The bar of the Gamate Hotel had always been a refuge, of one sort or another – a refuge from wives or husbands, or from work which had become too dull or too demanding, or from the heat, or from boredom, or from the gruesome pressure of reality. But now, it seemed, it had become a refuge of a different sort; an actual encampment, with broken windows boarded up, strict precautions as to who could come in, and who must stay out – the latter being any Maula not directly employed in the bar – and a general air of encirclement.
When, after a night of terror and burning, Fellows, the hotelkeeper, unlocked the entrance door and prepared for another day’s work, it was as if he were lowering a small, heavily guarded drawbridge, which under his direct supervision could admit a few chosen entrants to the inner citadel … The fact that, for the first time in his life, he had a loaded revolver secreted behind the till, was final proof that this was the focal ring of an armed camp.
Fellows polished the worn surface of the bar-counter, rearranged some glasses, swore at one of his Maula helpers who was being slow about bringing in the fresh stocks of soda and tonic water. Then the screen door of the stoep creaked open, and slammed shut again – a familiar sound, a sound he had heard a hundred times a day for the past ten years. He looked warily at the figure which shouldered its way in, and then relaxed. It was Oosthuizen, the Afrikaner farmer, huge and ponderous, his khaki shirt and slacks straining over giant muscles, his face and forearms bronzed to a deep mahogany hue.
Automatically, even as the other man advanced towards the bar, Fellows reached behind him for the bottle of pungent Commando brandy, and poured a generous tot into a thick tumbler.
‘Good morning, Mr Oosthuizen,’ he said, adding a dash of water and pushing the glass across the counter.
‘Gooie moré, Ted.’ Oosthuizen, already sweating in the hot midday air, came to a stop, and leant one elbow on the edge of the bar. With his other hand he swept up the tumbler, and swallowed lustily. The noise he made as he put the glass down again was like a pistol shot, shattering the peace of the empty bar. Oosthuizen grinned as he caught Fellows’s eye. ‘What’s new, eh?’ he asked. ‘What did those bloody bobijaans do, last night?’
‘Same as the night before,’ said Fellows morosely. His busy hands swabbed down the bar, sponging out the spilt drops of brandy. ‘Broke a lot more windows down at the hospital, burnt a couple of huts, tried to murder a policeman.’ His polishing arm worked quicker and quicker as he added: ‘You’ll read all about it in the newspapers. Maybe before some of it happens, for all I know.’
‘Those pampoens are still writing, eh?’
‘Still writing.’
The screen door creaked again, and slammed to. The inner door opened in its turn. They both looked round. This time it was two people – Llewellyn, the agricultural officer, and one of the doctors from the hospital.
They greeted each other like men in a desert, come at last to an oasis. It was almost as if they were surprised to see each other alive, on yet another new morning. They sipped their drinks, and compared notes. The hospital had been kept busy most of the night, said the doctor – a pale young man called Templegate, not long out of Liverpool Northern Hospital and the sober role of junior house surgeon. Two split heads, a policeman with a deep stab wound, a woman frightened into a miscarriage, a child which, in flight from some juvenile gang warfare, had swallowed a forked twig – been the same as usual, only a bit more so.
‘You’d be glad to get back to the Northern, I’d say,’ said Fellows, who had himself worked in Liverpool. ‘Sounds like a rough night in Scotland Road.’
‘Scotland Road was never like this,’ answered Templegate, brushing back his sparse hair. ‘Then, it was just the Liverpool-Irish cutting up, and working off a bit of excess blood pressure. Now you don’t know what to expect.’
Llewellyn stared down at his drink, his dark face seeming to brood on an inner sorrow. ‘By God, that’s true! I’ve been thirty years in this territory, and I’ll admit it’s got me beat. You don’t know who to trust. The boy who brings you your coffee in the morning might just as easily whip out a knife instead of a teaspoon.’
More regulars drifted in, taking up their accustomed places at the bar, contributing their quota of news. Two men from the logging camp arrived, reporting all quiet after a tribal clash – Maulas against imported Basutu – and a threatened strike. Captain Crump put his head round the door, nodded in recognition once or twice, and withdrew again, intent on some private quest.
Then Forsdick, the District Commissioner, arrived, punctually on the stroke of twelve-fifteen, bringing a curious story of theft from his office – a theft involving nothing more valuable nor more lethal than two cartons of officially embossed envelopes. ‘Perhaps they’re going to write two thousand letters to the newspapers,’ he commented savagely – and as if to point the remark, a knot of Press correspondents entered, and settled themselves (as they now always did) at one of the far tables, well away from the bar.
They made an uncomfortable, alien element in the room, notwithstanding that they were already as familiar as characters in some minor classic – Tulbach Browne exuding an air of paternal pride in the Gamate story, Pikkie Joubert arguing about South African politics, Axel Hallmarck massaging his crew-cut hair, Clandestine Lebourget and Noblesse O’Toole looking over some tear sheets of photographs which had arrived by that morning’s mail.
Though they were now an essential part of the Gamate scene, there was no one who would not have rejoiced to see them go; and their physical distance from the fellowship of the bar indicated the fact, like a pointing arrow.
Fellows, returning red-faced from serving them, jerked back his head contemptuously. ‘Wish it was poison, instead of beer,’ he said, low-voiced. ‘I’d cheerfully swing for that lot, tomorrow morning.’
‘To hell with them!’ said Oosthuizen, whose capacity for alcohol (following a recent switch of allegiance from beer to brandy) was uncertain. ‘They’re not worth spitting on, man!’
‘They’re causing a lot of trouble, all the same,’ said Fellows. ‘You know that.’
‘The trouble’s here, anyway,’ countered Oosthuizen roughly. ‘If all that lot over there–’ he turned and gestured, not bothering to lower his voice, ‘–ran off home tomorrow, we’d still have trouble.’
Pikkie Joubert, who had looked up with the rest of the Pressmen as Oosthuizen spoke, called out in salutation: ‘Gooie moré, kerel!’
‘Bugger you!’ said Osthuizen, and turned back to the bar.
As he did so, a furious altercation broke out between Fellows and a Maula who had just entered by the service door. The latter was a post office messenger, a thick-browed, heavy-set youth with a telegram for one of the Press correspondents; he had come in, in all innocence, and started to walk from the bar to the corner table, before Fellows seized his arm and shoulder in a crude half-nelson and halted him. There was a brief struggle, an exchange of shouts and curses, and the young Maula left again, muttering, and nursing his wrist. Two of the Pressmen, who had been watching, simultaneously dodged out of the bar by the door nearest their table, hot-foot for an interview.
‘For God’s sake!’ said Llewellyn, shaking his head in dismay. ‘That was just one of the post office kids. He had a telegram. Didn’t you see it?’
‘I don’t care if he had a medal for the District Commissioner,’ said Fellows, breathing heavily. ‘No one comes into this bar, unless I say so. I’m only protecting you.’
‘He’s right,’ said Oosthuizen, nodding ponderously. ‘You can’t trust a single mother’s son, these days.’
‘If anyone does come in with a medal for me,’ observed Forsdick pacifyingly, ‘let them past, will you? I’ve been waiting a hell of a long time for it.’
The laughter dispersed the quarrelsome moment, but Llewellyn still brooded on it.
‘There you have Gamate, in a bloody nutshell,’ he said morosely. ‘A kid comes in with a telegram, and we all think we’re going to be murdered … When you remember what it used to be like, in the old days … Give me another pint, Ted – and anyone else who wants it.’
‘I agree that we can’t take any chances,’ said Forsdick, in his fruity official voice. ‘But it’s bloody difficult to know what to do.’
‘I know what I’m going to do,’ said Oosthuizen. He slapped the side pocket of his trousers, and they all heard the solid, metallic sound that met his hand. ‘No one is going to take me by surprise.’
‘You’ve got a gun?’ asked Fellows, looking up as he drew the beer.
‘Jah!’ answered Oosthuizen, with emphasis. ‘I’ve got a gun, and a bloody good one too, and I don’t mind who knows it!’
‘You want to be careful of that sort of thing,’ said Llewellyn warningly.
‘They want to be careful, man!’ said Oosthuizen. ‘Why should I be careful? I’ve got nothing on my conscience.’
It was the same all over the town – every man’s hand was against his neighbour’s, every white skin was a lordly enemy, every black skin was suspect, for the first time within living memory. The careful cherishing, of black by white, that had been the rule for many generations, was abandoned as too dangerous and too undeserved; in its place, a poisonous mistrust flourished, reaching its extreme form in many normal homes, where, when men and women sat down at table, they added, to the knives and forks and spoons, a new essential for the peaceful enjoyment of food – a revolver.
Now, when rioting spilled over into bloodshed, there were no truce lines, no margins of brotherhood, no pity. Men bled to death because to bend over a wounded man on the ground only invited a knife in one’s own back; corpses lay where they fell until daylight, and were then borne away, in savage resentment, or in contemptuous irritation at so menial a chore.
At the hospital, they worked as usual on the casualties, but it had become a half-hearted, cynical devotion; a Maula whose life one saved, after extreme effort, with great expense of drugs and stimulants and blood plasma, might well turn out to be one’s own executioner, a short week from the day of his deliverance.
Tribal management became a farce; there was no ‘management’ in any ordinary sense, simply a deadlock, with impotence on one side, mute indiscipline on the other.
For the Press, there was much to report; and it was all bad news, when honestly measured against the past. For white Government, there was nothing but frustration and peril. For the Maulas, whether good or bad, whether fearful or pricked to wild defiance, there was uncertainty, a pause on the brink of their allotted history.
Both sides – for now the division was mortally apparent – knew well that things could not go on like this; black and white alike, they were condemned to the grinding wheel of chance – its blind axis unknown, its spokes as long as dreams or death, its rim already dipped in blood.
It was against such a background that Andrew Macmillan, the Resident Commissioner, made his last appeal to the three Regents of the Maulas.