George’s first worry was whether he would get sufficient native labour; but he had expected an anxious time, and, knowing the ropes, he sat tight, built his house, sank his borehole and studied his land. A few natives did come, but they were casual labourers, and were not what he was waiting for. He was more troubled, perhaps, than he let himself know. It is so easy to get a bad name as an employer. A justly dismissed man can spitefully slash a tree on the boundary of a farm where the migrating natives walk, in such a way that they read in the pattern of the gashes on the bark: This is a bad farm with a bad master. Or there may be a native in the compound who frightens or tyrannizes over the others, so that they slowly leave, with excuses, for other farms, while the farmer himself never finds out what is wrong. There can be a dozen reasons why a fair man, just to his natives according to the customs of the time, can get a bad name without ever knowing the reason for it.
George knew this particular trouble was behind him when one day he saw coming up the road to his front door an old native who had worked many years for his own father. He waited on the steps, smoking comfortably, smiling his greeting.
‘Morning,’ he said.
‘Morning, baas.’
‘Things go well with you, old Smoke?’
‘Things go well, baas.’
George tapped out his pipe, and motioned to the old man to seat himself. The band of young men who had followed Smoke along the road were waiting under some trees at a short distance for the palaver to finish. George could see they had come a long way for they were dusty, weary with the weight of their big bundles. But they looked a strong lot and good for work, and George settled himself in the big chair he used for audiences with satisfaction growing in him.
‘You have come a long way?’ he asked.
‘A long way, baas. I heard the Little Baas had come back from the war and was wanting me. I have come to the Little Baas.’
George smiled affectionately at old Smoke, who looked not a day older now than he had ten years, or even twenty years back, when he had lifted the small boy for rides on the mealie wagon, or carried him, when he was tired, on his back. He seemed always to have been a very old man, with grizzling hair and filming eyes but as light and strong and erect as a youth.
‘How did you know I had come back?’
‘One of my brothers told me.’
George smiled again, acknowledging that this was all he would ever be told of the mysterious way the message had travelled from mouth to mouth across hundreds of miles. ‘You will send messages to all your brothers to work for me? I need a great many boys.’
‘I have brought twenty. Later, others will come. I have other relations coming after the rains from Nyasaland.’
‘You will be my bossboy, Smoke? I need a bossboy.’
‘I am too old, much too old, baas.’
‘Do you know how old you are?’ asked George, knowing he would get no satisfactory answer, for natives of Smoke’s generation had no way of measuring their age.
‘How should I know, baas? Perhaps fifty. Perhaps a hundred. I remember the days of the fighting well, I was a young man.’ He paused, and added carefully, having averted his eyes: ‘Better we do not remember those days, perhaps.’
The two men laughed, after a moment during which their great liking for each other had time to take the unpleasantness from the reminder of war. ‘But I need a bossboy,’ repeated George. ‘Until I find a younger man as capable as you are, will you help me?’
‘But I am too old,’ protested Smoke again, his eyes brightening.
Thus it was settled, and George knew his labour troubles were over. Smoke’s brothers would soon fill his compound. It must be explained that relationships, among Africans, are not understood as they are among white people. A native can travel a thousand miles in strange country, and find his clan brothers in every village, and be made welcome by them.
George allowed these people a full week to build themselves a village and another week as earnest of good feeling. Then he pulled the reins tight and expected hard work. He got it. Smoke was too old to work hard himself; also he was something of an old rascal with his drinking and his women – he had got his name because he smoked dagga, which bleared his eyes and set his hands shaking – but he held the obedience of the younger men, and because of this was worth any amount of money to George.
Later, a second man was chosen to act as bossboy under Smoke. He was a nephew, and he supervised the gangs of natives, but it was understood that Smoke was the real chief. When George held his weekly palavers to discuss farm matters, the two men came up from the compound together, and the younger man (who had in fact done the actual hard work) deferred to the older. George brought a chair from the house to the foot of the great flight of stone steps that led up to the living-rooms, and sat there at ease smoking, while Smoke sat cross-legged on the ground before him. The nephew stood behind his uncle, and his standing was not so much an act of deference to George – though of course it was that too – as respect for his tribal superior. (This was in the early ’twenties, when a more gentle, almost feudal relationship was possible between good masters and their servants: there was space, then, for courtesy; bitterness had not yet crowded out affection.)
During these weekly talks it was not only farm matters that were discussed, but personal ones also. There was always a short pause when crops, weather, plans, had been finished; then Smoke turned to the young man behind him.and spoke a few dismissing words. The young man said, ‘Good night, baas,’ to George, and went away.
George and Smoke were then free to talk about things like the head driver’s quarrels with his new wife, or how Smoke himself was thinking of taking a young wife. George would laugh and say: ‘You old rascal. What do you want with a wife at your age?’ And Smoke would reply that an old man needed a young body for warmth during the cold weather.
Nor was old Smoke afraid of becoming stern, though reproachful, as if he momentarily regarded himself as George’s father, when he said: ‘Little Baas, it is time you got married. It is time there was a woman on this farm.’ And George would laugh and reply that he certainly agreed he should get married, but that he could find no woman to suit him.
Once Smoke suggested: ‘The baas will perhaps fetch himself a wife from England?’ And George knew then that it was discussed in the compound how he had a photograph of a girl on his dressing-table: old Smoke’s son was cookboy in George’s house.
The girl had been his fiancée for a week or so during the war, but the engagement was broken off after one of those practical dissecting discussions that can dissolve a certain kind of love like mist. She was a London girl, who liked her life, with no desire for anything different. There was no bitterness left after the affair; at least not against each other. George remained with a small bewildered anger against himself. He was a man, after all, who liked things in their proper place. It was the engagement he could not forgive himself for: he had been temporarily mad; it was that he could not bear to think of. But he remembered the girl sometimes with an affectionate sensuality. She had married and was living the kind of life he could not imagine any sane person choosing. Why he kept her picture – which was a very artificial posed affair – he did not ask himself. For he had cared for other women more, in his violent intermittent fashion.
However, there was her picture in his room, and it was seen not only by the cookboy and the houseboys but by the rare visitors to the house. There was a rumour in the district that George had a broken heart over a woman in England; and this explanation did as well as any other for George’s cheerful but determined self-isolation, for there are some people the word loneliness can never be made to fit. George was alone, and seemed not to know it. What surprised people was that the frame of his life was so much larger than he needed, and for what he was. The three large rooms had been expanded, after a few years, into a dozen. It was the finest house for many miles. Outhouses, storehouses, washhouses and poultry yards spread about the place, and he had lai
d out a garden, and paid two boys handsomely to keep it beautiful. He had scooped out the soil between a cluster of boulders, and built a fine natural swimming pool over which bamboos hung, reflecting patterns of green foliage and patches of blue sky. Here he swam every morning at sun-up, summer or winter, and at evening, too, when he came from the day’s work. He built a row of stables, sufficient to house a dozen beasts, but actually kept only two, one of which was ridden by old Smoke (whose legs were now too feeble to carry him far) and one which he used himself. This was a mare of great responsiveness and intelligence but with no beauty, chosen with care after weeks of attending sales and following up advertisements: she was for use, not show. George rode her round the farm, working her hard, during the day, and when he stabled her at night patted her as if he were sorry she could not come into the house with him. After he had come from the pool, he sat in the glow from the rapidly fading sunset, looking out over the wild and beautiful valley, and ceremoniously drinking beside a stinkwood table laden with decanters and siphons. Nothing here of the bachelor’s bottle and glass on a tin tray; and his dinner was served elaborately by two uniformed men, with whom he chatted or kept silence, as he felt inclined. After dinner coffee was brought to him, and having read farming magazines for half an hour or so, he went to bed. He was asleep every night by nine, and up before the sun.
That was his life. It was his life for years, one of exhausting physical toil, twelve hours a day of sweat and effort in the sun, but surrounded by a space and comfort that seemed to ask for something else. It asked, in short, for a wife. But it is not easy to ask of such a man, living in such a way, what it is he misses, if he misses anything at all.
To ask would mean entering into what he feels during the long hours riding over the ridges of kopje in the sunshine, with the grass waving about him like blond banners. It would mean understanding what made him one of mankind’s outriders in the first place.
Even old Smoke himself, ambling beside him on the other horse, would give him a long look on certain occasions, and quietly go off, leaving him by himself.
Sloping away in front of the house was a three-mile-long expanse of untouched grass, which sprang each year so tall that even from their horses the two men could not see over it. There was a track worn through it to a small knoll, a cluster of rocks merely, with trees breaking from the granite for shade. Here it was that George would dismount and, leaning his arm on the neck of his mare, stand gazing down into the valley which was in itself a system of other hills and valleys, so high did Four Winds stand above the rest of the country. Twenty miles away other mountains stood like blocks of tinted crystal, blocking the view; between there were trees and grass, trees and rocks and grass, with the rivers marked by lines of darker vegetation. Slowly, as the years passed, this enormous reach of pure country became marked by patches of cultivation; and smudges of smoke showed where new houses were going up, with the small glittering of roofs. The valley was being developed. Still George stood and gazed, and it seemed as if these encroaching lives affected him not at all. He would stay there half the morning, with the crooning of the green-throated wood pigeons in his ears, and when he rode back home for his meal, his eyes were heavy and veiled.
But he took things as they came. Four Winds, lifted high into the sky among the great windswept sun-quivering mountains, tumbled all over with boulders, offering itself to storms and exposure and invasion by baboons and leopards – this wilderness, this pure, heady isolation, had not affected him after all.
For when the valley had been divided out among new settlers, and his neighbours were now five miles, and not fifteen, away, he began going to their houses and asking them to his. They were very glad to come, for though he was an eccentric, he was harmless enough. He chose to live alone: that piqued the women. He had become very rich; which pleased everyone. For the rest, he was considered mildly crazy because he would not allow an animal to be touched on his farm; and any native caught setting traps for game would be beaten by George himself and then taken to the police afterwards: George considered the fine that he incurred for beating the native well worth it. His farm was as good as a game reserve; and he had to keep his cattle in what were practically stockades for fear of leopards. But if he lost an occasional beast, he could afford it.
George used to give swimming parties on Sundays; he kept open house on that day, and everyone was welcome. He was a good host, the house was beautiful, and his servants were the envy of every housewife; perhaps this was what people found it difficult to forgive him, the perfection of his servants. For they never left him to go ‘home’ as other people’s boys did; their home was here, on this farm, under old Smoke, and the compound was a proper native village, and not the usual collection of shambling huts about which no one cared, since no one lived in them long enough to care. For a bachelor to have such well-trained servants was a provocation to the women of the district; and when they teased him about the perfection of his arrangements, their voices had an edge on them. They used to say: ‘You damned old bachelor, you.’ And he would reply, with calm good-humour: ‘Yes, I must think about getting me a wife.’
Perhaps he really did feel he ought to marry. He knew it was suspected that this new phase, of entertaining and being entertained, was with a view to finding himself a girl. And the girls, of course, were only too willing. He was nothing, if not a catch; and it was his own fault that he was regarded, coldly, in this light. He would sometimes look at the women sprawled half-naked around the swimming pool under the bamboos – sprawling with deliberate intent, and for his benefit – and his eyes would narrow in a way that was not pleasant. Nor was it even fair, for if a man will not allow himself to be approached by sympathy and kindness, there is only one other approach. But the result of all this was simply that he set that photograph very prominently on the table beside his bed; and when girls remarked on it he replied, letting his eyelids half-close in a way which was of course exasperatingly attractive: ‘Ah, yes, Betty – now there was a woman for you.’
At one time it was thought he was ‘caught’ after all. One of his boundaries was shared with a middle-aged woman with two grown daughters; she was neither married, nor unmarried, for her husband seemed not to be able to make up his mind whether to divorce her or not, and the girls were in their early twenties, horse-riding, whisky-drinking, flat-bodied tomboys who were used to having their own way with the men they fancied. They would make good wives for men like George, people said: they would give back as good as they got. But they continued to be spoken of in the plural, for George flirted with them both and they were extraordinarily similar. As for the mother, she ran the farm, for her husband was too occupied with a woman in town to do this, and drank a little too much, and could be heard complaining fatalistically: ‘Christ, why did I have daughters? After all, sons are expected to behave badly.’ She used to complain to George, who merely smiled and offered her another drink. ‘God help you if you marry either of them,’ she would say, gloomily. ‘May I be forgiven for saying it, but they are fit for nothing but enjoying themselves.’
‘At their age, Mrs Whately, that seems reasonable enough.’ Thus George retreated, into a paternally indulgent attitude that nevertheless had a hint in it of cruel relish for the girls’ discomfiture.
He used to look for Mrs Whately when he entered a room, and stay beside her for hours, apparently enjoying her company; and she seemed to enjoy his. She did all the talking, while he stretched himself beside her, his eyes fixed thoughtfully on his glass, which he swung lightly between finger and thumb, occasionally letting out an amused grunt. She spoke chiefly of her husband whom she had turned from a liability into an asset, for the whole room would become silent to hear her humorous, grumbling tales of him. ‘He came home last week-end,’ she would say, fixing wide astonished eyes on George, ‘and do you know what he said? My God, he said, I don’t know what I’d do without you, old girl. If I can’t get out of town for a spot of fresh air, sometimes, I’d go mad. And there I was, wait
ing for him with my grievance ready to air. What can one do with a man like that?’ ‘And are you prepared to be a sort of week-end resort?’ asked George. ‘Why, Mr Chester!’ exclaimed Mrs Whately, widening her eyes to an incredibly foolish astonishment, ‘after all, he’s my husband, I suppose.’ But this handsome, battered matron was no fool, she could not have run the farm so capably if she had been; and on these occasions George would simply laugh and say: ‘Have another drink.’
At his own swimming parties Mrs Whately was the only woman who never showed herself in a swimming suit. ‘At my age,’ she explained, ‘it is better to leave it to one’s daughters.’ And with an exaggerated sigh of envy she gazed across at the girls. George would gaze, too, non-committally; though on the whole it appeared he did not care for the spare and boyish type. He had been known, however, during those long hot days when thirty or forty people lounged for hours in their swimming suits on the edge of the pool, eating, drinking, and teasing each other, to rise abruptly, looking inexplicably irritated, and walk off to the stables. There he saddled his mare – who, one would have thought, should have been allowed her Sunday’s rest, since she was worked so hard the rest of the week – swung himself up, and was off across the hillsides, riding like a maniac. His guests did not take this hardly; it was the sort of thing one expected of him. They laughed – most particularly the women – and waited for him to come back, saying: ‘Well, old George, you know …’
This Was the Old Chief's Country Page 20
