This Was the Old Chief's Country (49 page)

Maggie whispered to Paul. He jumped up, relieved to get away, and went to the kitchen and soon returned with a tray of tea. Maggie poured out a big cup, sugared it heavily and handed it to Alec. Those blue lips worried her. He put it at his
side, but she took it again and held it in front of him and he drank it off, rather impatiently. It was that impatient movement which reassured her. He was now sitting more easily and his face was flushed. ‘I can't understand it,' he said again, in an aggrieved voice, and Maggie understood that the worst was over. She was aching with pity for him and for Paul, who was pretending to read. She could see how badly the disappointment had gripped him. But he was only a child she thought; he would get over it.

‘Perhaps we should go to bed,' she suggested, in a small voice; but Alec said: ‘That means …' he paused, then thought for a moment and said: ‘I must have been wrong over – all this time I've been over-estimating the amount in a sample. I thought that was going ounces to the ton. And it means that my theory about the copper was …' He sat leaning forward, arms hanging loosely before him; then he jumped up, strode through to his office and returned with a divining wire. She saw it was one of the old ones, a plain iron rod. ‘Have you anything gold about you?' he asked, impatiently.

She handed him a brooch her mother had given her. He took it and went towards the veranda. ‘Alec,' she protested. ‘Not tonight.' But he was already outside. Paul put down his book and smiled ruefully at her. She smiled back. She did not have to tell him to forget all the wild-goose daydreams. Life would seem flat and grey for a while, but not for long – that was what she wanted to say to him; she would have liked, too, to add a little lecture about working for what one wanted in life, and not to trust to luck; but the words stuck. ‘Get yourself to bed,' she suggested; but he shook his head and handed her his cup for more tea. He was looking out at the moonlight, where a black, restless shape could be seen passing backwards and forwards.

She went quietly to a window and looked out, shielding herself with a curtain, as though she felt ashamed of this anxious supervision which Alec would most certainly resent if he knew. But he did not notice. The moon shone monotonously down, it looked like a polished silver sixpence; and Alec's shadow jerked and lengthened over the rough ground as he walked up and down with his divining rod. Sometimes he stopped and stood thinking. She went back to sit by Paul. She
slipped an arm around him, and so they remained for a time, thinking of the man outside. Later she went to the window again, and this time beckoned to Paul and he stood with her, silently watching Alec.

‘He's a very brave man,' she found herself saying, in a choked voice; for she found that determined figure in the moonlight unbearably pathetic. Paul felt awkward because of her emotion, and looked down when she insisted: ‘Your father's a very brave man and don't you ever forget it.' His embarrassment sent him off to bed. He could not stand her emotion as well as his own.

Afterwards she understood that her pity for Alec was a false feeling – he did not need pity. It flashed through her mind, too – though she suppressed the thought – that words like brave were as false.

Until the moon slid down behind the house and the veld went dark, Alec remained pacing the patch of ground before the house. At last he came morosely to bed, but without the look of exposed and pitiful fear she had learned to dread: he was safe in the orderly inner world he had built for himself. She heard him remark from the bed on the other side of the room where he was sitting smoking in the dark: ‘If that reef outside the front door is what I think it is, then I've found where I was wrong. Quite a silly little mistake, really.'

Cautiously she enquired: ‘Are you going on with that shaft?'

‘I'll see in the morning. I'll just check up on my new idea first.' They exchanged a few remarks of this kind; and then he crushed out his cigarette and lay down. He slept immediately; but she lay awake, thinking drearily of Paul's future.

In the morning Alec went straight off down to his shaft, while Paul forced himself to go and interview the bossboys about the farmwork. Maggie was planning a straight talk with the boy about his school, but his present mood frightened her. Several times he said, scornfully, just as if he had not himself been intoxicated: ‘Father's crazy. He's got no sense left.' He laughed in an arrogant, half-ashamed way; and she controlled her anger at this youthful unfairness. She was tired, and afraid of her own irritability, which these days seemed to explode in the middle of the most trifling arguments. She did not want to
be irritable with Paul because, when this happened, he treated her tolerantly, as a grown man would, and did not take her seriously. She waited days before the opportunity came, and then the discussion went badly after all.

‘Why do you want me to be different, mother?' he asked, sullenly, when she insisted he should study for a scholarship. ‘You and father were just like everybody else, but I've got to be something high and mighty.' Maggie already found herself growing angry. She said, as her mother might have done: ‘Everybody has the duty to better themselves and get on. If you try you can be anything you like.' The boy's face was set against her. There was something in the air of this country which had formed him that made the other, older voice seem like an anachronism. Maggie persisted: ‘Your great-grandparents were small farmers. They rented their land from a lord. But they saved enough to give your grandfather fifty pounds to take to the city. He got his own shop by working for it. Your father was just an ordinary clerk, but he took his opportunities and made his way here. But you see no shame in accepting a nobody's job, wherever someone's kind enough to offer it to you.' He seemed embarrassed, and finally remarked: ‘All that class business doesn't mean anything out here. Besides, my father's a small farmer, just like his grandparents. I don't see what's so new about that.' At this, as if his words had released a spring marked
anger
,
she snapped out: ‘So, if that's what you are, the way you look at things, it's a waste of time even …' She checked herself, but it was too late. Her loss of control had ended the contact between them. Afterwards she wondered if perhaps he was right. In a way, the wheel had come the circle: the difference between that old Scotsman and Alec was that one worked his land with his own hands; he was limited only by his own capacities; while the other worked through a large labour-force: he was as much a slave to his ill-fed, backward, and sullen labourers as they were to him. Well then, and if this were true, and Paul could see it as clearly as she did, why could he not decide to break the circle and join the men who had power because they had knowledge: the free men, that was how she saw them. Knowledge freed a man; and to that belief she clung, because it was her nature; and she was to grieve all
her life because such a simple and obvious truth was not simple for Paul.

Some days later she said, tartly, to Paul: ‘If you're not going back to school, then you might as well put your mind to the farmwork.' He replied that he was trying to; to her impatience he answered with an appeal: ‘It's difficult, mother. Everything's in such a mess. I don't know where to start. I haven't the experience.' Maggie tried hard to control that demon of disappointment and anger in her that made her hard, unsympathetic; but her voice was dry: ‘You'll get experience by working.'

And so Paul went to his father. He suggested, practically, that Alec should spend a month (‘only a month, Dad, it's not so long') showing him the important things. Alec agreed, but Paul could see, as they went from plough to wagon, field to grazing land, that Alec's thoughts were not with him. He would ask a question, and Alec did not hear. And at the end of three days he gave it up. The boy was seething with frustration and misery. ‘What do they expect me to do?' he kept muttering to himself, ‘what do they want?' His mother was like a cold wall; she would not love him unless he became a college boy; his father was amiably uninterested. He took himself off to neighbouring farmers. They were kind, for everyone was sorry for him. But after a week or so of listening to advice, he was more dismayed than before. ‘You'd better do something about your soil, lad,' they said. ‘Your Dad's worked it out.' Or: ‘The first thing is to plant trees, the wind'll blow what soil there is away unless you do something quickly.' Or: ‘That big vlei of yours: do you know it was dry a month before the rains last year? Your father has ploughed up the catchment area; you'd better sink some wells quickly.' It meant a complete reorganization. He could do it, of course, but … the truth was he had not the heart to do it, when no one was interested in him. They just don't care, he said to himself; and after a few weeks of desultory work he took himself off to James, his adopted father. Part of the day he would spend on the lands, just to keep things going, and then he drifted over to the mine.

James was a big, gaunt man, with a broad and bony face. Small grey eyes looked steadily from deep sockets, his mouth was hard. He stood loosely, bending from the shoulders, and
his hands swung loose beside him so that there was something of a gorilla-look about him. Strength – that was the impression he gave, and that was what Paul found in him. And yet there was also a hesitancy, a moment of indecision before he moved or spoke, and a sardonic note in his drawl – it was strength on the defensive, a watchful and precarious strength. He smoked heavily, rough cigarettes he rolled for himself between yellow-stained fingers; and regularly drank just a little too much. He would get really drunk several times a year, but between these indulgences kept to his three whiskies at sundown. He would toss these back, standing, one after another, when he came in from work; and then give the bottle a long look, a malevolent look, and put it away where he could not see it. Then he took his dinner, without pleasure, to feed the drink; and immediately went to bed. Once Paul found him at a week-end lying sodden and asleep sprawled over the table, and he was sickened; but afterwards James was simple and kindly as always; nor did he apologize, but took it as a matter of course that a man needed to drink himself blind from time to time. This, oddly enough, reassured the boy. His own father never drank, and Maggie had a puritan horror of it; though she would offer visitors a drink from politeness. It was a problem that had never touched him; and now it was presented crudely to him and seemed no problem at all.

He asked questions about James's life. James would give him that shrewd, slow look, hesitate a little and then in a rather tired voice, as if talking were disagreeable, answer the boy's clumsy questions. He was always very patient with Paul; but behind the good-natured patience was another emotion, like a restrained cruelty; it was not a personal cruelty, directed against Paul, but the self-punishment of fatalism, in which Paul was included.

James's mother was Afrikaans and his father English. He had the practicality, the humour, the good sense of his mother's people, and the inverted and tongue-tied poetry of the English, which expressed itself in just that angry fatalism and perhaps also in the drink. He had been raised in a suburb of Johannesburg, and went early to the mines. He spoke of that city with a mixture of loathing and fascination, so that to Paul it became
an epitome of all the great and glamorous cities of the world. But even while Paul was dreaming of its delights he would hear James drawl: ‘I got out of it in time, I had that much sense.' And though he did not want to have his dream darkened, he had to listen: ‘When you first go down, you get paid like a prince and the world's your oyster. Then you get married and tie yourself up with a houseful of furniture on the hire-purchase and a house under a mortgage. Your car's your own, and you exchange it for a new one every year. It's a hell of a life, money pouring in and money pouring out, and your wife loves you, and everything's fine, parties and a good time for one and all. And then your best friend finds his chest is giving him trouble and he goes to the doctor, and then suddenly you find he's dropped out of the crowd; he's on half the money and all the bills to pay. His wife finds it no fun and off she goes with someone else. Then you discover it's not just one of your friends, but half the men you know are in just that position, crooks at thirty and owning nothing but the car, and they soon sell that to pay alimony. You find you drink too much – there's something on your mind, as you might say. Then, if you've got sense, you walk out while the going's good. If not, you think: It can't happen to me, and you stay on.' He allowed a minute to pass while he looked at the boy to see how much had sunk in. Then he repeated, firmly: ‘That's not just my story, son, take it from me. It's happened to hundreds.'

Paul thought it over and said: ‘But you didn't have a wife?'

‘Oh, yes, I had a wife all right,' said James, grim and humorous. ‘I had a fine wife, but only while I was underground raking in the shekels. When I decided it wasn't good enough and I wanted to save my lungs, and I went on surface work at less money, she transferred to one of the can't-happen-to-me boys. She left him when the doctor told him he was fit for the scrapheap, and then she used her brains and married a man on the stock exchange.'

Paul was silent, because this bitter note against women was not confirmed by what he felt about his mother. ‘Do you ever want to go back?' he asked.

‘Sometimes,' conceded James, grudgingly, ‘Johannesburg's a mad house, but it's got something – but when I get the
hankering I remember I'm still alive and kicking when my crowd's mostly dead or put out to grass.' He was speaking of the city as men do of the sea, or travel, or of drugs; and it gripped Paul's imagination. But James looked sharply at him and said: ‘Hey, sonnie, if you've got any ideas about going south to the golden city, then think again. You don't want to get any ideas about getting rich quick. If you want to mix yourself up in that racket, then you buy yourself an education and stay on the surface bossing the others, and not underground being bossed. You take it from me, son.'