Sean Courtney was signalling to Mark in the gallery, and he acknowledged and helped Storm to her feet, shielding her through the excited press of bodies as they left the gallery and went down the passage to the staircase.
The General was waiting for them at the visitors’ entrance. He was scowling and dark-faced with concern; a measure of his agitation was the perfunctory kiss he dropped on Storm’s uplifted face before turning to Mark.
‘A pretty business, my boy.’ He seized his elbow. ‘Come on, let’s go where we can talk,’ and he led them to the members’ entrance, and up the stairs under the portraits of stern-faced Chief Justices to his own office.
Immediately the door was closed, he waved Storm away to one of the chairs, and told Mark, ‘The regiment was called out at ten o’clock this morning. I managed to get Scott on the telephone at his home – and he’s got it in hand. He’s a good man. They will be fully mobilized by now, and there is a special train being made up. They will entrain and leave for the Witwatersrand at eleven o’clock tonight, in full battle order.’
‘What about us?’ Mark demanded. Suddenly he was a soldier again and he dropped neatly into the role. His place was with the regiment.
‘We’ll join there. We leave tonight. We are going up in convoy with the Prime Minister, and we’ll travel all night – you will drive one of the cars.’ Sean was at his desk now, beginning to pack his briefcase. ‘How long will it take us?’ ‘It’s a thousand miles, sir,’ Mark pointed out.
‘I know that, damn it,’ snapped Sean. ‘How long?’ Sean had never liked nor understood the internal combustion engine, and his dislike showed in his ignorance of their speed and capability whereas he could finely judge a journey by wagon or horseback.
‘We won’t be there before tomorrow evening – it’s a hell of a road.’
‘Bloody motorcars,’ Sean growled. ‘The regiment will be there before us by rail.’
‘They’ve only three hundred miles to go.’ Mark felt obliged to come to the defence of the car, and Sean grunted.
‘I want you to get on home now. Have my wife pack my campaign bag and get your duffle together. We’ll leave immediately I get home.’ He turned to Storm. ‘Go along with Mark, now, Missy. I’m going to be busy here for a while.’
Mark strapped up his bag, and reflected how his worldly possessions had multiplied since he had joined the Courtney household. There had been a time when he could carry everything he owned in his pockets – the thought was broken by a knock on the door.
‘Come in,’ he called, expecting a servant. Only Ruth Courtney ever came down this end of the house on her weekly inspection, a determined crusade against dust and cockroaches.
‘Please take it down to the car,’ he said in Zulu, adjusting his uniform cap in the mirror above the wash-basin.
‘All on my own?’ Storm asked sweetly in the same language, and he turned startled.
‘You shouldn’t be here.’
‘Why not – am I in danger of violation and ravishment?’ She had closed the door and leaned against it, her hands behind her back, but her eyes bold and teasing.
‘It would be safer, I should imagine, to attempt to ravish a swarm of hornets.’
‘That was merely boorish, coarse and insulting,’ she said. ‘You really are improving immensely.’ And she looked at the strapped case on the bed.
‘I was going to offer to help you pack – most men are hopeless at that. But I see you’ve managed. Is there anything else I can do for you?’
‘I am sure I could think of something,’ he said with a solemn expression, but something in the tone of his voice made her smile and caution him.
‘Not too much improvement in one day, please.’ She crossed to the bed and bounced on it experimentally. ‘God! Who filled it with bricks? No wonder Irene Leuchars went home! The poor darling must have sprained her back!’ Her expression was innocent, but her gaze raked him and Mark felt himself blushing furiously. Suddenly, much that had puzzled him was clear, and as he turned back to the mirror, he wondered how she had found out about Irene. For something to do, he tipped the brim of his cap.
‘Beautiful,’ she agreed. ‘Are you going up there to brutalize those poor strikers – or to bounce on their wives also?’ And before he could give expression to the shock he felt she went on, ‘Funnily enough, I didn’t really come down here to fight with you. I once had another old tomcat and I was really very fond of him, but he got run over by a car. Have you got a cigarette, Mark?’
‘You don’t smoke.’ He had found it difficult to keep up with the conversation.
‘I know – but I have decided to learn. It’s so suave, don’t you think?’ Suave was the fashionable word at that moment.
She held the cigarette with an exaggerated vampish pose after he had lit it.
‘How do I look?’
‘Bloody awful,’ he said, and she batted her eyes and took a tentative draw, held it for a moment and then started to cough.
‘Here, give it to me.’ He took it away from her, and it tasted of her mouth. He felt the ache in his body, the terrible wanting, mingled now with a strange tenderness he had never felt before. She seemed, for once, so tender and young.
‘Will it be dangerous?’ she asked, suddenly serious.
‘I don’t think so – we’ll be just like policemen.’
‘They are killing policemen.’ She stood up and walked to the window. ‘The view is dreadful, unless you like dustbins. I’d complain, if I were you.’ She turned back to face him.
‘I’ve never seen a man off to war before. What should I say?’
‘I don’t know. Nobody ever saw me off before.’
‘What did your mother say?’
‘I never knew my mother.’
‘Oh Mark. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—’ Her voice trailed off, and he was shocked to see that her eyes were brimming with tears.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he assured her quickly, and she turned back to the window.
‘Actually, you can just see the top of Devil’s Peak, if you twist your head.’ Her voice was thick and nasal, and it was many seconds before she turned back.
‘Well, we’re both new to this, so we’ll just have to help each other.’
‘I suppose you should say, “Come back soon.”’
‘Yes, I suppose I should – and then what do I do?’
‘You kiss me.’ It was out before he had thought about it, and he was stunned by his own audacity.
She stood very still, rooted by the words, and when she began to move, it was with the slow deliberation of a sleepwalker, and her eyes were huge and unblinking. She came across the room.
She stopped in front of him, and, as she lifted her arms, she came up on her toes.
The air about her was filled with her fragrance, and her arms were slim and strong about his neck, but it was the softness and the warmth of her lips that amazed him.
Her body swayed against him, and seemed to melt with his own, and the long artistic fingers slowly caressed the nape of his neck.
He passed an arm around her waist, and was again amazed at how narrow and slim it was; but the muscles of her back were firm and pliant as she arched it, pushing forward with her hips.
He heard her gasp as she felt him, and a slow voluptuous shudder shook her. For long moments she lingered, her hips pressed to his and her breasts flattened against his tunic.
He stooped over her, his hands beginning to move up the hard resilient little back, his mouth forcing hers open so the soft lips parted like the fleshy red petals of an exotic blooming orchid.
She shuddered again, but then the sound in her throat turned into a panicky moan of protest and she twisted out of his arms, though he tried desperately to hold her. But she was strong and supple and determined.
At the door, she stopped to stare at him. She was trembling, her eyes were wide and dark, as though she had truly only seen him for the first time. ‘Oh la! Who was talking about swarms of hornets!’ she mocked,
but her voice was gusty and unsteady.
She twisted the door open, and tried to smile, but it was a poor lopsided thing, and she did not yet have control of her breathing. ‘I’m not so sure of that “Come back soon” any more.’ She held the door open to give herself courage, and her next smile was more convincing. ‘Don’t get run over, you old tomcat,’ and she slipped out into the passageway. Her receding footsteps were light and dancing in the silence of the big house, and Mark’s own legs were suddenly so weak that he sat down heavily on his bed.
Mark drove fast, concentrating all his attention on the twisting treacherous road through the mountains, driving the big heavily laden Rolls down the path of its own glaring brass-bound headlights, up Baines Kloof where the mountain fell away on his left hand sheer into the valley, past Worcester with its orderly vineyards standing in dark lines in the moonlight, before the final ascent up the Hex River Mountains to the rim of the flat compacted shield of the African interior.
They came out over the top, and the vast land stretched away ahead of them, the dry treeless karroo, where the flat-topped kopjes made strangely symmetrical shapes against the cold starry sky.
Now at last, Mark could relax in the studded leather driver’s seat, driving instinctively, the road pouring endlessly towards him, pale and straight out of the darkness, and he could tune his ears to the voice of the two men in the rear seat.
‘What they don’t understand, old Sean, is that if we do not employ every black man who offers himself for work – no, more than that, if we don’t actively recruit all the native labour we can get hold of – it will result not only in fewer jobs for white men, but, in the long run, it will mean, finally, no jobs at all for the white men of Africa.’
A jackal, small and furry as a puppy, lolloped into the path of the headlights with its ears erect, and Mark steered carefully to miss it, his own ears cocked for Sean’s reply.
‘They think only of today.’ His voice was deep and grave. ‘We must plan for ten years from now – for thirty, fifty years ahead, for a nation firm and undivided. We cannot afford once again to have Afrikander against Briton, or worse, we dare not have white against black. It is not enough that we are forced to live together, we must learn to work together.’
‘Slowly, slowly – old Sean,’ the Prime Minister chuckled. ‘Don’t let dreams run away with reality.’ ,
‘I don’t deal in dreams, Jannie. You should know that. If we don’t want to be torn to pieces by our own people, we must give all of them, black, white and brown, a place and a share.’
They ran on hard into the endless land, and the light of a lonely farm house on a dark ridge emphasized how vast and empty it was.
‘Those who clamour so loudly for less work and more pay may find that what benefit they get now will have to be paid for at a thousand per cent interest some day in the future. A payment in misery and hunger and suffering,’ Sean Courtney was speaking again. ‘If we are to steer off the reef of national disaster, then men will have to learn to work again, and to take seriously once more the demands of a disciplined and orderly society.’
‘Have you ever wondered, Sean, at how many people these days depend for their livelihood on nothing else but finding areas of dispute between the employers and the employed, between labour and management?’
Sean nodded, taking it up where Smuts left off. ‘As though the two were not shackled to each other with bonds that nothing can break. They travel the same road, to the same goal, bound together irretrievably by destiny. When one stumbles, he brings the other down on bloody knees, when one falls the other comes down with him.’
Slowly, as the stars made their circuit of grandeur across the heavens, the talk in the back seat of the Rolls dwindled into silence.
Mark glanced in the mirror and saw that Sean Courtney was asleep, a travelling rug about his shoulders and his black beard on his chest.
His snores were low and regular and deep, and Mark felt a rush of feeling for the big man. It was a fine mixture of respect and awe, of pride and affection. ‘I suppose that is what you would feel, if you had a father,’ he thought, and then, embarrassed by the strength and presumption of his feeling, he once again concentrated all his attention on the road.
The night wind had sifted the sky with fine dust, and the dawn was a thing of unbelievable splendour. From horizon to horizon, and right across the vaulted domes of the heavens, vibrant colour throbbed and glowed and flamed, until at last the sun thrust clear of the horizon.
‘We won’t stop in Bloemfontein or any of the big towns, Mark. We don’t want anybody to see the Prime Minister.’ Sean leaned across the back of the seat.
‘We’ll need petrol, General.’
‘Pick one of the roadside pumps,’ Sean instructed. ‘Try and find one with no telephone lines.’
It was a tiny iron-roofed general dealer’s store set back from the road under two scraggy eucalyptus blue gum trees. There was no other building in sight, and the open empty veld stretched dry and sun-seared to the circle of the horizon. The plaster walls of the store were cracked and in need of whitewash, plastered with advertisement boards for Bovril and Joko tea. The windows were shuttered and the door locked, but there were no telephone lines running from the solitary building to join those that followed the road, and a single red-painted petrol pump stood at rigid attention in the dusty yard below the stoep.
Mark blew a long continuous blast on the Rolls’ horn, and while he was doing so, the Prime Minister’s black Cadillac that was following turned off the main road and parked behind them. The driver and the three members of the ministerial staff climbed out and stretched their stiff muscles.
When the proprietor of the store emerged at last, unshaven, red-eyed, but cheerfully doing up his breeches, he spoke no English. Mark asked in Afrikaans, ‘Can you fill up both cars?’
While the storekeeper swung the handle of the pump back and forth, and the fuel rose alternately into the two one-gallon glass bowls on the top of the pump, his wife came out from the store with a tray of steaming coffee mugs and a platter of crisp golden freshly baked rusks. They ate and drank gratefully, and were ready to go on again within twenty minutes.
The storekeeper stood in the yard, scratching the stubble of his beard and watched the twin columns of red dust billowing into the northern sky. His wife came out on to the stoep and he turned to squint up at her.
‘Do you know who that was?’ he asked, and she shook her head.
‘That was Clever Jannie – and his English gunmen. Didn’t you see the uniform the young one wore?’ He spat into the red dirt, and his phlegm balled and rolled. ‘Khaki! Damned khaki!’ He ripped the word out bitterly, and went around the side of the building to the little lean-to stable.
He was clinching the girth on the old sway-backed grey mare, when she followed him into the stall.
‘It’s none of our business, Hendrick. Let it stand.’
‘None of our business?’ he demanded indignantly. ‘Didn’t I fight khaki in the English war, didn’t I fight it again in 1916 when we rode with old De Wet – isn’t my brother a rock-breaker on the Simmer and Jack mine, and isn’t that where Clever Jannie is going with his hangmen?’
He swung up on the mare and put his heels to her. She jumped away, and he pointed her at the ridge. It was eight miles to the railway siding, and there was a telegraph in the ganger’s cottage; the ganger was a cousin of his. The Railway Workers’ Union was out in sympathy with the miners now. The Action Committee would have the news in Johannesburg by lunch time that Clever Jannie was on his way.
While Mark Anders drank coffee at the wayside store, Fergus MacDonald lay under the hedge at the bottom of a garden ablaze with crimson cannas in orderly beds, and peered through a pair of binoculars down the slope at the Newlands Police Station. They had sand-bagged the windows and doors.
The lady of the house had sat on her veranda the previous evening, drinking coffee and counting forty-seven police constables arriving by motor lorry t
o reinforce the station. Her son was a shift boss on the Simmer and Jack Whoever commanded the police at Newlands was no soldier, Fergus decided, and grinned that wolfish wicked grin.
He had seen the dead ground instantly, any soldier would have picked it up at a glance.
‘Pass the word for the Mills bombs,’ he muttered to the striker beside him, and the man crawled away.
Fergus swung the glasses up along the road where it started to climb the kopjes, and grunted with satisfaction. The telephone wires had been cut, along with the power lines. He could see the loose ends dangling from the poles.
The police station was isolated.
The striker crawled back to Fergus’ side, dragging a heavy rucksack. He had a tooth missing from his upper jaw, and he grinned gap-toothed at Fergus.
‘Give them hell, comrade.’
Fergus’ face was blackened with soot and his eyelashes were singed away. They had burned the Fordsburg Police Station a little before midnight.
‘I want covering fire – on my whistle.’
‘You’ll get it – never fear.’
Fergus opened the rucksack and glanced at the steel globes, with their deeply segmented squares for fragmentation, then he slung the strap over his shoulder and adjusted the burden to hang comfortably on his flank.
‘Look after it well.’ He handed his Lee-Enfield rifle to the gap-toothed striker. ‘We’ll need it again today.’ He crawled away down the shallow drainage ditch that led to a concrete culvert which crossed under the road.
The culvert was lined with circular tubes of rusty corrugated iron, and Fergus wriggled through it carefully, emerging on the far side of the road.
Lying on his side, he raised himself slightly to peer over the edge of the drainage ditch. The police station was a hundred and fifty yards away. The blue light over the front door, with the white lettered ‘POLICE’, was dead, and the flag hung limply on its pole in the still windless morning.