‘Some say that the diamond mine at New Rush in the early seventies was a chasm of the damned, the inner circle of an inferno, where Satan himself reigned among a hundred thousand tormented souls. Have you ever see Gustave Doré’s engravings which illustrate Dante’s journey through the rings of hell? Gaze at them, and you will at once see a close representation of life inside the yawning pit which only two years earlier had been a little hill upon which scrawny sheep nosed for green shoots among the thorn bushes. Can you, an Oxford don, even begin to imagine the stench, the dust, the squalor, the drunkenness of the camps that surrounded this hell-hole? Yet it was upon this most unlikely site that I experienced a revelation so intense that it was to change utterly the life of this obscure missionary’s daughter. I was a mere seventeen years when I arrived at the New Rush mining camp – the name was changed to Kimberley during the ten months I spent there with my sister and brother.’
Miss Schreiner appeared to be serenely confident that her story would be of irresistible interest to me. Her eyes did not leave my face for a second. ‘Theo was what they called a Digger. He worked fourteen hours a day on his claim with a gang of Kaffirs. The natives picked, shovelled, hauled and sifted, while Theo sat under an awning outside his tent and sorted through the red gravel they had mined. Ettie did what she could to provide him with some home comforts within their tent. Through their despair at the excesses of gambling and drinking that dominated life on the fields – for both belonged to various Temperance organisations – the hope that Theo would find a large diamond glittered in their dismal lives quite as brightly as the precious stones themselves.’ She sighed deeply and shook her head.
‘Although there was more than enough Cape Brandy there was never enough water; we suffered from scurvy because of a lack of fresh vegetables, and from dysentery because of primitive sanitation, and the flies! The canvas walls were black with flies: they dropped into your tea and coffee and cooking food; they buzzed in your ears and settled on plates and crawled over your dry lips, hoping to find a moist crack into which they could insert their busy probosces – I’m sorry if I disgust you, Professor – you have turned quite pale!’ And indeed I felt quite faint at the image she had just conjured. Although as a child I had pulled the wings off flies, and, as a student, dissected them under microscopes, I have never allowed an insect to crawl across my face. (Alfred was not an insect.)
‘But more terrifying than the flies, Professor, were the dust-storms.’ And here she gave an involuntary shudder, though I thought I might prefer dust to flies.
‘We would always know when one was about to break: for an hour or so a strange, almost tangible silence would fall upon the camps. Then a faint breeze would flutter among the huts and chase bits of paper into the air. Within minutes corrugated-iron roofs began to rattle, tent ropes creaked and strained, and you could see a dense brown wall blustering towards you from a distance. The closer it got to the camp the thicker it became: then tents were ripped out of the ground, shacks and shanties collapsed like houses of cards, pots and pans rolled across the veld, and vast clouds of dust engulfed the whole settlement. For hours afterwards we became diggers of a different kind as we struggled to spade out the layers of dust and grit that had accumulated in our tent – and which now coated our eyes, mouths, food, clothes and bedding. I remember breathing in clouds of dust and breathing it out again in clouds, like steam from a kettle.
‘Afterwards, deep rumbles of thunder would promise refreshing rain – but sometimes the thunderstorms were as terrifying as the dust-storms. Tents would be flooded in the downpour, the ground became sodden, everything was unbearably wet and filthy; often we had to choose between sleeping in a pool of water or upon the table.’ She scrutinised my face even more closely, to see if I appreciated the horror of what she was saying. ‘Needless to say, as a woman I was expected to perform women’s tasks, well away from the masculine preserve of the diamond fields: I helped Ettie tidy our tent, fetched water from the river and wells (two buckets a day was all we were allowed), picked flowers and taught in the night schools. Occasionally I helped at the sorting table, sieving and washing the diamondiferous pebbles. Around us seethed thousands of natives who kicked up the red sand in clouds above their heads; some stark-naked savages from the interior, some half-dressed colonial blacks, but all with one thought in their heads: the guns they would buy with the money they earned. It was a rough, raw environment, Professor.’ She paused for a moment, her eyes and mouth twitching with the emotions awoken by ghastly memories –then set off again.
‘Some Diggers who had struck it rich had clubbed together into “messes”: they shared food, expenses and servants. To signal that they had no shortage of food, they had commandeered large trees from which they hung legs of mutton like Christmas decorations. These young bachelors were on the whole a better class of person, not the drunkards and desperadoes who spent all their free time reeling from bars to gambling houses to back-street brothels. I, of course, took no interest in these young men who altogether lacked the spiritual dimension which is of the first importance to me in any man or woman. What little spare time I had was spent reading – John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, John Ruskin – or writing. I had started work on various stories and novels, but could not bring myself to believe my writing was of any value … However, I could not help noticing a tall, fair-haired youth, not much older than myself, whose individual behaviour distinguished him from his companions–’
At that moment the sound of a disturbance caused us to raise our heads in alarm. A group of treetops began to thrash and sway until out of the foliage exploded a couple of black eagles, their powerful wings whirring like machines. Higher and higher they tumbled into the mountain air, emitting shrieks and howls so piercing that the rest of the forest held its breath. Were they mating or were they marauding? They wheeled in ever larger circles, one apparently chasing the other. My companion, too, was silenced by this outburst, which ceased as suddenly as it had started, as both birds glided back to the very spot from which they had burst.
‘Oh look!’ She darted from the bench to pick up a gigantic black feather that had drifted down and landed on the very rim of her discarded hat. Now, as she jabbed the feather into the jumble of lace and roses, it struck me that the Colossus, too, cared little for his appearance because he, like her, was not quite right in the head! You could see it at once in their eyes: a certain madness that goes with obsession on a grand scale, obsessions and dreams that focus not on people or objects, but on whole countries, races, Empires. I peered at her eyes more closely, and fancied I saw in them the great diamond mine of which she spoke with such passion, and more besides that made me uneasy.
Her hat now reset upon her black curls, she resumed her monologue as if nothing had happened. This young man first came to my attention when I carried a lunch pail to Theo, at work on his claim. My brother was supervising his labourers as they hauled up leather buckets of ore from the bottom of the pit on aerial tramwires, and dumped the flame-coloured gravel into waiting mule carts. All around him the perpetual hum of manual labour rose from the chasm itself: the thud of pick and shovel against the soil, the clank of rope and bucket, the shouted commands between pit and roadway, the breathy songs of native gangs as they worked deep in the crater that was once a kopje. The white supervisors bustled about, sometimes scrambling down the ladderworks into the pit to stand over their gangs to prevent them from hiding – and swallowing – the diamonds their spades had exposed. Let me not talk of the curse of illicit diamond buying, the greatest of all the plagues of the fields, to which every ruined Digger attributed his failure …’
Here she once again paused and allowed herself to remember unspeakable tragedies. Then the expression on her face softened as she continued.
‘Amidst all this confusion of male comradeship, I became aware of a separate figure sitting on an upturned bucket, an opened book in his hand. He was staring dreamily into space, his mind a thousand miles away from the gangs of Diggers he was supposed to be supervising and, as I watched, he withdrew a pencil from his pocket and began to underline some of the text. The incongruity between his studiousness and the brutish environment quite enchanted me, and I stood among the mules and buckets with a sudden feeling that I beheld before me a kindred spirit, a soulmate, a fellow-being who thought as I did. Finally I asked my brother who the dreamy young man might be. Theo snorted. “He may dream, but he has the sharpest head for finance of all of us. In just a couple of years he has trebled his earnings through clever enterprises, and he is not yet twenty.”
‘From that moment onwards I began to notice this angular youth, often dressed in white flannels stained red by the earth, leaning moodily against a street wall with his hands in his pockets. Though I stared at him with an intensity that amounted to insolence, not once did he raise his eyes to meet mine. I believe that if a flock of beautiful women passed before him he would be unaware of their presence, so much more urgent were his own thoughts and dreams.’
Olive pursed her lips briefly and reflected on this opinion. She sighed before continuing.
‘One evening, when the noise and stir in the camp pressed upon me like a great weight, I escaped to the solitude of the Big Hole in the bright moonlight. It was like entering the city of the dead in the land of the living, so quiet it was, so well did the high-piled gravel heaps keep out all sound of the seething noisy world around. Not a sound, not a movement. I walked to the edge of the reef and looked down into the crater. The thousand wires that crossed it glistened in the moonlight, forming a weird, sheeny, mist-like veil over the black depths beneath. Very dark, very deep it lay all round the edge, but high towering into the bright moonlight rose the unworked centre. In the magic of the moonlight it was a golden castle of the olden knightly days; you might swear, as you gazed down at it, that you saw the shadows of its castellated battlements, and the endless turrets that overcrowned it; a giant castle, lulled to sleep and bound in silence for a thousand years by the word of some enchanter.’
Miss Schreiner seemed to have entered some kind of trance, and indeed I myself felt swept away to this magical scene where hell-hole becomes fairy castle. Her voice had sunk very low, while her eyes stared sightlessly through the forest trees.
‘I thought I was alone, but a slight movement in the periphery of my vision told me that some other living creature lingered nearby, drawn to the silence of the place as I was. It scarcely surprised me when a woman’s voice floated towards me.
‘“It is utterly transformed at moonlight, is it not? It becomes a thing of sublime beauty and mystery – like a Gothic cathedral dug up out of the earth,” said she.
‘“I doubt the diggers would find it so,” said I sharply, for I preferred my own image of a crumbling castle (and perhaps, if the truth be known, myself as the sleeping princess waiting to be awakened by a prince). “But no doubt Mr Ruskin would admire the beauty that moonlight confers upon manual labour.”
‘“You know Mr Ruskin’s works then?” The figure stirred with evident interest and moved slightly towards me.
‘“I am interested in his dreams and how they shape the dreams of others,” I replied – and then my very heart turned over. That fierce African moonlight not only throws a silken veil over man’s monstrosities but also reveals what the darkness of night would otherwise have hidden. I could now see that my companion was no woman.
‘His pale eyes blazed like two African moons, full of cold passion. But do not think this passion was directed at me. He was pointing down into the crater. “This is where my dreams begin. I can think of nothing else.”
‘“Then you are a mere fortune-hunter like all the rest?” I did not attempt to hide the scorn in my voice.
‘He laughed with equal contempt. “I am not interested in personal fortune. My dream concerns the entire Anglo-Saxon race, and for that I need all the riches this earth will yield.”
‘This unexpected reply silenced me for a while, which was just as well, for the young man proceeded to break into a perfect rhapsody of plans to fill the entire African continent with British settlers, and to acquire for Her Majesty the Queen vast tracts of land which she might call her Empire. His aspirations were not restricted to Africa: the American colonies must be restored to British rule, for the British race is the finest, and each tract of land becomes a finer place for its presence.
‘The young man’s speech rushed out in fits and starts, and his voice soared upwards as his excitement grew. I felt my heart beat more quickly as his vision grew to encompass the whole world – when he stopped almost in midstream and turned his burning gaze on me.
‘“And you – what is your dream?”
‘“My dream?” I was startled that he could have any interest in a young South African woman’s hopes for her future, and for a moment I could not answer him. Then, as I began to speak, I felt that my life’s decision was being made, endorsed even, by his grave attention.
‘“My dream is to write of Africa, of its desolate landscapes and bigoted, God-fearing, idle people. And I will explore Woman and her sexuality, her identity, isolated in the lonely expanses of the Karoo, about which no English-speaking person has yet written.” Now it was my turn for language to tumble from my mouth as I told this utter stranger of all my wild imaginings that had haunted me day and night. I could see his eyes catch fire as I spoke of the empty interiors with their ancient histories and seething insect life, none of which was known to the civilised world who avoided this barbaric hinterland because it was neither picturesque, nor was it sublime. Even when I spoke of women’s role in society and the absolute necessity for a man and woman to be equal, he listened with an alert interest which stimulated me to explore these ideas further.
‘When I had had my say, he waited to see if there was yet more. My old doubts rose up and I murmured: “But of course all this is only a dream. I do not yet believe in my abilities.”
‘“But you have no choice,” he said at once. “You contain within yourself a rich gift, a gift of space. It is a space which those people crushed together in the claustrophobic terraced houses of England long to inhabit. They long to meet human beings uncrushed by civilisation, who are at one with indigenous animal and plant life but who love and hate, cheat and suffer just as much as they do. It is your duty.”
‘And I knew it must be so. I told him that soon I would be leaving the diamond fields for my sister’s farm, some three hundred miles away, in the heart of the Karoo. He, for his part, was about to depart for Oxford, in order to carry out the next stage of his grand plan. We had both come to bid farewell to this gigantic and mysterious crater in the earth, which was to influence both our lives so profoundly.’
Miss Schreiner paused for at least a minute while she reflected on this potent episode. I shifted on my tree trunk, fearing a chill (I suspected it was damp, though the surface seemed dry enough), or, worse, anal haemorrhoids. Such physical discomforts clearly were not occupying her thoughts, for she took up her story with renewed energy, the only indication of her recent asthma attack being a slight hunching of the shoulders.
‘We went our separate ways. The young man was right: ordinary suburban people did want to enter the lives of simple Boer farmers and rebellious young women trapped in those wild and lonely plains. My book about life on an African farm sold in hundreds of thousands and was translated into many languages. I spent many years in England, mixing with progressive thinkers, achieving some kind of unwanted fame. Ten years ago I returned to live in South Africa, a country now torn apart by racial antagonisms on every level. I had heard much about a man of genius, a Colossus of the Colony, who would pull this country of diverse races and needs into one glorious union, using his great wealth for higher purposes. I began to feel an almost painful interest in this man and his career. It became a necessity for me to meet him.’
She stared at me with passionate eyes, and I was unwillingly stirred by the intensity of this little woman’s emotional life.
‘I had chosen to return to my beloved Karoo, so kind to asthmatics with its clear unadulterated air. The little hamlet where I lived had become a stopping-place on the railway line from Cape Town to Kimberley, where passengers on the through-train might take meals at the station café. It happened that this man travelled frequently to Kimberley, where he had made his fortune; and I happened to know that he greatly admired my novel about life on a Boer farm. My brother, who worked for his diamond syndicate, arranged for us to meet on the station one morning, and partake of a meal together in the café.
‘As I waited for the steam engine to draw in at the station, my excitement at the prospective meeting was almost unbearable. By now my feelings for him were positive and mysterious, feelings which I had never experienced towards anyone else – the deliberate knowledge: “That man belongs to me!” I must have paced that small platform a hundred times.
‘The train was not late that morning. He had offered me a choice between breakfast or evening meal, as the train runs twice a day: I felt I should like to combine our meeting with dawn rather than dusk. At last the great engine panted into the station cloaked in the white steam which always reminds me of the swirling feathers of the ostriches on the Karoo farms. A door opened almost immediately – he has his own private carriage – and in the midst of the steamy plumes the gigantic figure of a man became discernible. I moved towards him as if in a dream.
‘Oh, how the years had altered my young man of the diamond rush! Where once his face had been almost anaemic in its pallor, now the cheeks were swollen and flushed. His vast body, which now towered over me as he bent low to shake my hand, was crammed into crumpled white trousers and a tight jacket, while a spotted bow-tie looked as if it might shortly strangle him, so red and thick was the bulging neck. Yet for all that, he had retained that curious far-off look, and an almost childlike quality in his speech and movements. I could see at once that he did not recognise me – even then I was no longer the slender creature I had been at seventeen – and that the episode beside the Big Hole which had changed my life so powerfully had vanished from his memory. I did not remind him, though the disappointment caught at my throat.
‘Over a cooked breakfast, which I scarcely tasted, marvelling how he wolfed it down and called for more, I found him to be even higher and nobler than I expected. He did not speak with the quick-witted fluency of my English friends, and his fluty tones entirely lacked the gravitas we expect from great men, but the vastness of his ideas more than made up for his vocal peculiarities. His plans to extend his railway right through the heart of Africa, to reconcile Boer and British in a unified South Africa, the dreams for his mighty Chartered Company, all utterly enthralled me, and as I sat in that remote railway café, my bacon congealing on my plate, I knew I faced a man of genius. Once again he did not confine his discourse to his own achievements and hopes, but spoke more lovingly and sympathetically of my African Farm than anyone else has done. I longed to remind him of our meeting of twenty years earlier, but in a flash, as it seemed, the train was ready to move on, and we bade each other goodbye, each conscious of the other’s energy and intellect, each longing for another such meeting …’
I pulled out my fob-watch. ‘I hate to interrupt you, Miss Schreiner, but –’
Miss Schreiner appeared not to have heard me. ‘We met many times after that – on the humble railway platform, in my own small house, and for days on end at his great mansion down there, before it was destroyed by fire. Society hostesses fell over each other to have us both present at their dinner parties, and he gave me precedence over all other women at his own dinners.’
‘Speaking of dinners …’ How frail and feeble my voice sounded next to her ringing tones.
Miss Schreiner fumbled in her reticule and withdrew a box of cigarettes without a shade of embarrassment. Lighting one, she inhaled deep into her asthmatic lungs. ‘So close did we become –’ she blew out a stream of smoke which appeared to be having no ill effect on her bronchial tubes – ‘that the rumour was spread that we were about to marry!’ She gave a short, smoky laugh. ‘I would lay my head on the block that he never loved a woman. Men, certainly. But he has a horror of being left alone with a woman, unless she has a formidable intellect!’
I rose from my tree trunk. ‘I’m afraid I really have to go now. It has been most interesting to hear –’
She was opening her reticule again with nervous fingers. Inside it I could see a confusion of papers, one of which she passed to me. Sensing my reluctance to accept it, she raised her wild, tragic eyes.
‘This is the Appeal of which I spoke. I have put all my energies into it. It is my last hope.’
‘But really … I’m sorry …’
To my consternation Miss Schreiner grabbed both my hands in hers.
‘Professor Wills, we are on the brink of a bloody war in this country, a war which will stir inextinguishable hatred in the breast of the Boer, and inextinguishable guilt in the heart of the Englishman. This beloved country will be rent apart to make way for an evil so great that it will become a pariah even in this world of evil. And you, Professor, have a vital role to play in preventing this calamity.’
I was conscious of the dampness of my palms, pressed into her warm dry hands.
‘Madam, I am an ornithologist. I have no influence with your Colossus.’
She looked at me in astonishment and allowed my trapped hands to fall. With scorn in her proud eye she cried out: ‘I am not asking you to present my Appeal to a man whose heart is entirely eaten away by corruption! I am asking you to present this Appeal to the High Commissioner, Sir Alfred Milner, and to request him to meet me – here – tomorrow. Ten minutes of his time will suffice. I will wait at this spot all tomorrow.’
‘But why on earth should he listen to me? I hardly know him.’
Miss Schreiner’s features hardened. ‘I have observed that you have his ear.’
‘I’ve taken photographs of him on a bicycle, if that’s what you mean.’
‘Professor Wills.’ Her chest was heaving. ‘In moments of extreme desperation I am prepared to resort to blackmail. I think the mention of the name “Cecile” may act as a gentle stimulus in this case. A woman in Brixton, you may remember. He loved to feel her hair flow into his lap. After dining with the Queen.’
Needless to say the cages were quiet as I passed them.
‘You’ve got less than three days!’ I hissed at a bleary-eyed nightingale.
Chamberlain and Salisbury were sliding their pebbles about on the gravel patterns, uttering a combination of low-pitched chants and sudden shrieks.
‘You should be whistling to the birds, never mind the mumbo-jumbo!’ I yelled, though I privately considered that their primitive magic was more likely to succeed than my avian music classes.
But I hurried on, by now thinking only of my delayed afternoon nap, especially necessary on this busiest of days, with an evening’s socialising ahead.