The Angels Weep - Smith Wilbur - Страница 119

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They danced in a circle, and the two men whooped and leaped, Ralph like a highlander, and Harry like a Plains Indian, while the Matabele hammer-boys broke off their labours and watched them, first with astonishment, and then chuckling in sympathy.

Vicky broke out of the circle first, panting and holding the first bulge of her pregnant tummy in both hands.

"You are mad!" she laughed breathlessly. "Mad! Both of you! And I love you for it." The mix was fifty-fifty, half river-clay dug from the banks of the Khami and half yellow anthill clay, the adhesive qualities of which had been enhanced by the saliva of the termites which had carried it up through their subterranean tunnels to the surface. The clays were puddled in a pit beside the bottom well, the same well that Clinton Codrington, Robyn's first husband, and Jordan Ballantyne had dug together so long ago, even before the Charter Company's pioneers had first ridden into Matabeleland.

Two of the Mission converts cranked up each bucketful from the well, and spilled it into the mixing pit, another two shovelled in the clay and a dozen naked black children, led by Robert St. John, made a game out of trampling the clay to the correct consistency. Robyn St. John was helping pack the clay into the oblong wooden moulds, each eighteen inches by nine. A line of Mission boys and girls carried the filled moulds away to the drying ground, where they carefully turned out the wet bricks onto the beds of dry grass, and then hurried back with the empty moulds to have them refilled.

There were thousands of yellow bricks lying in long lines in the sun, but Robyn had calculated that they needed at least twenty thousand for the new church alone. Then of course they would have to cut all the timber and cure it, and in a month's time the thatch grass in the vleis would be tall enough to begin cutting.

Robyn straightened and placed her muddied yellow hand in the small of her back to ease the cramping muscles. A lock of grey-flecked hair had escaped from under the scarf she had knotted over her head, and there was a smear of mud down her cheek and neck, but the little tunnels of her own sweat were eroding this away and staining the high collar of her blouse with it.

She looked up at the burned-out ruins of the Mission, the charred roof beams had fallen in and the heavy rains of the last wet season had dissolved the unbaked brick walls into a shapeless hillock. They would have to re-lay every brick, and lift every rafter into place again, and the prospect of all that grinding, unremitting labour gave Robyn St. John a deep and exciting sense of anticipation. She felt as strong and alive as the young medical missionary who had first stepped onto this unforgiving African soil almost forty years before.

"Thy will be done, dear Lord," she said aloud, and the Matabele girl beside her cried happily, "Amen, Nomusa!" Robyn smiled at her, and was about to bend once more to the brick moulds, when she started, shaded her eyes, and then picked up her skirts and rushed down the track towards the river, running like a young girl.

"Juba," she cried. "Where have you been? I have waited so long for you to come home." Juba set down the heavy load she carried balanced on her head, and came lumbering to meet her.

"Nomusa!" She was weeping as she hugged Robyn to her. Great fat oily tears slid down her cheeks and mingled with the sweat and mud on Robyn's face.

"Stop crying, you silly girl," Robyn scolded her lovingly. "You will make me start. just look at you! How skinny you are, we will have to feed you up! And who is this?" The black' boy dressed only in a soiled loincloth came forward shyly.

"This is my grandson, Tungata Zebiwe." "I did not recognize him, he has grown so big." "Nomusa, I have brought him to you so that you can teach him to read and to write." "Well, the first thing we will have to do is give him a civilized name. We shall call him Gideon and forget that horrible vengeful name." "Gideon," Juba repeated. "Gideon Kumalo. And you will teach him to write?" "We have a lot of work to do first," Robyn said firmly. "Gideon can go into the mud puddle with the other children and you can help me pack the moulds. We have to start all over, Juba, and build it all up from the beginning again." "I admire the grandeur and loneliness of the Matopos, and therefore I desire to be buried in the Matopos on the hill which I used to visit and which I called the "View of the World" in a square to be cut in the rock on the top of the hill and covered with a plain brass plate with these words thereon. "Here lie the remains of CECIL JOHN RHODES"." So when at last the pumping of his diseased heart ceased, he came to Bulawayo once more along the railroad that Ralph Ballantyne had laid. The special saloon coach in which his coffin rode was draped with purple and black, and at each town and siding along the way, those whom he had called "my Rhodesians" brought wreaths to pile upon the casket. From Bulawayo the coffin was taken on a gun carriage into the Matopos Hills and the pure black bullocks that drew it plodded slowly up the rounded egg-shaped dome of granite that he had chosen.

Above the open sepulchre stood a tripod gantry, with block and chain at the peak, and around it a dense throng of humanity. elegant gentlemen, uniformed officers, and ladies with black ribbons on their hats. Then, farther out, there stretched a vast black sea of half-naked Matabele, twenty thousand come to see him go down into the earth. At their head were the indunas who had met him near this same hill to treat for peace. There were Gandang and Babiaan and Somabula, all of them very old men now.

Gathered at the head of the grave were the men who had replaced them in real power, the administrators of the Charter Company, Milton and Lawley, and the members of the first Rhodesian Council. Ralph Ballantyne was amongst them with his young wife beside him.

Ralph's expression remained grave and tragic as the coffin was lowered on its chains into the gaping tomb, and the bishop read aloud the obituary that Mr. Rudyard Kipling had composed. "It is his will that he look forth Across the world he won, The granite of the ancient north, Great spaces washed with sun. There shall he patient take his seat (As when the death he dared) And there await a people's feet In the paths that he prepared." As the heavy brass plaque was lowered into position, Gandang stepped out of the ranks of, the Matabele, and lifted one hand.

"The father is dead," he cried, and then in a single blast of sound, like the thunder of a tropical storm, the Matabele nation gave the salute they had never given to a white man before.

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