The Angels Weep - Smith Wilbur - Страница 95

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Ralph caught him up and hugged him to his chest, pressing his haggard unshaven cheek against the boy's velvet skin.

"Jonathan," he croaked, and then his voice failed. The feel of the child's warm little body, and the milky puppy smell of his sweat was almost too painful to be borne.

"Daddy." jon jon pulled back his head, and his face was pale and stricken.

"I couldn't look after Mummy. She wouldn't let me." "That's all right, Jon-Jon," Ralph whispered. "You did your best. And then he was crying. The terrible dry hacking sobs of a man driven to the far frontiers of his love. he hated to let the child out of his arms for a moment, Ralph sent Jonathan to help Isazi feed the horses at the entrance to the shaft. Then he drew Vicky and Harry Mellow aside and in the gloom of the tunnel where they could not see his face, he told them simply.

"Cathy is dead." "How?" Harry broke the stunned silence. "How did she die?".

"Badly," Ralph told them. "Very badly. I don't want to say any more." Harry held Vicky while she wept and when her first sharp grief was over, Ralph went on, "We can't stay here. We have a choice, the railhead or Bulawayo." "Bulawayo may be burned and sacked by now," Harry pointed out.

"And there may be an impi between here and the railhead," said Ralph. "But if Vicky wants to try and reach the railhead, we can send her and Jon-Jon south on the first train that gets through." "Then?"

Harry asked. "What then?" "Then I am riding to Bulawayo. If they are still alive, then they'll want fighting men to stay that way."

"Vicky?"

Harry hugged his wife.

"My mother and my family are at Bulawayo. This is the land of my birth I'm not running away." She wiped the wetness off her cheeks with her thumbs. "I'm coming with you to Bulawayo." Ralph nodded. He would have been surprised if she had agreed to go south.

"We will ride as soon as we have eaten." They took the wagon road northwards and it was a dismal route. The derelict wagons abandoned during the rinderpest were as regular as milestones. The wagon canvas was already rotted to tatters, the cargoes looted, and scattered on the grass, shattered cases and broken boxes and rusting tins. In the traces of some of the wagons the mummified remains of the oxen lay where they had fallen, heads twisted back in the convulsions that had killed them.

Then at intervals they came upon death and destruction that was fresher and more poignant. One of the Zeederbergs" express coaches in the middle of the track, with the mules speared to death and, festooned from the branches of a thorn-tree, the disembowelled bodies of the driver and his passengers.

At the drift of the Inyati river the blackened walls of the trading-post was all that were left standing. Here there was a macabre twist to the usual mutilation of the dead. The naked bodies of the Greek shopkeeper's wife and her three daughters had been laid in a neat row in the front yard with the shafts of the knobkerries thrust up into their private parts. The shopkeeper himself had been beheaded, and his trunk thrown onto the fire. His head, fixed on an assegai, leered at them in the centre of the road. Ralph covered Jon Jon face with his coat, and held him close as they rode past.

Ralph sent Isazi ahead to scout the drift and he found it defended. Ralph closed up the little party and they took it at a gallop, catching the dozen or so Matebele amadoda by surprise, shooting four of them down as they ran to their weapons, and thundering up the far bank together in the dust and gunsmoke. They were not followed, though Ralph, hoping they might be, turned back and lay in ambush beside the road.

Ralph held Jonathan in his lap during the night, starting awake every few minutes from nightmares in which Cathy screamed and pleaded for mercy. In the dawn he found that without realizing it, he had taken the mole-skin headband from his jacket and held it balled in his fist. He put it back in his pocket and buttoned the flap, as though it was something rare and precious.

They rode on northwards all that day, past the little one-man gold mines and the homesteads where men and their families had begun to carve a life out of the wilderness. Some of them had been taken completely by surprise. They were still clad in the remnants of their night-clothes. One little boy even clutched his teddy bear while his dead mother reached out to him with fingers that did not quite touch his sodden curls.

Others had sold their lives dearly, and the dead Matabele were flung like wood chips from a sawmill in a wide circle around the burned-out homesteads. Once they found dead amadoda but no white bodies. There were tracks of horses and a vehicle heading out northwards.

"The Andersons. They got away," Ralph said. "Please God, they are in Bulawayo by now." Vicky wanted to take the old wagon road, past Khami Mission, but Ralph would not do so.

"If they are there, it's too late. You've seen enough. If they got away, we'll find them in Bulawayo." So they rode into the town of Bulawayo in the early morning of the third day. The barricades opened to let them pass into the huge central laager in the town square, and the townspeople thronged around the horses, shouting questions.

"Are the soldiers coming?" "When are the soldiers coming?" "Did you see my brother? He was at the Antelope Mine-" "Have you any news?"

When she saw Robyn waving to her from the top of one of the wagons in the market square, Vicky wept again for the first time since leaving the Harkness Mine. Elizabeth jumped down from the wagon and pushed her way through the crowd to Ralph's horse.

"Cathy?" she asked.

Ralph shook his head and saw his own sorrow reflected in her clear dark honey-coloured eyes. Elizabeth reached up and lifted Jon Jon down from the front of the saddle.

"I'll look after him, Ralph," she said softly.

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