Rage - Smith Wilbur (читать книги онлайн без сокращений .TXT) 📗
As he drew the cork on the bottle of Chambertin, he told her, 'I've put four days aside for us. In the last few weeks I have been fortunate enough to get my hands on fifty thousand acres of land across the Sabi river from the Kruger National Park. I've been after it for fifteen years. It belonged to the widow of one of the old Randlords and I had to wait for the old biddy to cross the great divide before it came on the market. It's marvelous unspoilt bush country, teeming with wild game, perfect place for a lost weekend, we'll fly down after breakfast tomorrow - nobody will know where we are." She laughed at him. 'You are out of your little mind, lover. I'm a working girl. At eleven o'clock tomorrow I've got an interview with the leader of the opposition, De Villiers Graaff, and I'm certainly not breezing off into the boondocks with you to stare at lions and tigers." 'No tigers in Africa - you are the African expert, you should know that." He was angry again. 'It's a case of false pretences. You got me all the way up here for nothing,' he accused.
'Nothing?" she chuckled again. 'You call that nothing?" 'I expected four days of it." 'You overestimate the going price for an interview. All you get is the rest of the night, and then tomorrow it's back to work - for both of us." She was getting under his guard too often, Shasa realized. Last time he had proposed marriage to her, and the idea still had its appeal. She had moved him the way no woman had since he had first met Tara. It was partly her unattainability that made her so desirable. Shasa was accustomed to getting what he wanted, even if it was a hard and heartless little vixen with a childlike face and body.
He watched her eat the rare steak with the same sensual gusto as she made love. She was sitting cross-legged on the front edge of her chair and the hem of her dressing-gown had ridden up high on her thighs. She saw the direction of his gaze but made no effort to cover herself.
'Eat up,' she grinned at him. 'One thing at a time, lover." Shasa was chary of Tara's offer to assist his election campaign, and for the first two meetings left her at Weltevreden and drove out alone over Sir Lowry's Pass and the mountains.
South Boland, his new constituency, was an area of rich land, between the mountains and the sea, on the Cape's eastern littoral.
The voters were almost entirely of Afrikaner extraction, and their families had held the land for three hundred years. They were wealthy farmers of wheat and sheep, Calvinist and conservative, but not as rabidly republican and anti-English as their cousins of the interior, the Free Staters and the Transvalers.
They received Shasa's first speeches with caution, and applauded him politely at the end. His opponent, the United Party candidate, was a blood Smuts man, like Blaine, who had been the incumbent until 1948 when he lost it to the Nationalists. Yet he still had a base of support in the district amongst the men who had known Smuts and had gone 'up north' to fight the Axis.
After Shasa's second meeting, the local Nationalist organizers were looking worried and scared.
'We are losing ground,' one of them told Shasa. 'The wives are suspicious of a man who campaigns without his own wife. They want to have a look at her.?
'You see, Meener Courtney, you are a bit too good-looking. It's okay for the younger women who think you look like Errol Flynn, but the older women don't like it, and the men don't like the way the young women look at you. We have to show them you are a family man." Tll bring my wife,' Shasa promised, but his spirits sank. What kind of impression would Tara create in this dour God-fearing community where many of the women still wore the voortrekker bonnets and the men believed a woman's place was either in the bed or in the kitchen?
'Another thing,' the chief party organizer went on tactfully. 'We need one of the top men, one of the cabinet ministers to stand up on the platform with you. You see, Meneer Courtney, the people are having difficulty believing that you are a ware Nationalist. What with the English name and your family history." 'We need somebody to make me look respectable, you mean?" Shasa hid his smile, and they all looked relieved.
'Ja, man! That's it!" 'What if I could get Minister De La Rey to come out for the meeting on Friday - and my wife, of course?" 'Hell, man!" they enthused. 'Minister De La Rey is perfect. The people like the way he handled the trouble. He is a good strong man. If you get him to come to talk to them, we'll have no more problems." Tara accepted the invitation without comment, and by an exercise J--elfxest, raknt.-Shoe, a..r-ofr.ed.Cca giiag-lcr-advice On how to dress or to conduct herself, and was delighted and grateful when she came on to the platform in the town hall of the little town of Caledon, dressed in a sober dark blue dress with her thick auburn hair neatly gathered into a bun behind her head.
Though pretty and smiling she was the picture of the good wife.
Isabella sat up beside her with knee-length white socks and ribbons in her hair. A born actress, Isabella responded to the occasion by behaving like a candidate for holy orders. Shasa saw the organizers exchanging approving nods and relieved smiles.
Minister De La Rey, supported by his own blonde wife and large family, introduced Shasa with a fiery speech in which he made it very clear that the Nationalist government was not going to allow itself to be dictated to by foreign governments or communist agitators, especially not if these agitators were black as well as communist.
Manfred had a finely tuned style of oratory, and he thrust out his jaw and flashed those topaz-coloured eyes, he wagged his finger at them, and stood with arms defiantly akimbo when they stood up to applaud him at the end.
Shasa's style was different, relaxed and friendly, and when he tried his first joke, they responded with genuine amusement. He followed it with assurances that the government would increase the already generous subsidy for farm products, especially wool and wheat, and that they would at the same time foster local industry and explore new overseas markets for the country's raw materials, particularly wool and wheat. He ended by telling them that many English speakers were coming to realize that the salvation of the country lay in strong uncompromising government and predicted a substantial increase in the Nationalist majority.
This time there was no reservation in the tumultuous applause that followed his speech, and the votes of confidence in the government, the National Party and the Nationalist candidate for South Boland were all carried unanimously. The entire district, including the United Party supporters, turned up for the free barbecue on the local rugby grounds, to which Shasa invited them. Two whole oxen were roasted on the spit and were washed down with lakes of Castle beer and rivers of mampoer, the local peach brandy.
Tara sat with the women, looking meek and demure and speakiJ little, allowing the older women to develop pleasantly matern feelings towards her, while Shasa circulated amongst their husband talking knowledgeably about such momentous subjects as scale ( wheat and scab on sheep. The whole atmosphere was cosy and reassu ing, and for the first time Shasa was able to appreciate the depth planning by the party organizers, their dedication and commitmel to the Nationalist cause, which resulted in this degree of mobilizatio of all its resources. The United Party could never match it, for tk English speakers were complacent and lethargic when it came t politics. It was the old English fault of wanting never to appear t try too hard. Politics was a kind of sport and every gentleman kne that sport should be played only by amateurs.
'No wonder we lost control,' Shasa thought. 'These chaps or professionals, and we just couldn't match them' - and then he checke himself. These were his organizers now, no longer the enemy. H had become a part of this slick, highly tuned political machine, am the knowledge was a little daunting.
