The Fever Tree (19 page)

“You were arriving any minute. I needed to get us settled. When Baier asked me to leave Kimberley, I wasn’t in a position to refuse.”

Silence settled over them. Eventually, Frances asked, “And the articles?”

“They’re nothing.”

“Can I read them?”

“I only have a copy of one of them. It may not interest you.”

“Were they published?”

“The first two were but not the rest.” He gave a dry laugh. “
The
Times
in London accepted them, but it turned out Mr. Baier was more powerful than I thought.”

The Diamond Field

10th February 1880

The Native Labourer on the Diamond Fields

By Dr. E. Matthews

Our highly esteemed and admired writer Anthony Trollope visited us recently, and wrote on looking down into the Kimberley mine: “When I have seen three or four thousand [natives] at work, I have felt that I was looking at three or four thousand growing Christians.” This is, I suspect, an opinion held by our dear cousins at home when they eye like magpies the sparkling fruits of Kimberley’s labour. The Africans work, and in return we feed them, clothe them and offer them education. I hope to cast a more revealing light on the life of the native, but I will start by begging Mr. Trollope’s forgiveness. When I stand at the crumbling edge of the mine, gazing down to the dizzying depths below, with the Africans crawling like flies over its mountainous walls, I am reminded of nothing so much as the pits of hell.

I am a medical man, not a politician or a money-maker, which gives me the advantage of impartiality. All men suffer sickness equally, regardless of race, though in Kimberley you could lay your bets on an African dying first. A native has about a one in ten chance of survival.

No surprises there, you say. After all, working the mines is self-evidently a dangerous job. Imagine a hole in the sand dug by a child. At a certain depth the walls begin to avalanche and water pools in at the bottom. So it is with the mines. If you stand on the precipitous edge of the Big Hole and gaze downwards, three hundred feet below, and you have the patience to wait there under the burning sun for a good part of the day, then you are sure to be rewarded with the sight of half a dozen Africans being swept away by a roaring landslide. I happened to be standing next to an English girl when a supporting wall gave way in a crush of rubble, taking with it four Africans and a cart pulled by donkeys.

“Oh, but the donkeys! Who will dig them out?” the girl asked, clutching at her throat in anxiety, expressing like most of her kind exactly no apprehension on behalf of the natives.

When the pumps stop working, as they do from time to time, the labourers get sucked into the pools of mud and water at the bottom, and drown. The walls of the mines are poorly made, and natives slip and fall through the rotten rungs of ladders. I have spent time at the hospital (a rather grandiose word for a canvas tent with a few beds), and it is full of men—white and black—who have had their feet blown off by dynamite. Now the miners have started to dig underground, and the heat and noise in the caves below, the terror of explosives and the smoke from the machines is unimaginable. A fire broke out a month ago, and a hundred men were killed.

Clearly Trollope is mistaken. It is not the mines themselves which turn our natives into Christians. But perhaps, you ask, the civilizing bit happens when they are not at work?

In fact, what does an African do when he is not at work?

Immediately after he leaves his shift he is ordered to strip naked. A bar is held out, and he is asked to jump over it. Then his hair, nose, mouth, ears and rectum are inspected with exacting care. His European masters are looking for stones secreted in cuts, wounds, swellings and orifices. Occasionally, if suspected, he is chained naked in a room and given purgatives. A civilizing experience indeed.

It used to be that Africans owned claims in the mines, alongside their European partners. Legislation has ensured that this is no longer possible. To be black is now synonymous with being a labourer, and being a labourer is—hardly surprisingly—synonymous with being a diamond thief.

The trend, started by Joseph Baier, is now to house natives separately, in compounds, and to keep them there for the duration of their stay in Kimberley. If an African cannot produce a certificate of registration to say that he is contracted for work, then he is classed as a vagrant. A vagrant can be sentenced to six months’ hard labour, which is wonderfully convenient for a claim holder.

It works to the European’s advantage if the African learns to like alcohol. After all, a native with a taste for brandy will spend his hard-earned wages procuring it. He’ll stick around longer. There is not a man in Kimberley who has not returned late from dinner or a game of cards and come across two or three Africans stretched out on the grass reeking of liquor, frozen to death as they slept.

But the compounds come with advantages, Joseph Baier has been heard to argue. I ask Mr. Baier: what advantages to the African? I have been to compounds and seen men lying in filthy blankets, dying from diseases as common as scurvy, or shivering with pneumonia because there is no firewood. It is more expensive to give medical care to a sick African than to rip up his contract and offer it to someone new. If you need proof, then look on the outskirts of town, where the bodies of dead Africans litter the roadsides, dumped by men too thrifty to pay burial dues. Is this the Christian end to Mr. Trollope’s parable?

For those that do survive—and I don’t deny there are many—they have the honour of bringing back guns to their tribe.

South Africa is historically an agrarian economy. A rocky, barren land which—until the discovery of diamonds—was desperately poor. Is it not a startling coincidence that men like Joseph Baier have come to civilize the African just when there is a profit to be made out of it? And now we hear him arguing to reintroduce nigger-flogging at a time when the rest of the civilized world is beginning to think more carefully about the welfare of their labouring classes.

There is a cancer at the heart of the Europeans’ relationship with Africa, and its nature is self-interest. The monopolies of power holding sway over the mines are controlled by Europeans—non-residents who have no vested interest in either the future of South Africa or the civilizing of its people. Why would they care about the economic development of the country, when they are single-mindedly engaged in the extraction of its wealth? What use is an educated, civilized African to Joseph Baier, when he is in need of a permanent, subdued labour force?

Mr. Baier has spent the last ten years working on the creation of a labouring class which is entirely dependent on his munificence. He has often been praised for his sponsorship of a railway which will link the Cape Coast to Kimberley, but does anyone know his real motive for such a venture? Mr. Baier wants the railway so he can undercut the native tribes who supply the population of Kimberley with firewood and grain. Goods will be imported direct from Europe, and the natives will be bankrupt in a matter of months. Then there is the sponsorship of kaffir wars, the encouragement of hut taxes, and the legal battles which force natives to sell their land in order to afford a defence in court.

Few things worse have been flown under the banner of Christianity than the exploitation of African workers in Kimberley. Only a few days ago, Joseph Baier wrote in the pages of this paper: “One of the first lessons to be instilled into them [the natives] will be to respect the laws of
meum
and
tuum
.
*
The diamond fields have, in my opinion, done much to accomplish this.” It seems that for the first time we are in perfect agreement. The laws of
meum
and
tuum
have been perfectly illustrated to the Africans who work on the mines in Kimberley.

The ferocity of the article shocked her. Here was an anger and passion she hadn’t seen before in her husband. She had misunderstood him. There was fire running beneath his long silences and slow calculations of the truth. She put the dates together in her head. The article had been published over a year ago, just before he had come to London. Baier must have put pressure on him to leave Kimberley, and when he had tried to go back to revive his practice, there had been the incident with the native girl, Ruth.

When he came back that evening, she was sitting on the
stoep
, waiting for him.

“Edwin—tell me. If you feel this strongly, why did you let him intimidate you into leaving? Why didn’t you stay?” He didn’t say anything. “Couldn’t you have found someone else to publish the articles?”

He walked past her into the house.

She followed him. “He’ll think you’re a coward for coming here.”

“Just like you do?” He turned to face her, his eyes fixed on hers. And she couldn’t deny it. There was something spineless about letting another man beat you into submission.

He saw it, and said, “Frances, do you have any idea what he could do to me? To us?” Edwin made a gesture of exasperation. “I could stand having eggs thrown at me in the street, not being received into any respectable house at the Cape, but what about you?”

“Couldn’t we go to Cape Town?”

“You don’t get it. There isn’t a thing that happens at the Cape without his say-so. The business of Kimberley drives South Africa. There is barely any other economy, and there is almost no one in the colony who wants anything except what Baier wants. He makes them all rich. Do you really want to be an outcast? Do you want to have to go back to England? Have you thought about what kind of a life we would have there?”

He turned on his heel and walked into the study. The door closed behind him. She stared after him in frustration. He had implied that she was the one holding him back. That if she hadn’t been on her way to South Africa he would have stayed in Kimberley and fought harder for the girl. But it was hardly her fault. He was the one who had insisted on marrying her.

She walked out onto the
stoep
. On the distant horizon a herd of sheep were nudging their way across the veldt, the air above them churned to a dusty haze. He was right. She didn’t want to go back to England. They had no capital to get them started, no house to live in. More than likely he would have to set up a practice in Manchester, where there would be little prospect of ever doing well. It would be a mean, dreary life. At least there might be opportunities in South Africa. Society was less rigid, and there were fewer doctors. He would have a better chance of being successful.

She lay in bed that night, listening to Edwin’s steady breathing beside her. She couldn’t sleep. They were prisoners. Edwin had made that perfectly clear. She was amazed that she hadn’t guessed it before. It made sense of everything—Edwin’s decision to leave Kimberley, his apparent lack of ambition, his reaction to Baier at dinner. He wasn’t living at Rietfontein out of choice, and bringing her to live on the veldt wasn’t an experiment in survival. The fact that he had kept all this hidden from her was a shock. She thought she had understood him completely, but it turned out he wasn’t at all who she had thought he was.

What pleasure it must have given Baier to sit at their meager table, gloating over their impoverishment. Not just their impoverishment. He had dissected their marriage like a surgeon probing for cancer, knowing the great shame that was eating away at them. She felt a surge of guilt. Edwin had given up his ideals to marry her, and she had betrayed him before they were even wed. Their marriage was a sham—even Baier knew it—and Edwin had looked like a cuckolded fool. Christ knew she had more respect for her husband than Baier, and she felt a seething hatred for this man who had made a mockery of him in front of her. And what was worse, he had suggested, with his wink across the table, that they were sharing in the joke together. She shivered in self-disgust. If she hadn’t compromised herself, then Baier would have no power over her. Instead, he had them both caught in a trap. She was desperate to keep Edwin from finding out about William, and Edwin would keep trying to protect her, swallowing scraps out of Baier’s hand like a dog accepting gristle from the table.

Good God, was Baier right? She made a sudden movement, throwing off the sheets to keep off the thoughts which threatened to pin her down. She couldn’t, wouldn’t, be able to stop thinking about William, and every time she did she was betraying Edwin further. Still, she thought later, when her mind was exhausted and light was whitening the chinks in the shutters, if they could just get out from under Baier’s clutches, then perhaps everything would be different.

O
n a cool autumn evening they went to the farmhouse for dinner. Mijnheer Reitz sat at the head of the table carving a leg of Karoo lamb, and a maid ran back and forth ferrying new dishes to the table: buttered carrots, beans and salads of lettuces and radishes, and boards piled high with cheese. At the table were Mijnheer and Mevrouw Reitz, their Dutch overseer, and a neighboring farmer and his wife. A fire burned in the grate, throwing shadows over the whitewashed walls. The room was full of the smell of melting lamb fat, and Frances ate hungrily. It was a long time since she had seen such a spread.

The conversation at the table was in Dutch. She would have been content simply to eat and let the voices roll over her, but Mevrouw Reitz sat opposite and insisted on explaining. Frances listened, warily respectful of this woman who wasn’t afraid of plain speaking.

“They are talking about the sheep,” Mevrouw Reitz said. “The natives have lost hundreds to the drought. They can’t improve their stock, the quality or quantity of meat they produce, because their sheep are always struggling just to survive. The pressures of the veldt are too extreme. You can only get . . .” She paused, unsure of the language. “How do you say it, Dr. Matthews?”

Edwin looked up at Frances with impassive eyes. He had kept his distance from her since their argument. “Variation can only take place under domestication, or in other words, if the sheep are given access to a controlled environment—constant grazing, water, et cetera. Then a lamb might be born which, say, has more meat but is less suited to surviving a drought. In a domesticated environment, removed from evolutionary pressures, this variation will survive, and it can be bred back into the herd to improve the stock.”

He had told her something similar once about her father’s roses—that the brilliant colors and fantastic blooms would never have existed in the wild. They were the result of the same domestication. “Presumably these sheep wouldn’t be much good to the native when a drought came along?”

“Exactly,” Edwin said. “There is little point in helping natives to improve their stock if they continue to be at the mercy of their environment.”

Mevrouw Reitz turned to Frances, and asked her in English, “Did you enjoy the peach tree this summer?”

“Yes, thank you. They were delicious.”

“Albert’s grandfather planted that tree fifty years ago, when he first came here. He built the house you’re living in. We used to walk the children down there every summer to pick the fruit.”

“But you should have brought them down this summer! There were far too many for us to eat. Hundreds, in fact. I’m afraid we couldn’t eat them all, and we had to leave some of them to the wasps.”

Mevrouw Reitz frowned. “But surely you didn’t let them go to waste. You were making jam, bottling them?”

Frances looked at her, embarrassed.

“Why ever not?” Mevrouw Reitz asked.

“I suppose it didn’t occur to me. I’ve never made jam before.”

There was a reproachful silence. Mevrouw Reitz began talking to the neighboring farmer in a low voice. Frances looked at Edwin, but he was eating, perhaps with studied indifference to the conversation—she wasn’t sure, and she wondered if he was ashamed of her. She hadn’t turned out to be at all what he had hoped she would be.

The overseer said something then to Edwin, and he glanced quickly at her before replying. She thought he looked caught out. When he spoke, the table broke out into murmurs of excitement. Mevrouw Reitz said to her, “But you must be delighted.”

“Delighted?”

“That the Cape has been declared free of smallpox.”

Frances gaped at Edwin. Why hadn’t he told her? This could mean leaving Rietfontein. “What will happen to the quarantine station?” Mevrouw Reitz asked.

“Joseph Baier is closing it down.”

“Well, that’s wonderful news!” Mevrouw Reitz said, and Frances could see that despite their differences, the woman understood her and saw that she couldn’t be happy living here. “Where will you go?”

“We haven’t decided. But more than likely to Cape Town.” Cape Town. Relief coursed through her. There was an end to Baier’s influence after all. Once they were in Cape Town, Edwin could start a practice, and they would have nothing more to do with politics or smallpox.

•   •   •

J
ANTJIE
DROVE
THEM
HOME
in the cart. The night was perfectly quiet, except for the grinding of the wheels over the earth and his gentle mutterings to the mules. The plains were vast and still, with the great amphitheater of the heavens arched over them, glittering as though God had thrown down a cinder from a fire and it had splintered into a thousand glowing shards. A fat quarter-moon hung like a pendant above them. She could see the dark outline of Edwin’s figure and the white gleam of his face.

After a moment, she asked, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Baier’s letter only came today.”

“And just like that we can move to Cape Town? He hasn’t asked you to do anything else for him?”

“Nothing.”

“Which is good news, isn’t it?”

“Yes, though you shouldn’t expect it to be easy in Cape Town, not at first.” He paused. “I have no income now, and it will take me a few months to get up and running.”

“But you have some money put aside? From your work at the quarantine station?”

“I was cheap labor for Baier. He saw my work here as a kind of reparation.”

It didn’t matter. He would soon have a practice established, and in the meantime they would have to make do.

The cart left them at the cottage and rolled off into the night. Edwin stood at the
stoep
, waiting for her to pass up in front of him, but she stopped for a second, close enough so she could hear the low intake of his breath. On an impulse, without thinking, she reached out her hand and touched the sleeve of his coat. Her fingers grazed across the rough wool.

“Edwin, can we start again?”

He stood so motionless that she wondered if he had heard her. Then he said, “Perhaps. If we are honest with each other.” It was a statement, but, like a question, it carried the weight of implication. Did he want a confession from her? For a brief moment she felt herself teetering on the brink of telling him about William, but her heart gave a sickening lurch. They were going to Cape Town anyway. The past was behind them now. There was no need to drag it up again. There was too much damage in honesty. Edwin might never forgive her, and he was able to read her too well. He would know in an instant that she was still in love with William. They stood staring at each other for a long moment. Then she shivered and said something about the cold, and they went inside.

•   •   •

T
WO
WEEKS
LATER
, Frances was lying on her back by the riverbank, knees making a tent of her skirts, with her head resting on one bent arm. It was cooler now as winter drew on, and today was no hotter than a cloudless spring afternoon at home. A slight breeze stirred the dappled shade of the mimosa bushes, and through the branches she could see the dark shape of a bird of prey circling.

The last of the bees droned through the sweet herbage. Although the summer rains had failed and the riverbed was dry, it was still greener here than the rest of the veldt. Soon she would be away from Rietfontein, out of the dust and the sand, but she would miss the freedom of this place. A line of ants ran through the dry scrub. She rolled onto her side to look at them. Edwin had told her once that he had counted twenty different species here in one day. He would have enjoyed that. She smiled. They would be leaving in just under a month. Edwin had already found Sarah a position on a neighboring farm, and only this morning she had written to her uncle asking if he had any contacts in Cape Town who might be able to help him get started. It would be a new beginning for them. There would be shops in Cape Town, markets, and Englishwomen who might be friends. You could buy real chocolate imported straight from England. They might have a house with running water.

After a moment, she sat up, unlaced her boots, and walked down into the riverbed. The heavy sand was hot and dry, and it prickled between her toes. She nudged her feet beneath its surface, enjoying the warm weight on her skin. Tucked into the riverbank on the far side was a tightly woven bird’s nest, and inside it two halves of an eggshell. She cradled the feathery weight of it in the palm of her hand, pleased. Edwin would know what it was. She would give it to him. This was the gesture which might allow her to erase some of the bad feeling between them.

She was deeply content when she walked up to the house, her legs dusty, her arms supple and firm, her hair crackling in the heat. A horse was tethered outside, and when she went in she saw a man sitting at the table with her husband. He stood up when she came in, raised his hat to her, and said, “I’d best be off.”

He was English and she asked him to stay for supper, but Edwin intervened: “He has to get back.”

“Edwin,” she said when the man had gone, “I wanted to say to you—” She stopped. “Cape Town. I’m so pleased.” She smiled at him. “Thank you. For everything you have done.”

He looked at her with a tight, closed expression. “Frances, please. Sit down.” He motioned to one of the chairs around the table.

“What is it?” she asked, sitting.

“We’re not going to Cape Town. At least, not yet.”

He paused, and she waited for him to explain.

“There is a rumor of smallpox, in Kimberley.”

“But how? The Cape has been declared free of it.”

“Isaac is a sanitary inspector. He has seen smallpox before. He says some natives brought it down the East Coast from Mozambique.”

“What has all this got to do with us? You left Kimberley months ago. There are other doctors.”

“Perhaps not with my experience.”

“Oh, Edwin, don’t flatter yourself. There must be a handful of doctors in Kimberley who could diagnose someone with the pox.”

“That’s the problem. They are denying the disease.”

“Which means it probably isn’t smallpox after all.”

“Perhaps. I should like to go see for myself. Besides, I thought you would be pleased. Haven’t you always wanted to see Kimberley?”

She pushed her thumbnail into the soft wood of the tabletop, making a crescent-shaped groove. William was in Kimberley. If they went, she was bound to see him again. The familiar, dull pain twisted into fire. He would be married by now. Would he even be pleased to see her?

“I was hoping we could get settled in Cape Town. I have already written to my uncle. You need to get your practice started. Why delay?”

“We will do all those things, but first I have to go to Kimberley.”

She saw there was no point in arguing with him. “When do you want to leave?”

“As soon as possible. Sunday, if we can manage it.” It was Thursday. That gave them three days. She felt excitement, tinged with dread, stir inside her, like the uncoiling of a snake. She wanted to see William, but she knew it would only make her more unhappy.

It wasn’t until she was undressing later that she found the eggshell she had brought back for Edwin tucked into her skirt pocket. There was no use for it now, and she crushed it in the palm of her hand and let the shards fall between her fingers out of the window onto the earth below.