Light steps in the passage stopped opposite his bedroom door, and now there was a tap on the woodwork.
‘Mark?’
He sat up quickly, letting the single thin blanket fall to his waist.
‘May I come in?’
‘Yes,’ he husked, and the door swung open. Helena crossed to his bed. She wore a gown of light pink shiny material that buttoned down the front; the skirt opened at each step and there was a glimpse of smooth white flesh above her knees.
She carried a slim book in one hand. ‘I said I would lend it to you,’ she explained. ‘Read it, Mark.’ She held out the volume.
The Communist Manifesto was the title, and Mark took it from her, opening it at random. He bowed his head over the open pages to cover the confusion into which her near presence plunged him.
‘Thank you, Helena.’ He used her name for the first time, wanting her to leave and yet hoping she would stay. She leaned over him a little, looking at the open book, and the bodice of her gown fell apart an inch. Mark looked up, and saw the incredibly silky sheen where the beginning of one white breast pressed against the lace that edged the neck of the gown. Swiftly he dropped his eyes again, and they were both silent until Mark could stand it no longer, and he looked up at her.
‘Helena,’ he began, and then stopped. There was a smile, a secret womanly smile on her lips, lips that were slightly parted and moist in the harsh electric light. The dark eyes were half hooded but glowed again with that fierce fanatical light, and her bosom beneath the pink satin rose and fell with quick soundless breathing.
He flushed a sultry red under the dark tan of his cheeks and he rolled abruptly on to his side, drawing up his knees.
Helena straightened up slowly, still smiling. ‘Goodnight, Mark.’ She touched his shoulder, fire sprang afresh from her finger-tips and then she turned and went slowly towards the door. The slippery material of the gown slid softly across the tight double rounds of her buttocks.
‘I’ll leave the light on.’ She looked back at him, and now the smile was knowing. ‘You’ll want to read.’
The Pay Office of Crown Deep Mines Ltd was a long austere room where five other clerks worked at high desks set in a line down one wall. They were mostly men in advanced middle age, two of them sufferers from phthisis, that dreaded disease of the miners in which the rock dust from the drills settled in the lungs, building up slowly until the lung turned to stone and gradually crippled the man. Employment in the mine offices was a form of pension. The other three were grey and drab men, stooped from poring over their ledgers. The atmosphere in the office was quiet and joyless, as in some monastic cloister.
Mark was given charge of the files and personnel R to Z, and the work was dull and repetitive, soon becoming automatic as he calculated overtime and leave pay, made deductions for rent and union fees and struck his totals. It was drudgery, not nearly enough to engage a bright and active young brain, and the narrow confines of the office were a cage for a spirit that was at home in the wide open sweep of sky and veld and had known the cataclysmic universe of the battlefields of France.
On the weekends, he escaped from his cage and rode on an old bicycle for miles into the open veld, following dusty paths along the base of the rocky kopjes on which grew the regal candelabra of giant aloes, their blooms burning in bright scarlet against the clear pale blue of the highveld sky. He sought seclusion, wilderness, secret places far from other men, but it seemed that always there were the barriers of barbed wire to limit his range; the grasslands had gone to the plough, the pale dust devils swirled and danced over red earth from which the harvest had been stripped, leaving the dried sparse stubble of maize stalks.
The great herds of game that once had covered the open grassland to the full range of the eye were long gone, and now small scrub cattle, multi-coloured and scrawny, grazed in mindless bovine herds tended by almost naked black piccaninnies who paused to watch Mark pedalling by, and greeted him with solemnity which turned to wide-eyed pleasure when he returned the greeting in their own language.
Once in a while Mark would start a small grey duiker from its lay and send it bounding and bouncing away through the dry grass with small sharp horns and ears erect, or else catch a glimpse of a springbuck drifting elusive as smoke across the plain, lonely survivors of the long rifles. Then the delight of their wild presence stayed long with him, warming him on the dark cold ride home.
He needed these times of quiet and solitude to complete the healing process, not only of the Maxim bullet wounds in his back but of the deeper wounds, soul damage caused by too early an exposure to war in all its horror.
He needed this quietness also to evaluate the swift rush of events that filled his evenings and nights in direct contrast to the grey drudgery of his working days.
Mark was carried along by the fanatical energy of Fergus MacDonald and Helena. Fergus was the comrade who had shared with him experience that most men never knew, the stark and terrible involvement of combat. He was also much older than Mark, a paternal figure, filling a deep need in his life. It was easy to suspend the critical faculties and believe; not to think, but to follow blindly wherever Fergus’ bitter restless energy led them.
There was excitement and a sense of commitment in those meetings with men like him, men with an ideal and a sense of destiny. The secret meetings in locked rooms with armed guards at the doors, the atmosphere quivering with the promise of forbidden things. The cigarette-smoke spiralling upwards until it filled the room with a thick blue haze, like incense burning at some mystic rite; the faces shining with sweat and the quiet frenzy of the fanatic, as they listened to the speakers.
Harry Fisher, the Chairman of the Party, was a tall fierce man with a heavy gut, the brawny shoulders and hairy muscular arms of a boilermaker, an unkempt shock of coarse wiry black hair laced with strands of silver and dark burning eyes.
‘We are the Party, the praetorian guard of the proletariat, and we are not bound by law or the ethical considerations of the bourgeois age. The Party in itself is the new law, the natural law of existence.’
Afterwards he shook hands with Mark, while Fergus stood by with paternal pride. Fisher’s grip was as fierce as his stare.
‘You’re a soldier,’ he nodded. ‘We will need you again, comrade. There is bloody work ahead.’
The disquieting presence of the man stayed to haunt Mark long afterwards, even when they rode home in the crowded tramcar, the three of them squeezed into a double seat so that Helena’s thigh was pressed hard against his. When she spoke to him, she leaned sideways, her lips almost touching his cheek, and her breath smelling of liquorice and cigarettes, a smell that mingled with the cheap flowery perfume she wore, and the underlying musky warmth of her woman’s body.
There were other meetings on the Friday evenings, great raucous shouting gatherings where hundreds of white miners crowded into the huge Fordsburg Trades Union Hall, most of them boozy with cheap brandy, loud and inarticulate and spoiling for trouble. They roared like the crowd at a bull fight as the speakers harangued them; occasionally one of the audience climbed on to his chair to sway there, shouting meaningless confused slogans until his laughing comrades dragged him down.
One of the most popular speakers at these public meetings was Fergus MacDonald; he had a dozen tricks to excite his audience, he probed their secret fears and twisted the probe until they howled half in pain and half in adulation.
‘You know what they are planning, the bosses, you know what they are going to do? First they will fragment the trades—’
A thunderous ugly roar, that shook the windows in their frames, and Fergus paused on the stage, sweeping his sparse sandy hair back off his forehead and grinning down at them with his thin bitter mouth until the sound subsided.
‘—the trade that took you five years to learn, they will split it up and now there will be three unskilled men to do your job, with only a year’s training to learn that fragment, and they will pay them a tenth of the wage you draw.’
A storming roar of ‘No!’ and Fergus flung it back at them.
‘Yes!’ he shouted. ‘Yes! Yes! And yes again. That is what the bosses are going to do. But that’s not all, they are going to use blacks in your jobs, black men are going to take those jobs away from you – black men who will work for a wage that you cannot live on.’
They screamed now, frantic with anger, a terrible anger which had no object on which to focus.
‘What about your kids, are you going to feed them on mealies, are your wives going to wear limbo? That’s what will happen, when the blacks take your jobs!’
‘No!’ they roared. ‘No!’
‘Workers of the world,’ Fergus shouted at them, ‘workers of the world unite—and keep our country white!’
The bellow of applause, the rhythmic stamp of feet on the wooden floor lasted for ten minutes, while Fergus strutted back and forth across the stage, clasping his hands above his head like a prize-fighter. When at last the cheering faltered, he flung back his head and bellowed the opening line of ‘The Red Flag’.
The entire hall came crashing to its feet, and stood at attention to sing the revolutionary song:
Then raise the scarlet standard high,
Within its shade we’ll live or die.
Tho’ cowards flinch and traitors sneer,
We’ll keep the red flag flying here.
Mark walked home with the MacDonalds in the frosty night, their breathing smoking like ostrich plumes in the lights of the street lamps. Helena walked between the men, a small dainty figure in her black overcoat with rabbit-fur collar and a knitted cap pulled down over her head.
She had slipped a hand into the crook of the elbows of each of them, a seemingly natural impartial gesture, but there was a disturbing pressure of fingers on the hard muscle of Mark’s upper arm, and her hip touched his as she skipped occasionally to catch the longer stride of the men.
‘Listen, Fergus, what you were saying there in the hall doesn’t make sense, you know,’ Mark broke the silence, as they turned into the home street. ‘You can’t have it both ways, workers unite and keep it white.’
Fergus chuckled appreciatively. ‘You’re a bright lad, comrade Mark.’
‘But, I’m serious, Fergus – it’s not the way Harry Fisher—’
‘Of course not, lad. Tonight I was shovelling up swill for the hogs. We need them fighting mad, we have things to tear down, bloody work to do.’ He stopped and turned to face Mark over the woman’s head. ‘We need cannon fodder, lad, and plenty of it.’
‘So it won’t be like that?’ Mark asked.
‘No, lad. It will be a beautiful brave new world. All men equal, all men happy, no bosses—a workers’ state.’
Mark tried to control his pricking nagging doubts.
‘You keep talking of fighting, Fergus. Do you mean that, literally? I mean, will it be a shooting war?’
‘A shooting war, comrade, a bloody shooting war. Just like the revolution in Russia, where comrade Lenin has shown us the way. We have to burn away the dross, we have to soak this earth with the blood of the rulers and the bosses, we have to flood it with the blood of their minions - the petit bourgeois officer’s class of the police and military.’
‘What will—’ Mark almost said ‘we’ but it would not come to his lips. He could not make that commitment. ‘What will you fight with?’
Fergus chuckled again, and winked slyly. ‘Mum’s the word, lad, but it’s time you knew a little more.’ He nodded. ‘Yes, tomorrow night,’ he decided.
On Saturday there was a bazaar being held in the Trades Hall, a Women’s Union fund-raising drive for building the new church. Where the crazed mob had screamed murder and bloody revolution the previous night, now there were long trestle tables set out and the women hovered over their displays of baked and fancily iced cakes, trays of tarts, preserved fruit in jars and jams.
Mark bought a packet of tarts for a penny and he and Fergus munched them as they wandered idly down the hall, stopping at the piles of second-hand clothing while Fergus tried a maroon cardigan and, after careful deliberation, purchased it for half a crown. They reached the top of the hall, and stood beneath the raised stage.
Fergus surveyed the room casually and then took Mark’s arm and led him up the steps. They crossed the stage quietly, and went in through a door in the wings, into a maze of small union offices and storerooms, all deserted now on a Saturday afternoon.
Fergus used a key from his watch-chain to unlock a low iron door, and they stooped through it. Fergus relocked behind him, and they went down a narrow flight of steps that descended steeply. There was a smell of damp and earth, and Mark realized that they were descending to the cellars.
Fergus tapped on the door at the bottom of the stairs, and after a moment a single eye regarded them balefully through a peep hole.
‘All right, comrade. Fergus MacDonald—a committee member.’
There was the rattle of chains and the door opened. A disgruntled, roughly dressed man stood aside for them. He was unshaven and sullen, and against the wall of the tiny room was a table and chair, still spread with the remains of a meal and the crumpled daily newspaper.
The man grunted, and Fergus led Mark across the room and through another door into the cellars.
The floor was earthen and the arched columns were in raw unplastered brick. There was the stench of dust and rats, stale dank air in confined space. A single bulb lit the centre starkly, but left the alcoves behind the arches in shadow.
‘Here, lad, this is what we are going to use.’
There were wooden cases stacked neatly to the height of a man’s head in the alcoves, and the stacks were draped with heavy tarpaulin, obviously stolen from the railway yards for they were stencilled SAR & H.
Fergus lifted the edge of one tarpaulin, and grinned that thin humourless smile.
‘Still in the grease, lad.’ The wooden cases were branded with the distinctive arrow-head and W. D. of the British War Department, and below that the inscription: ‘6 pieces. Lee-Enfield Mark IV (CNVD)’.
Mark was stunned. ‘Good God, Fergus, there are hundreds of them.’
‘That’s it, lad – and this is only one arsenal. There are others all along the Rand.’
He lifted another tarpaulin, walking on down the length of the cellar. The ammunition cases, with the quick-release catches on the detachable lids that were painted: ‘1000 rounds .303.’
‘We have enough to do the job.’ Fergus squeezed Mark’s arm, and led him on.
There were racks of rifles now, ready for instant use, blued steel glistening with gun oil in the electric light. Fergus picked out a single rifle and handed it to Mark.
‘This one has got your name on it.’
Mark took the weapon, and the feel of it in his hands was terribly familiar.
‘It’s the only one we’ve got, but the moment I saw it, I thought of you. When the time comes, you’ll be using it.’
The P.14 sniper’s rifle had that special balance that felt just right in his hands but made Mark sick in the stomach. He handed it back to Fergus without a word, but the older man winked at him before racking it again carefully.
Like a showman, Fergus had kept the best for last. With a flourish he whipped the canvas off the heavy weapon, with its thick, corrugated water-jacketed barrel, that squatted on its steel tripod. The Maxim machine gun, in its various forms, had the dubious distinction of having killed more human beings than any other single weapon that man’s destructive genius had been able to devise.
This was one of that deadly family, the Vickers-Maxim .303 Mark IV.B, and there were boxes stacked beside it. Each containing a belt of 250 rounds. The gun could throw those at 2440 feet per second and at a cyclic rate of 750 rounds a minute.
‘How about that, comrade? You asked what we are going to fight with – how will that do for a beginning?’
In the silence Mark could hear faintly, but distinctly, the sound of children’s laughter from the ha
ll above them.
Mark sat alone upon the highest crest of the low kopjes, that stretched into the west, black ironstone ridges breaking out of the flat dry earth like the crested back of a crocodile surfacing from still lake water.
The memory of the hidden arsenal had stayed with him through the night, keeping him from sleep, so that now his eyes felt gritty and his skin stretched tight and dry across the bones of his cheeks.
Lack of sleep had left him with that remote feeling, a lightness of thought, detached from reality, so now he sat in the bright sunlight like a day-flying owl, and looking like a stranger into his own mind.
He felt a rising sense of dismay as he realized how idly he had drifted along the path that had brought him here to the very brink of the abyss. It had taken the feel of the P.14 in his hands, and the laughter of children to bring him up at the end of a rope.
All his training, all his deepest beliefs were centred on the sanctity of law, on the order and responsibilities of society. He had fought for that, had spent all of his adult life fighting for that belief. Now suddenly he had drifted, out of apathy, to the camp of the enemy; already he was numbered with the legions of the lawless, already they were arming him to begin the work of destruction. There was no question now that it was merely empty rhetoric shouted at gatherings of drunken labourers—he had seen the guns. It would be cruel and without mercy. He knew Harry Fisher, had recognized the forces that drove him. He knew Fergus MacDonald, the man had killed before and often; he would not flick an eyelid when he killed again.
Mark groaned aloud, aghast at what he had let happen to himself. He who knew what war really was, he who had worn the king’s uniform, and won his medal for courage.
He felt the oily warmth of shame in his throat, a gagging sensation, and, to arm himself against future weakness of this same kind, he tried to find the reasons why he had been drawn in.