The covenant - James A. Michener [395]
When the ship docked at Port Elizabeth, Frank headed immediately north for his family's farm, and he supposed that he would never again see C. J. Rhodes, but one afternoon as he and his parents sat at tea on a veranda overlooking the pastures and the stream, a dusty cart clattered up to the gate, and Mr. Rhodes strode up to the porch. After the most perfunctory acknowledgment of Frank's parents, he asked bluntly, 'Well, Saltwood, are you prepared to come with me?'
'I haven't really . . .'
'You're not mooning about the law, are you? With so much work to be done?'
Frank tried to avoid a harsh answer that would send Mr. Rhodes away permanently, and once he vacillated, Rhodes sprang at him like a tiger: 'Good! We're off to Kimberley in the morning.' Only then did he bother with the older Saltwoods: 'I'll watch over him. He'll be at the heart of things, and when you next see him he'll be a man.'
The next day they drove to Graaff-Reinet, where they caught the stagecoach to Kimberley, whose violent activity was bewildering. Frank would never forget his first sight of the diamond mines, for as he wrote to his mother, they were like nothing else on earth:
Each prospector is entitled to a square of precious land, thirty-one feet to a side, but of this land he must leave a narrow path for others to use. Since Miner A had dug his plot forty feet down, and Miner B twenty feet, poor Miner C who has not dug at all finds himself atop a square with such precipitous sides that any fall is fatal. Also, at night irresponsible men cut underneath the footpaths, causing them to collapse. All is chaos.
But what catches the eye is a massive nest of cobwebs which looks as if ten thousand Arachnes had been spinning. They are the wires and ropes leading from the edge of the mine down to each of the individual holdings. On them buckets are drawn up, bearing the diamantiferous soil, and this immense tangle of lines, the buckets rising and falling are the signs of a diamond mine at Kimberley.
It is Mr. Rhodes' fervent hope that he can bring some order into this madness, and to this end he has quietly been buying up plots here and there, endeavoring to consolidate them into some kind of reasonable concentration. If he can do so, he will command the industry and will become even more rich and powerful than he now is. It is my job to cut down to the same level all the contiguous plots he acquires, and I am finding many diamonds in the soil left for the footpaths. But for the moment the chaos continues, with one block fifty feet up in the air, the one beside it fifty feet down, and no order anywhere except in those areas he controls. It is a race between reason and anarchy, and he assures me that where men of good sense are concerned, reason always wins. He intends to.
Frank did not tell his mother what might have been the two most interesting bits of information. In the cottage occupied by Mr. Rhodes just as much chaos reigned as in the mines; a tin-roofed affair, it was Spartan-like, with not a single adornment to grace it, clothes pitched everywhere, dishes unwashed and furniture about to collapse. No woman was ever allowed in the house, which Rhodes shared with a gifted, sickly young man a few years younger than he. Frank found that he wasn't the only one in his early twenties selected to advance Mr. Rhodes' many interests; a squad of bright, eager recruits submerged their personal interests in those of this dreamer who visualized a Union Jack over every territory from the Cape to Cairo.
He invariably called his young men by their first names: Neville, Sandys, Percival, Bob, Johnny, and often he encouraged them to engage in hearty pranks, as if they were in grammar school. They were free to entertain such women as they could find in the diamond town, but there was an unwritten law that ladies were to be flirted with, and perhaps frolicked with, but quickly forgotten. Far greater things were in store for 'my young gentlemen,' as he referred to them, and like Shaka, he wanted his regiments to keep their hearts on the great