, moving carefully through the narrow channel that divided the great leper settlement of Robben Island from the mainland, and dropped anchor in Table Bay.

Jamie was on deck before sunrise. He watched, mesmerized, as the early-morning fog lifted and revealed the grand spectacle of Table Mountain looming high over the city. He had arrived.

The moment the ship made fast to the wharf, the decks were overrun by a horde of the strangest-looking people Jamie had ever seen. There were touts for all the different hotels – black men, yellow men, brown men and red men frantically offering to bear away luggage – and small boys running back and forth with newspapers and sweets and fruits for sale. Hansom drivers who were half-castes, Parsis or blacks were yelling their eagerness to be hired. Vendors and men pushing drinking carts called attention to their wares. The air was thick with huge black flies. Sailors and porters hustled and halloaed their way through the crowd while passengers vainly tried to keep their luggage together and in sight. It was a babel of voices and noise. People spoke to one another in a language Jamie had never heard.

‘Yulle kom van de Kaap, neh?’

‘Het julle mine papa zyn wagen gezien?’

‘Wat bedui’ di?’

‘Huistoe!’

He did not understand a word.

Cape Town was utterly unlike anything Jamie had ever seen. No two houses were alike. Next to a large warehouse two or three storeys high, built of bricks or stone, was a small canteen of galvanized iron, then a jeweller’s shop with hand-blown plate-glass windows and abutting it a small greengrocer’s and next to that a tumble-down tobacconist’s.

Jamie was mesmerized by the men, women and children who thronged the streets. He saw a kaffir clad in an old pair of 78th Highland trews and wearing as a coat a sack with slits cut for the arms and head. The kaffir walked behind two Chinese men, hand in hand, who were wearing blue smock frocks, their pigtails carefully coiled up under their conical strat hats. There were stout, red-faced Boer farmers with sun-bleached hair, their wagons loaded with potatoes, corn and leafy vegetables. Men dressed in brown velveteen trousers and coats, with broad-brimmed, soft-felt hats on their heads and long clay pipes in their mouths, strode ahead of their vraws, attired in black, with thick black veils and large black-silk poke bonnets. Parsi washerwomen with large bundles of soiled clothes on their heads pushed past soldiers in red coats and helmets. It was a fascinating spectacle.

The first thing Jamie did was to seek out an inexpensive boarding-house recommended to him by a sailor aboard ship. The landlady was a dumpy, ample-bosomed, middle-aged widow.

She looked Jamie over and smiled. ‘Zoek yulle goud?’

He blushed. ‘I’m sorry – I don’t understand.’

‘English, yes? You are here to hunt gold? Diamonds?’

‘Diamonds. Yes, ma’am.’

She pulled him inside. ‘You will like it here. I have all the convenience for young men like you.’

Jamie wondered whether she was one of them. He hoped not.

‘I’m Mrs Venster,’ she said coyly, ‘but my friends call me “Dee-Dee”.’ She smiled, revealing a gold tooth in front. ‘I have a feeling we are going to be very good friends. Ask of me anything.’

‘That’s very kind of you,’ Jamie said. ‘Can you tell me where I can get a map of the city?’

With map in hand, Jamie went exploring. On one side of the city were the landward suburbs of Rondebosch, Claremont and Wynberg, stretching along nine miles of thinning plantations and vineyards. On the other side were the marine suburbs of Sea Point and Green Point. Jamie walked through the rich residential area, down Strand Street and Bree Street, admiring the large, two-storey buildings with their flat roofs and peaked stuccoed fronts – steep terraces rising from the street. He walked until he was finally driven indoors by the flies that seemed to have a personal vendetta against him. They were large and black and attacked in swarms. When Jamie returned to his boardinghouse, he found his room filled with them. They covered the walls and table and bed.

He went to see the landlady. ‘Mrs Venster, isn’t there anything you can do about the flies in my room? They’re –’

She gave a fat, jiggling laugh and pinched Jamie’s cheek, ‘Myn magtig. You’ll get used to them. You’ll see.’

The sanitary arrangements in Cape Town were both primitive and inadequate, and when the sun set, an odoriferous vapour covered the city like a noxious blanket. It was unbearable. But Jamie knew that he would bear it. He needed more money before he could leave. ‘You can’t survive in the diamond fields without money,’ he had been warned. ‘They’ll charge you just for breathin’.’

On his second day in Cape Town, Jamie found a job driving a team of horses for a delivery firm. On the third day he started working in a restaurant after dinner, washing dishes. He lived on the leftover food that he squirrelled away and took back to the boardinghouse, but it tasted strange to him and he longed for his mother’s cock-a-leekie and oatcakes and hot, fresh-made baps. He did not complain, even to himself, as he sacrificed both food and comfort to increase his grubstake. He had made his choice and nothing was going to stop him, not the exhausting labour, nor the foul air he breathed, nor the flies that kept him awake most of the night. He felt desperately lonely. He knew no one in this strange place, and he missed his friends and family. Jamie enjoyed solitude, but loneliness was a constant ache.

At last, the magic day arrived. His pouch held the magnificent sum of two hundred pounds. He was ready. He would leave Cape Town the following morning for the diamond fields.

Reservations for passenger wagons to the diamond fields at Klipdrift were booked by the Inland Transport Company at a small wooden depot near the docks. When Jamie arrived at seven a.m., the depot was already so crowded that he could not get near it. There were hundreds of fortune seekers fighting for seats on the wagons. They had come from as far away as Russia and America, Australia, Germany and England. They shouted in a dozen different tongues, pleading with the besieged ticket sellers to find spaces for them. Jamie watched as a burly Irishman angrily pushed his way out of the office onto the sidewalk, fighting to get through the mob.

‘Excuse me,’ Jamie said. ‘What’s going on in there?’

‘Nothin’,’ the Irishman grunted in disgust. ‘The bloody wagons are all booked up for the next six weeks.’ He saw the look of dismay on Jamie’s face. ‘That’s not the worst of it, lad. The heathen bastards are chargin’ fifty pounds a head.’

It was incredible! ‘There must be another way to get to the diamond fields.’

‘Two ways. You can go Dutch Express, or you can go by foot.’

‘What’s Dutch Express?’

‘Bullock wagon. They travel two miles an hour. By the time you get there, the damned diamonds will all be gone.’

Jamie McGregor had no intention of being delayed until the diamonds were gone. He spent the rest of the morning looking for another means of transportation. Just before noon, he found it. He was passing a livery stable with a sign in front that said MAIL DEPOT. On an impulse, he went inside, where the thinnest man he had ever seen was loading large mail sacks into a dogcart. Jamie watched him a moment.

‘Excuse me,’ Jamie said. ‘Do you carry mail to Klipdrift?’

‘That’s right. Loadin’ up now.’

Jamie felt a sudden surge of hope. ‘Do you take passengers?’

‘Sometimes.’ He looked up and studied Jamie. ‘How old are you?’

An odd question. ‘Eighteen. Why?’

‘We don’t take anyone over twenty-one or twenty-two. You in good health?’

An even odder question. ‘Yes, sir.’

The thin man straightened up. ‘I guess you’re fit. I’m leavin’ in an hour. The fare’s twenty pounds.’

Jamie could not believe his good fortune. ‘That’s wonderful! I’ll get my suitcase and –’

‘No suitcase. All you got room for is one shirt and a toothbrush.’

Jamie took a closer look at the dogcart. It was small and roughly built. The body formed a well in which the mail was stored, and over the well was a narrow, cramped space where a person could sit back to back behind the driver. It was going to be an uncomfortable journey.

‘It’s a deal,’ Jamie said. ‘I’ll fetch my shirt and toothbrush.’

When Jamie returned, the driver was hitching up a horse to the open cart. There were two large young men standing near the cart: one was short and dark, the other was a tall, blond Swede. The men were handing the driver some money.

‘Wait a minute,’ Jamie called to the driver. ‘You said I was going.’

‘You’re all goin’,’ the driver said. ‘Hop in.’

‘The three of us?’

‘That’s right.’

Jamie had no idea how the driver expected them all to fit in the small cart, but he knew he was going to be on it when it pulled out.

Jamie introduced himself to his two fellow passengers. ‘I’m Jamie McGregor.’

‘Wallach,’ the short, dark man said.

‘Pederson,’ the tall blond replied.

Jamie said, ‘We’re lucky we discovered this, aren’t we? It’s a good thing everybody doesn’t know about it.’

Pederson said, ‘Oh, they know about the post carts, McGregor. There just aren’t that many fit enough or desperate enough to travel in them.’

Before Jamie could ask what he meant, the driver said, ‘Let’s go.’

The three men – Jamie in the middle – squeezed into the seat, crowded against each other, their knees cramped, their backs pressing hard against the wooden back of the driver’s seat. There was no room to move or breathe. It’s not bad, Jamie reassured himself.

‘Hold on!’ the driver sang out, and a moment later they were racing through the streets of Cape Town on their way to the diamond fields at Klipdrift.

By bullock wagon, the journey was relatively comfortable. The wagons transporting passengers from Cape Town to the diamond fields were large and roomy, with tent covers to ward off the blazing winter sun. Each wagon accommodated a dozen passengers and was drawn by teams of horses or mules. Refreshments were provided at regular stations, and the journey took ten days.

The mail cart was different. It never stopped, except to change horses and drivers. The pace was a full gallop, over rough roads and fields and rutted trails. There were no springs on the cart, and each bounce was like the blow of a horse’s hoof. Jamie gritted his teeth and thought, I can stand it until we stop for the night, I’ll eat and get some sleep, and in the morning I’ll be fine. But when nighttime came, there was a ten-minute halt for a change of horse and driver, and they were off again at a full gallop.

‘When do we stop to eat?’ Jamie asked.

‘We don’t,’ the new driver grunted. ‘We go straight through. We’re carryin’ the mails, mister.’