This Was the Old Chief's Country (27 page)

And then she began talking about something else in her familiar, rather clowning manner.

It was at one of these swimming parties that the cat came out of the bag. Its presence had of course been suspected, and accorded the usual tolerance. In fact, the incident was not of importance because of his friends' reactions to it, but because of George's own reactions.

It was one very warm December morning with the rains due to break at any moment. All the farmers had their seed-beds full of tobacco ready to be planted out and their attention was less on the excellence of the food and drink and the attractions of the women, than on the sky, which was filled with heavy masses of dull cloud. Thunder rolled behind the kopjes, and the air was charged and tense. Under the bamboos round the pool, whose fronds hung without a quiver, people tended to be irritable because of the feeling of waiting; for the last few weeks before the season are a bad time in any country where rain is uncertain.

George was sitting dressed on a small rock: he always dressed immediately when he had finished bathing. The others were still half-naked. They had all lifted their heads and were looking with interested but non-committal expressions past him into the trees when he noticed the direction of their gaze, and turned himself to look. He gave a brief exclamation; then said, very deliberately: ‘Excuse me,' and rose. Everyone watched him walk across the garden, and through the creeper-draped rocks beyond to where a young native woman stood, hand on hips provocatively, swinging herself a little as if wishing to dance. Her eyes were lowered in the insolently demure manner of the native woman; and she kept them down while George came to a standstill in front of her and began to speak. They could not make out from his gestures, or from his face, what he was saying; but after a little while the girl looked sulky, shrugged, and then moved off again towards the compound, which could be seen through trees and past the shoulder of a big kopje, perhaps a mile away. She walked dragging her feet, and swinging her hands to loosely clutch at the grassheads: it was a beautiful exhibition of unwilling departure; that was the impression given, that this was not only how she felt, but how
she intended to show she felt. The long ambiguous look over her bare shoulder (she wore native-style dress, folded under the armpits) directed at the group of white people, could be interpreted in a variety of ways. No one chose to interpret it. No one spoke; and eyes were turned carefully to sky, trees, water or fingernails, when George returned. He looked at them briefly, without any hint of apology, then sat himself down again and reached for his glass. He took a swallow, and went on speaking where he had left off. They were quick to answer him; and in a moment conversation was general, though it was a conscious and controlled conversation: these people were behaving as if for the benefit of an invisible observer who was standing somewhere at a short distance and chuckling irresistibly as he called out: ‘Bravo! Well done!'

What they felt towards George – an irritation which was a reproach for not preserving appearances – was not allowed to appear in their manner The women, however, were noticeably acid; and George's acknowledgement of this was a faint smile, so diminishing of their self-respect that by that evening, when the party broke up (it would rain before midnight and they would all have to be up early for a day's hard planting), relations were as usual. In fact, George would be able to count on their saying, or implying: ‘Oh, George! Well, it is all very well for him, I suppose.'

But that did not end the matter for him. He was very angry. He summoned old Smoke to the house when the visitors had gone, and this showed how angry he was, for it was a rule of his never to disturb the labourers on a Sunday.

The girl was Smoke's daughter (or grand-daughter, George did not know), and the arrangement – George's attitude towards the thing forbade any other term – had come about naturally enough. The only time it had ever been mentioned between the two men was when shortly after the girl had set herself in George's path one evening when he was passing from swimming pool to house, Smoke had remarked, without reproach, but sternly enough, that a half-caste child would not be welcome among his people. George had replied with equal affability, that he gave his assurance there would be no child. The old man replied, half-sighing, that he understood the white
people had means at their disposal. There the thing had ended. The girl came to George's room when he sent for her, two or three times a week. She used to arrive when George's dinner was finished, and she left at sun-up, with a handful of small change. George kept a supply of sixpences and threepenny bits under his handkerchiefs, for he had noticed she preferred several small coins to one big one. This discrimination was the measure of his regard for her, of her needs and nature. He liked to please her in these little ways. For instance, recently, when he had gone into town and was down among the Kaffir-truck shops buying a supply of aprons for his houseboys, he had made a point of buying her a headcloth of a colour she particularly liked. And once, she had been ill, and he drove her himself to hospital. She was not afraid to come to him to ask for especial favours to her family. This had been going on for five years.

Now, when old Smoke came to the house, with the lowered eyes and troubled manner that showed he knew of the incident, George said simply that he wished the girl to be sent away, she was making trouble. Smoke sat cross-legged before George for some minutes before replying, looking at the ground. George had time to notice that he was getting a very old man indeed. He had a shrunken, simian appearance; even the flesh over his skull was crinkled under the dabs of white wool; his face was withered to the bone; and his small eyes peered with difficulty. At last he spoke, and his voice was resigned and trembling: ‘Perhaps the Little Baas could speak to the girl? She will not do it again.'

But George was not taking the chance of it happening again.

‘She is my child,' pleaded the old man.

George, suddenly irritable, said: ‘I cannot have this sort of thing happening. She is a very foolish girl.'

‘I understand, baas, I understand. She is certainly a foolish girl. But she is also young, and my child.' But even this last appeal, spoken in the old wheezy voice, did not move George.

It was finally arranged that George should pay the expenses of the girl at mission school, some fifty miles off. He would not seeher before she left, though she hung about the back steps for days. She even attempted to get into his bedroom the night
before she was to set off, accompanied by one of her brothers for escort, for the long walk to her new home. But George had locked his door. There was nothing to be said. In a way he blamed himself. He felt he might have encouraged the girl: one did not know, for example, how the matter of the headcloth might rearrange itself in a primitive woman's mind. He had been responsible, at any rate, for acting in a way that had ‘put ideas into her head'. That appearance of hers at the swimming pool had been an act of defiance, a deliberate claiming of him, a provocation, whose implications appalled him. They appalled him precisely because the thing could never have happened if he had not treated her faultily.

During the week after she left, one evening, before going to bed, he suddenly caught the picture of the London girl off his dressing-table, and tossed it into a cupboard. He was thinking of old Smoke's daughter – grand-daughter, perhaps – with an uncomfortable aching of the flesh, for some weeks before another girl presented herself for his notice.

He had been waiting for this to happen; for he had no intention of incurring old Smoke's reproach by enticing a woman to him.

He was sitting on his veranda one night, smoking, his legs propped on the veranda wall, gazing at the great yellow moon that was rising over a long wooded spur to one side of the house, when a furtive, softly-gliding shape entered the corner of his vision. He sat perfectly still, puffing his pipe, while she came up the steps, and across the patch of light from the lamp inside. For a moment he could have sworn it was the same girl, but she was younger, much younger, not more than about sixteen. She was naked above the waist, for his inspection, and she wore a string of blue beads around her neck.

This time, in order to be sure of starting on the right basis, he pulled out a handful of small coins and laid them on the veranda wall before him. Without raising her eyes, the girl leaned over sideways, picked them up, and caused them to disappear in the folds of her skirt. An hour later she was turned out of the house, and the doors were locked for the night. She wept and pleaded to be allowed to stay till the first light came (as the other girl had always done) for she was afraid to go
home by herself through the dark bush that was full of beasts and ghosts and the ancient terrors that were her birthright. George replied simply that if she came at all, she must resign herself to leaving when the business of the occasion was at an end. He remembered the nights with the other one, which had been spent wrapped close in each other's arms –
that
was where he had made his mistake, perhaps? In any case, it was not going to be allowed to happen again.

This girl wept pitifully the first night, and even more violently the second. George suggested that one of her brothers should come for her. She was shocked at the idea, so shocked that he understood things were with her as with him: the thing was permissible provided it was possible decently to ignore it. But she was sent home; and George did not allow himself to picture her gliding through the dark shadows of the moonlit path and whimpering with fear, as she had done in his arms before leaving him.

At their next weekly palaver, George waited for Smoke to speak, for he knew that he would. It was with a conscious determination not to show guilt (a reaction which surprised and annoyed him) that George watched the old man dismiss the nephew, wait for him to get well on his way on the path to the compound, and turn back to face him, in appeal. ‘Little Baas,' he said, ‘there are things that need not be said between us.' George did not answer. ‘Little Baas, it is time that you took a wife from your own people.'

George replied: ‘The girl came to me, of her own accord.'

Smoke said, as if it were an insult that he was forced to say such an obvious thing: ‘If you had a wife, she would not have come.' The old man was deeply troubled; far more so than George had expected. For a while he did not answer. Then he said: ‘I shall pay her well.' It seemed to him that he was speaking in that spirit of honesty that was in everything he said, or did, with this man who had been the friend of his father, and was his own good friend. He could not have said anything he did not feel. ‘I'm paying her well; and will see that she is looked after. I am paying well for the other one.'

‘Aie, aie,' sighed the old man, openly reproachful now, ‘this is not good for our women, baas. Who will want to marry her?'

George moved uncomfortably in his chair. ‘They both came to me, didn't they? I didn't go running after them.' But he stopped. Smoke so clearly considered this argument irrelevant that he could not pursue it, even though he himself considered it valid. If he had gone searching for a woman among those at the compound, he would have felt himself responsible. That old Smoke did not see things in this light made him angry.

‘Young girls,' said Smoke reproachfully, ‘you know how they are.' Again there was more than reproach. In the feeble ancient eyes there was a deeper trouble. He could not look straight at George. His gaze wavered this way and that, over George's face, away to the mountains, down to the valley, and his hands were plucking at his garments.

George smiled, with determined cheerfulness: ‘And young men, don't you make allowances for them?'

Smoke suddenly flashed into anger: ‘Young men, little boys, one expects nonsense from them. But you, baas, you – you should be married, baas. You should have grown children of your own, not spoiling mine …' the tears were running down his face. He scrambled to his feet with difficulty, and said, very dignified: ‘I do not wish to quarrel with the son of my old friend, the Old Baas. I ask you to think, only, Little Baas. These girls, what happens to them? You have sent the other one to the mission school, but how long will she stay? She has been used to your money and to … she has been used to her own way. She will go into the town and become one of the loose women. No decent man will have her. She will get herself a town husband, and then another, and another. And now there is this one …' He was now grumbling, querulous, pathetic. His dignity could not withstand the weight of his grief. ‘And now this one, this one! You, Little Baas, that you should take this woman …' A very old, tottering scarecrow man, he swayed off down the path.

For a moment George was impelled to call him back, for it was the first time one of their palavers had ended in unkindness, without courteous exchange in the old manner. But he watched the old man move uncertainly past the swimming pool through the garden, along the rockeries, and out of sight. He was feeling uncomfortable and irritated, but at the same time he
was puzzled. There was a discrepancy between what had happened and what he had expected that he felt now as a sharp intrusion – turning over the scene in his mind, he knew there was something that did not fit. It was the old man's emotion. Over the first girl reproach could be gathered from his manner but a reproach that was fatalistic, and related not to George himself but rather to circumstances, some view of life George could not be expected to share. It had been an impersonal grief, a grief against life. This was different; Smoke had been accusing him, George, directly. It had been like an accusation of disloyalty. Reconstructing what had been said, George fastened upon the recurring words: ‘wife' and ‘husband'; and suddenly an idea entered George's head that was intolerable. It was so ugly that he rejected it and cast about for something else. But he could not refuse it for long; it crept back, and took possession of him, for it made sense of everything that had happened: a few months before old Smoke had taken to himself a new young wife.