Men of Men (71 page)

Ralph was dressed in expensive broadcloth with a high stock and cravat of watered grey silk that on this hot June day brought beads of sweat to his forehead. His thick dark hair was dressed with
pomade to a glossy shine, and his magnificent moustache, twirled with beeswax, pricked out in two stiff points.

Both of them were rigid with expectation, staring fixedly at the altar candles which Clinton had hoarded for such an occasion, and lit only minutes before.

Behind them one of the twins fidgeted with excited anticipation, and Salina pumped up the little organ and launched into ‘Here comes the Bride’, while Ralph grinned with bravado and,
out of the side of his mouth, muttered to his father, ‘Well, here we go then, Papa. Fix bayonets and prepare to receive cavalry!’

They turned with parade ground precision to face the church door, just as the brides stepped through it.

Cathy wore the mail-order dress which Ralph had brought up from Kimberley, while Robyn had lifted her own wedding dress from its resting place in the leather-bound trunk and they had taken in
the waist and let down the hem to fit Louise. The delicate lace had turned to the colour of old ivory, and she carried a bouquet of Clinton’s yellow roses.

Afterwards they all straggled across the yard. The brides tottered on their high heels and tripped on their trains, clinging to the arms of their new husbands; and the twins pelted them with
handfuls of rice, before running ahead to the verandah where the wedding board was piled with mountains of food and lined with regiments of bottles, the finest champagne from Ralph’s
wagons.

At one end of the table Ralph loosened his stock and held Cathy in the circle of his arm and a glass in his other hand as he made his speech:

‘My wife—’ he referred to her, and the company hooted with laughter and clapped with delight, while Cathy clung to him and looked up at his face in transparent adoration.

Then when the speeches were ended, Clinton looked across the table at his eldest daughter. His bald head shone with the heat and excitement and the good champagne.

‘Will you not sing to us, my darling Salina?’ he asked. ‘Something happy and joyous?’

Salina nodded and smiled, and lifted her chin to sing in her gentle voice:

Louise turned her face towards Zouga, and when she smiled the corners of her dark blue eyes slanted upwards and her lips parted and glistened. Below the tabletop Clinton reached
for Robyn’s hand, but his gaze stayed upon his daughter’s face.

Even Ralph sobered, and sat attentively while Cathy laid her cheek upon his shoulder.

Salina sat very straight on the wooden bench with her hands in her lap. She was smiling as she sang, a sweet serene smile, but a single tear broke from her lower lid and
descended, with tortuous slowness, the velvet curve of her cheek, until it reached the corner of her mouth.

The song ended, and they were silent for a long moment, and then Ralph pounded on the table with the flat of his hand.

‘Oh bravo, Salina, that was superb.’

Then they were all applauding, and Salina smiled at them and the single tear broke and fell to her breast, to leave a dark star upon the satin of her bodice.

‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘Please excuse me.’

And she stood up and, still smiling, glided down the verandah. Cathy sprang to her feet, her face twisted with concern, but Robyn caught her wrist before she could follow.

‘Leave her be,’ she whispered. ‘The child needs to be alone a while. You will only upset her further.’ And Cathy sank back beside Ralph.

‘Shame on you, Louise,’ with forced jocularity, Clinton called down the table. ‘Your husband’s glass is empty, are you neglecting him so soon?’

An hour later Salina had not returned, and Ralph’s voice had become louder and even more assertive. ‘Now that Mr Rhodes has got his charter, we can begin to assemble the column.
Cathy and I will start back tomorrow with the empty wagons. Heaven knows we will need every pair of wheels, and I thought old King Ben would never take those rifles off my hands.’

But Cathy was for once not drinking in every one of his words; she kept looking down the verandah, and again she whispered to Robyn, who frowned and shook her head.

‘You talk as though the whole affair was arranged for your personal profit, Ralph.’ Robyn turned from Cathy to challenge her new son-in-law.

‘Perish the thought, Aunty.’ Ralph laughed, and winked at his father down the length of the table. ‘It’s all for the good of Empire and the glory of God.’

Cathy waited until they were once more embroiled in amiable argument, and then she slipped away so quietly that Robyn did not notice until Cathy reached the end of the verandah. For a moment she
looked set to call her back, but instead she made a move of annoyance and addressed herself to Zouga.

‘How long will you and Louise remain at GuBulawayo?’

‘Until the column reaches Mount Hampden. Mr Rhodes doesn’t want any misunderstanding between the volunteers and Lobengula’s young bucks.’

‘I will be able to send up fresh vegetables and even a few flowers while you are at the king’s kraal, Louise,’ Clinton offered.

‘You’ve been too kind already,’ Louise thanked him, and then broke off, and an expression of deep concern crossed her face.

They all turned hurriedly in the direction she was staring.

Cathy had returned and climbed the verandah steps. She leaned against one of the whitewashed columns. Her face was the muddy yellow of a malaria sufferer, and her brow and chin were blistered
with droplets of sweat. Her eyes were tortured, and her mouth twisted with horror.

‘In the church,’ she said. ‘She’s in the church.’ And then she doubled over, and retched with a terrible tearing sound, and it came up her throat in a solid yellow
eruption that soaked the virginal white skirts of her wedding gown.

Robyn was the first to reach the church door. She stared for only a moment and then she whirled and hid her face against Clinton’s chest.

‘Take her away,’ Zouga ordered Clinton brusquely, and then to Ralph. ‘Help me!’

The garland of pink roses had fallen from Salina’s head, and lay below her on the floor of the nave. She had thrown a halter rope over one of the roof beams, and she must have climbed up
on the table that Robyn used for her surgery.

Her hands hung open at her sides. The toes of her slippers were turned in towards each other in a touchingly innocent stance, like those of a little girl standing on tiptoe; but they were
suspended at the height of a man’s waist above the flagged floor.

Zouga had to look up at her face. The rope had caught her under one ear and her head was twisted at an impossible angle to one side. To Zouga her face seemed swollen to twice its normal size,
and it was mottled a dark mulberry hue.

At that moment a merciful little breeze came in through the doorway and turned her slowly on the rope to face the altar, so that Zouga could see only her lustrous golden hair which had come down
and now hung to her waist. That was still beautiful.

C
athy Ballantyne had never known such happiness as the months spent in the British South Africa Company camp on the Macloutsi river.

She was the
only woman among nearly seven hundred men, and a favourite of all of them. They called her ‘Missus’, and her presence was eagerly sought at every social activity with which officers and
men diverted themselves during the long term of waiting.

The harsh conditions of camp life might have daunted another newly married girl of her age, but Cathy had known no others, and she turned the hut of daub and thatch that Ralph built for her into
a cosy retreat with calico curtains in the glassless windows and woven grass native mats on the earth floor. She planted petunias on each side of the doorway, and the troopers of the column vied
for the honour of watering them. She cooked over an open fire in the lean-to kitchen, and her invitations to dine were eagerly sought after by men who subsisted on canned bully beef and stamped
maize meal.

She glowed with all the attention and excitement, so that from being merely pretty, she seemed to become beautiful – which made the men cherish her the more. Then, of course, she had
Ralph, and she wondered some nights as she lay awake and listened to his breathing, how she had ever lived without him.

Ralph had the rank of major now, and he told her with a wink and an irreverent chuckle, ‘We are all colonels and majors, my girl. I’m even thinking of making old Isazi a
captain.’ But he looked so handsome in his uniform with fragged coat and slouch hat and Sam Browne belt, that she wished he would wear it more often.

With each day Ralph seemed to her to become taller, his body more powerful and his energy more abundant. Even when he was away down the line hustling up the wagons, setting up the heliograph
stations, or meeting with the other directors of the British South Africa Company in Kimberley, she was not lonely. Somehow his presence seemed always with her, and his absence made anticipation of
his return a sort of secret joy.

Then suddenly he would be back, galloping into camp to sweep her up and toss her as high as if she were a child, before kissing her on the mouth.

‘Not in public,’ she would gasp and blush. ‘People are watching, Ralph.’

‘And turning green with envy,’ he agreed, and carried her into the hut.

When he was there, everything was a breathless whirl. He was everywhere with his long assured stride and merry infectious laugh, driving his men along with a word of encouragement or of banter,
and occasionally with sudden murderous black rages.

His rages terrified her, although they were never directed at her; and yet at the same time they excited her strangely. She would watch him with fearful fascination as his face swelled and
darkened with passion, and his voice rose into a roar like a wounded bull. Then his fists and boots would fly and somebody would roll in the dust.

Afterwards she felt weak and trembly, and she would hurry away to the hut and draw the curtains and wait. When he came in, he would have that savage look on his face that made something flutter
in the pit of her stomach, and it took all her will not to run to him – but to wait for him to come to her.

‘By God, Katie my girl,’ he said to her once as he leaned on his elbow over her, the sweat still glistening on his naked chest, and his breathing as rough as though he had run a
race, ‘you may look like an angel, but you could teach the devil himself a trick or two.’

Though she prayed afterwards for strength to control the wanton sensations and cravings of her body, the prayers were perfunctory and lacked real conviction, and that lovely smug and contented
feeling just would not go away.

With Ralph it was excitement all the time, day and night, when they were alone and when they were in company. She loved to watch the deference with which other men treated him, rich and famous
men older than he was like Colonel Pennefather and Dr Leander Starr Jameson, who were the leaders of the column. But then, she told herself, so they should. Ralph was already a director of the
Chartered Company, Mr Rhodes’ British South Africa Company, and when he sat down at the boardroom table in the De Beers building, it was in the company of lords and generals and of Mr Rhodes
himself, though Ralph grinned and told her wickedly, ‘Great men, Katie, but not one of them whose feet don’t stink in hot weather – same as mine.’

‘You are awful, Ralph Ballantyne,’ she scolded, but she felt all puffed up with pride when she overhead two troopers talking of him and one said: ‘Ralph Ballantyne,
there’s a man for you, and no mistake.’

Then at night, after they had made boisterous unashamed love, they would talk in the darkness, sometimes through most of the night, and his dreams and plans were the more enchanting for she knew
that he would make them come true.

Her personal rapture was heightened by the mood of the seven hundred men around her, and each day’s restraint as they waited for the word to move off increased the tension which gripped
them all. Ralph’s oxen brought up the guns, two seven-pounders, and the artillery fired shrapnel over the deserted veld beyond the camp, while the watchers cheered them as the fleecy cotton
pods of smoking death opened prettily in the clear dry air.

The four Maxim machine-guns were unpacked from their cases and de-greased – and then, on a memorable day, the monstrous steam engine came chugging into the encampment, dragging behind it
the electric generator and the naval searchlight which would be just another precaution against night attack by the Matabele hordes.

That night as she lay in his arms, Cathy asked Ralph the question they were all asking one another.

‘What will Lobengula do?’

‘What can he do?’ Ralph stroked her hair, the way he might caress a favourite puppy. ‘He has signed the concession, taken his gold and guns, and promised Papa the road to
Mashonaland.’

‘They say he has eighteen thousand men waiting across the Shashi.’

‘Then let them come, Katie, my lass. There are not a few amongst us who would welcome the chance to teach King Ben’s buckeroos a sharp lesson.’

‘That’s a terrible thing to say,’ she said without conviction.

‘But it’s the truth, by God.’

She no longer chided him when he blasphemed so lightly, for the days and ways of Khami Mission seemed to be part of a fading dream.

T
hen one day, early in July of 1890, the mirror of a heliograph winked its eye across the dusty, sun-washed distances. It was the word for which
they had waited all these months. The British Foreign Secretary had at last approved the occupation of Mashonaland by the representatives of the British South Africa Company.