People who live on the veld for a long time acquire an instinct for the places where one must sink for water. An old-timer will go snuffing and feeling over the land like a dog, marking the fall of the earth, the lie of a reef, the position of an anthill, and say at last: Here is the place. Likely enough he will be right, and often enough, of course, quite wrong.
Alec went through just such a morning of scenting and testing, through the bush at the back of the house, where the hillock erupted its boulders. If the underground forces had broken here, then there might be fissures where water could push its way; water was often to be found near a place of reefs and rocks. And there were antheaps; and ant galleries mostly ended, perhaps a hundred feet down, in an underground river. And there was a certain promising type of tree – yes, said Alec, this would be a good place for a well. And he had already marked the place and taken two labourers from the farm to do the digging when there appeared yet another of those dangerous visitors; another vagrant old man, just as stained and weatherworn as the last; with just such a craziness about him, only this time even worse, for he claimed he was a water-diviner and would find Alec Barnes a well for the sum of one pound sterling.
That night Paul was exposed until dawn to the snares of magical possibilities. He could not be made to go to bed. The old man had many tales of travel and danger; for he had spent his youth as a big-game hunter, and later, when he was too old for that, became a prospector; and later still, by chance, found that the forked twig of a tree had strength in his hands. Chance! – it was always chance, thought Maggie, listening dubiously. These men lived from one stroke of luck to the next. It was bad luck that the elephant charged and left the old man lame for life, with the tusk-scars showing white from ankle to groin. It was good luck that he ‘fell in’ with old Thompson, who had happened to ‘make a break’ with diamonds in the Free State.
It was bad luck that malaria and then blackwater got him, so that he could no longer sleep in the bush at nights. It was good luck that made him try his chance with the twig, so that now he might move from farm to farm, with an assured welcome for a night behind mosquito netting … What an influence for Paul!
Paul sat quietly beside her and missed not a word. He blinked slow attention through those dark and watchful eyes; and he was critical, too. He rejected the old man’s boasting, his insistence on the scientific certainties of the magic wand, all the talk of wells and watercourses, of which he spoke as if they were a species of underground animal that could be stalked and trapped; Paul was fixed by something else, by what kept his father still and alert all night, his eyes fixed on his guest. That something else – how well Maggie knew it! and how she distrusted it, and how she grieved for Paul, whose heart was beating (she could positively hear it) to the pulse of that dangerous something else. It was not the elephants and the lions and the narrow escapes; not the gold; not underground rivers; none of these things in themselves, and perhaps not even the pursuit of them. It was that oblique, unnameable quality in life which Maggie, trying to pin it down safely in homely words, finally dismissed in the sour and nagging phrase: Getting something for nothing. That’s all they wanted, she said to herself, sadly; and when she kissed Paul and put him to bed she said, in her sensible voice: ‘There isn’t anything to be proud of in getting something for nothing.’ She saw that he did not know what she meant; and so she left him.
Next morning, when they all went off to the projected well, Maggie remained a little way off, her apron lifted over her head against the sun, arms folded on her breast, in that ancient attitude of a patient and ironic woman; and she shook her head when the diviner offered her the twig and suggested she should try. But Paul tried, standing on his two planted feet, elbows tight into his sides, as he was shown, with the angles of the fork between palm and thumb. The twig turned over for him and he cried, delightedly: ‘I’m a diviner, I’m a diviner,’ and the old man agreed that he had the gift.
Alec indicated the place and the old man walked across and around it with the twig, and at last he gave his sanction to dig – the twig turned down, infallibly, at just that spot. Alex paid him twenty shillings, and the old man wandered off to the next farm. Maggie said: ‘In a country the like of this, where everyone is parched for water, a man who could tell for sure where the water is would be nothing but a millionaire. And look at this one, his coat all patches and his boots going.’ She knew she might as well save her breath, for she found two pairs of dark and critical eyes fixed on her, and it was as good as if they said: Well, woman, and what has the condition of his boots got to do with it?
Late that evening she saw her husband go secretly along the path to the hillock with a twig, and later still he came back with an excited face, and she knew that he, too, ‘had the gift’.
It was that term that Maggie got a letter from Paul’s headmaster saying that Paul was not fitted for a practical education, nor yet did he have any especial facility for examinations. If he applied himself he might win a scholarship, however, and become academically educated … and so on. It was a tactful letter, and its real sense Maggie preferred not to examine, for it was too wounding to her maternal pride. Its surface sense was clear; it meant that Paul was going to cost them a good deal of money. She wrote to say that he must be given special coaching, and went off to confront Alec. He was rather irritable with her, for his mind was on the slow descent of the well. He spent most of his time watching the work. And what for? Wells were a routine. One set a couple of men to dig, and if there was no water by a certain depth, one pulled them out and tried again elsewhere. No need to stand over the thing like a harassed mother hen. So thought Maggie as she watched her husband walking in his contemplative way around the well with his twig in his hands. At thirty feet they came on water. It was not a very good stream, and might even fail in the dry season, but Alec was delighted. ‘And if that silly old man hadnae come at all the well would have been sunk just that place, and no fiddle-faddle with the divining rod,’ Maggie pointed out. Alec gave her a short answer and went off to the mine on the ridge, taking his twig with him. The miner said, tolerantly, that he could divine a well if he liked. Alec chose a place, and came home to tell Maggie he would earn a guinea if there turned out to be water. ‘But man,’ said Maggie in amazement, ‘you aren’t going to keep the family in shoe-leather on guineas earned that way!’ She asked again about the money for Paul’s coaching, and Alec said: ‘What’s the matter with the boy, he’s doing all right.’ She persisted, and he gave in; but he seemed to resent it, this fierce determination of hers that her son must be something special in the world. But when it came to the point, Alec could not find the money, it was just not in the bank. Maggie roused herself and sold eggs and poultry to the store at the station, to earn the extra few pounds that were needed. And she went on scraping shillings together and hoarding them in a drawer, though money from chickens and vegetables would not send Paul through university.
She said to Alec: ‘The wages of the trench-boys would save up for Paul’s education.’ She did not say, since she could not think of herself as a nagging woman: And if you put your mind to it there’d be more money at the end of a season. But although she did not say it. Alec heard it, and replied with an aggrieved look and dogged silence. Later he said: ‘If I find another Rand here the boy can go to Oxford, if you want that.’ There was not a grain of humour in it, he was quite in earnest.
He spent all his time at the mine while the well was being sunk. They found water and he earned his guinea, which he put carefully with the silver for paying the labourers. What Maggie did not know was that during that time he had been walking around the mine-shaft with his divining rod. It was known how the reefs lay underground, and how much gold they carried.
He remarked, thoughtfully: ‘Lucky the mine is just over the way for testing. The trouble with this business is it’s difficult to check theories.’
Maggie did not at first understand; for she was thinking of water. She began: ‘But the well on the mine is j
ust the same as the one …’ She stopped, and her face changed as the outrageous suspicion filled her. ‘But Alec,’ she began, indignantly; and saw him turning away, shutting out her carping and doubt. ‘But Alec,’ she insisted, furiously, ‘surely you aren’t thinking of …’
‘People have been divining for water for centuries,’ he said simply, ‘so why not gold?’ She saw that it was all quite clear to him, like a religious faith, and that nothing she could say would reach him at all. She remained silent; and it was at that moment the last shreds of her faith in him dissolved; and she was filled with the bitterness of a woman who has no life of her own outside husband and children, and must see everything that she could be destroyed. For herself she did not mind; it was Paul – he would have to pay for this lunacy. And she must accept that too; she had married Alec, and that was the end of it; for the thought of leaving him did not enter her mind: Maggie was too old-fashioned for divorce. There was nothing she could do; one could not argue with a possessed person, and Alec was possessed. And in this acceptance, which was like a slow shrug of the shoulders, was something deeper, as if she felt that the visionary moon-chasing quality in Alec – even though it was ridiculous – was something necessary, and that there must always be a moment when the practical-minded must pay tribute to it. From that day, Alec found Maggie willing to listen, though ironically; she might even enquire spontaneously after his ‘experiments’. Well, why not? she would catch herself thinking; perhaps he may discover something new after all. Then she pulled herself up, rather angrily; she was becoming infected by the lunacy. In her mind she was lowering the standards she had for Paul.
When Paul next returned from school he found the atmosphere again altered. The exhilaration had gone out of Alec; the honeymoon phase of discovery was past; he was absorbed and grim. His divining rod had become an additional organ; for he was never seen without it. Now it was made of iron wire, because of some theory to do with the attraction of gold for iron; and this theory and all the others were difficult to follow. Maggie made no comment at all; and this Paul would have liked to accept at its surface value, for it would have left him free to move cheerfully from one parent to the other without feeling guilt. But he was deeply disturbed. He saw his mother, with the new eyes of adolescence, for the first time, as distinct from feeling her, as the maternal image. He saw her, critically, as a fading, tired woman, with grey hair. He watched her at evening sitting by the lamp, with the mending on her lap, in the shabby living-room; he saw how she knitted her brows and peered to thread a needle; and how the sock or shirt might lie forgotten while she went off into some dream of her own which kept her motionless, her face sad and pinched, for half an hour at a time, while her hands rubbed unconsciously in a hard and nervous movement over the arms of the chair. It is always a bad time when a son grows up and sees his mother as an elderly lady; but this did not last longer than a few days with Paul; because at once the pathos and tiredness of her gripped him, and with it, a sullen anger against his own father. Paul had become a young man when he was hardly into his teens; he took a clear look at his father and hated him for murdering the gay and humorous Maggie. He looked at the shabby house, at the neat but faded clothes of the family, and at the neglected farm. That holiday he spent down on the lands with the labourers, trying to find out what he should do. To Maggie, the new protective gentleness of her son was sweet, and also very frightening, because she did not know how to help him. He would come to her and say: ‘Mother, there’s a gulley down the middle of that land, what should I tell the bossboy to do?’ or ‘We should plant some trees, there’s hardly any timber on the place, he’s gone and cut it all down.’ He referred to his father, with hostility, as he; all those weeks, and Maggie said over and over again that he should not worry, he was too young. She was mortally afraid he would become absorbed by the farm and never be able to escape. When he went back to school he wrote desperate letters full of appeals like this one: ‘Do, please, make him see to that fence before the rains, please, mother, don’t be soft and good-natured with him.’ But Alec was likely to be irritable about details such as fences; and Maggie would send back the counter-appeal: ‘Be patient, Paul. Finish your studies first, there’ll be plenty of time for farming.’
He scraped through his scholarship examination with three marks to spare, and Maggie spoke to him very seriously. He appeared to be listening and perhaps he tried to; but in the end he broke in impatiently: ‘Oh, mother, what’s the use of me wasting time on French and Latin and English Literature? It just doesn’t make sense in this country, you must see that.’ Maggie could not break through this defence of impatient common sense, and planned to write him a long, authoritative letter when he got back to school. She still kept a touching belief in what schools could put in and knock out of children. At school, she thought, he might be induced into a serious consideration of his future, for the scholarship was a very small one, and would only last two years.
In the meantime he went to his father, since Maggie could not or would not help him, for advice about the farm. But Alec hardly listened to warnings about drains that needed digging and trees that should be planted; and in a fit of bitter disappointment, Paul wandered off to the mine: the boy needed a father, and had to find one somewhere. The miner liked the boy, and spoiled him with sweets and gave him the run of the workings, and let him take rides in the iron lift down the mine-shaft that descended through the soiled and sour-smelling earth. He went for a tour through the underground passages where the mine-boys worked in sodden grey loincloths, the water from the roof dripping and mingling with their running sweat. The muffled thudding of their picks sounded like marching men, a thudding that answered the beat of the mine-stamps overhead; and the lamps on their foreheads, as they moved cautiously through the half-dark tunnels, made them seem like a race of groping Cyclops. At evening he would watch the cage coming up to the sunlight full of labourers, soaked with dirt and sweat, their forehead lamps blank now, their eyes blinking painfully at the glare. Then everyone stood around expectantly for the blasting. At the very last moment the cage came racing up, groaning with the strain, and discharged the two men who had lit the fuse; and almost at once there was a soft, vibrating roar from far under their feet, and the faces and bodies of the watchers relaxed. They yawned and stretched, and drifted off in groups for their meal. Paul would lean over the shaft to catch the acrid whiff from the blasting; and then went off to eat with James, the miner. He lived in a little house with a native woman to cook for him. It was unusual to have a woman working in the house, and this plump creature, who smiled and smiled and gave him biscuits and called him darling, fascinated Paul. It was terrible cheek for a kaffir, and a kaffir woman at that, to call him darling; and Paul would never have dreamed of telling his mother, who had become so critical and impatient, and might forbid him to come again.
Several times his father appeared from the trenches down the ridge, walking straight and fast through the bush with his divining rod in his hand. ‘So there you are, old son,’ he would say to Paul, and forgot him at once. He nodded to James, asked: ‘Do you mind?’ and at once began walking back and forth around the mine-shaft with his rod. Sometimes he was pleased, and muttered: ‘Looks as if I’m on the right track.’ Or he might stand motionless in the sun, his old hat stuck on the back of his head, eyes glazed in thought. ‘Contradictory,’ he would mutter. ‘Can’t make it out at all.’ Then he would say, briefly, ‘Thanks!’ nod again at James and Paul as if at strangers, and walk back just as fast and determined to the ‘experimental’ trenches. James watched him expressionlessly, while Paul avoided his eyes. He knew James found his father ridiculous, and he did not intend to show that he knew it. He would stare off into the bush, chewing at a grass-stem, or down at the ground, making patterns in the dust with his toes, and his face was flushed and unhappy. James, seeing it, would say, kindly: ‘Your father’ll make it yet, Paul.’
This Was the Old Chief's Country Page 36
