Luck at the Diamond Fields

by Dalrymple J. Belgrave

Luck—An Episode in a Digger’s Life.

There are few more hideous parts of the world than the country known as Griqualand West, celebrated, as the school books have it, for its diamonds. In that weary land the traveller may go on day by day outspanning at evening in just the same dreary waste of veldt in which he inspanned at morning, until he almost forgets that the world is not one endless series of rolling, burnt-up flats with ridges of table-topped hills in the distance, the last just like the one before it. Still there are spots on the banks of the Vaal River which runs through this territory that have a soft beauty of their own, all the more fascinating because of their contrast with the desert ugliness of the country—places where the traveller longs to settle down and live the rest of his days doing some slight work well paid by kind nature, forgetting the troublesome, distant world. Moonlight Rush is perhaps the fairest of these silent river nooks. There a wooded gulley, gay with flowering bushes, and shadowed by wide-spreading trees, runs down to the waters of the Vaal River. One can rest under the shade of those trees and forget how cruelly the sun beats down on the veldt, and as one looks at the Vaal, which flows at one’s feet in a noble reach, one no longer thinks of the arid discomfort of the plains. The place is quiet enough now, but once it had its day. The night it was rushed will be always remembered by those who came to seek their fortunes on the banks of the Vaal in the early days of diamond-digging. To this day men talk of how the news about the quantities of diamonds that had been found at a new place spread like wild-fire around the river camps, and how diggers, as soon as they heard it, snatched up their picks and shovels and rough provision for a meal or two, and left their camp fires, eager to get a claim in the new diggings, where they were at last to strike a fortune. Its history was like that of other river camps, only the diamonds found there at first were more plentiful, and are said to have been of better average quality; but they became fewer and fewer, and the diggers, party by party, either left for the new dry digging, which afterwards became the wonderful diamond mines of South Africa, or wandered away to other river camps. And at last the place was quite deserted, and the rock hares sported over the grass-grown claims, and the snakes, who had found the place too lively for them, sneaked back to make their homes in the ruined hovels put up by sanguine diggers who had believed in the future of Moonlight, and had shown their faith by plunging into building to the extent of houses built with boulders and thatched with rushes. Still, from time to time diggers, who had found well at Moonlight in its palmy days, or had heard of the wonderful stones which had been found there, came back to try their luck either in sorting the débris for the gems which the greedy diggers in those good flush times threw away in their haste, or in working the less promising ground which was left untouched. But since those old days no one had done much. Diggers had lingered on there, and persuaded themselves into believing in it because they liked the place; for the charm of nature has a strange influence over many a rough mind which knows little of culture or art jargon. But most of them, after working for months, had to tell the diggers’ oft-told tale of “we are not making tucker, let alone wages,” and had to drag their small stock-in-trade of tools off to some other digging, or had given up the river as a bad game, and had gone to work as overseers for wages in the mines.

One night, a year or two ago, there were only two tents there—almost hidden in the bushes by the river-bank. Though it was long past the time when men who have to work hard all day and to be up betimes are usually asleep, it was lit up. Its tenant was stretched across the tent on a mattress. By his side there were several tattered, well-read volumes—‘Vanity Fair,’ ‘Elia,’ some of Bret Harte’s books; and Whyte Melville’s ‘Bones and I,’ and in his hand he had a crumpled home letter. His name was Charlie Lumsden, and he was about thirty years old. For the last ten years, more or less, he had belonged to the noble army of diggers who are recruited from all classes of society, and form a distinct class of their own. He was also an English gentleman of good birth and gentle breeding, as any one would guess from a first glance at him, and be sure of after a few minutes’ conversation. He was not reading, though it was so late, but thinking, and had been thinking for some time, far more seriously than he often did. It was perhaps an orthodox occasion for a little self-retrospection, for it happened to be the last night of the old year. Charlie, by chance, for he had been living a solitary life in which men are apt to forget dates, had remembered this, and he was seeing the New Year in, as many a man may well do, thinking over the years of his life he had lived, and what he had managed to do with them. He has not much reason to be satisfied with the past, or to be over sanguine about the future. Where will he be this time next year, and what sort of a year will it be for him? he wonders. Well, pretty much the same as the last year or two. Last year he was at ‘Bad Hope,’ digging with his old chum, Jack Heathcote, who has just left him, and given up the off-chance of the river for the certainty of some pay in the Mounted Police. They were finding fairly well, but their finds melted away before the claim was worked out, at least most of them did, though there would have been something left if they had not been fools and had that spree at Kimberley Races. Last New Year’s Day he was up-country hunting for gold near the Crocodile River. He found pretty well too, and would not have done so badly if his mates had not gone down with fever. Maybe he will have another turn at it. After all, it wouldn’t much matter, he thinks, if next time he is tempted to trespass on Tom Tiddler’s ground fever should catch him, and keep him as it caught his chums. Yes, now he sees what a mess he has made of his life. Ten years before he had just left school, and was going up to Cambridge, where it was hoped that he would do wonders in the way of taking honours and getting fellowships. Now he was a digger, just like old David Miller who worked near him, though he was not half as good with a pick and shovel as the old man who could hardly read and write.

Then he remembered the year he had spent at Cambridge. Well, he had a jolly time enough there; but what a young fool he was to have run up all those ticks, and to have got into those scrapes, which when he looks back to them seem so childish. What a mistake he had made in living with the fast, noisy lot instead of the steady-going set, who were just as good fellows after all. How well he remembers that supper party which was so fatal to him. It had been in a rich fellow-commoner’s room, and a good many bottles had been emptied, and they were just ripe for mischief, when one of the party suggested the brilliant idea of having songs, and a camp fire on the college grass plot.

They had proceeded at once to carry out the suggestion; their host, who was placidly intoxicated, blandly approving, at the sacrifice of his household gods in defiance of college discipline, when it was proposed that his chairs should be used for firewood. The fire was lit, and the fun round it was fast and furious until the college tutor made his appearance, as he naturally did.

The dons were only too glad to make a clean sweep of the rowdy lot in the college, and about ten of them were sent down the next morning. Some of them got over their misfortune very easily. The man who suggested the bonfire is a popular preacher, and the giver of the supper party is a county member. Poor Charlie unfortunately was the earthern pot between the brazen ones, and that college row ended in his leaving England for South Africa, with his passage paid and fifty pounds in his pocket. Well, and he would have had a good chance on the fields if he had only been wise. What a lot of diamonds he used to get in that half-claim of his, in number five road. The other day it was sold for over ten thousand; but he had been sold up and had to let it go for a few hundreds after he struck a bad layer. He would have been able to have worked through the bad layer though if he had saved the money he made first, instead of throwing it away playing faro in those gambling saloons that were so fatal to many a digger’s fortunes.

After he sold his claim in the mine he lived the roving hand-to-mouth life of a river-digger, with very little capital beyond his pick and shovel, and his reputation with the store-keepers of being a straight man, who would always pay when he found. Not a bad life either he would think at any other time, for the Bohemianism of a digger is ingrained in him. He liked the free and easy life, the absence from restraint or dependence on any one else. But he was out of spirits. He had not found for months; he missed his old partner, and he had no boys working for him. In fact he would find it very difficult to pay them any wages if he had, so he can get through but very little work. That night, memories of the old days and his old life came crowding into his mind, and he longed to be in England again, and to see well-remembered places and faces.

The crumpled letter by his side was from home—from his sister in England. She told him that she had been staying at the little village in Somersetshire, where he once went with a reading party, and that she had met the parson’s daughter there, who had asked so much after him. How well he remembered that reading party. Does the message in his sister’s letter mean that she still cares for him? She has not married yet then. That boy and girl engagement was perfectly absurd of course, but he knows that they were quite in earnest while it lasted, and after all if he had taken his degree instead of being sent down in disgrace, they probably would have been married. For a minute or two he pictures himself as a staid curate or vicar dressed in decent black garment, instead of in moleskin and a flannel shirt—with a vicarage house to live in, instead of a tent.

Probably she got over it as easily as he did. He was broken-hearted when he got her sad little letter, saying that it must all come to an end, and that her father would not hear of it. He got over it wonderfully soon though. With his sea-sickness his love-trouble left him in the bay. She probably had got over it too, and could laugh at it as he did. But as he smokes and thinks, he realises how much happier his life might have been. How wanting it is in real happiness; why how long is it since he has spoken to any woman more refined than the barmaid of the Vaal Hotel? Should he ever shake the dust of Africa off his boots and go home, or should he be buried there as many a chum of his had been. It is no good going home dead beat to loaf on his relations; no, it would be better to stay in the country for ever, or to land without a sixpence in some other colony. What bad luck he has always had. The men who make money may say what they like, but it is almost all luck after all, he thinks, as he contrasts his position with that of many another man, just as thoughtless and reckless as he, who has made a fortune and gone home with it. Maybe the very next shovel full of gravel he washes may turn his luck, and he thinks of all the big diamonds that have at one time or the other been found down the river. “Bosh, what’s the use of thinking,” he said to himself as the end of the candle, which has been growing shorter and shorter, fell down to the bottom of the bottle into which he had stuck it, and he was left in the dark to knock out the ashes of his pipe and to curl himself up in his blanket.

It was still enough at Moonlight Rush, and in a few minutes he was asleep and dreaming a queer medley of English and Diamond-Field scenes. As he slept and dreamt he heard a cry for help, repeated again and again. At first it seemed to fit in with what he was dreaming about. But he heard it again after he woke up, and then he formed a pretty notion as to what it meant. “It’s poor old David come to grief,” he said to himself, as he sprang up and ran out of his tent.