African Stories

by Doris Lessing

  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 boss-boy 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 blessing. 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 said, briefly, “Thanks!” nodded again at James and Paul as if at strangers, and walked 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.”

  “Do you think there could be gold?” Paul asked, eagerly, for confirmation, not of the gold, but of his father’s good sense.

  “Why not? There’s a mine right here, isn’t there? There’s half a dozen small-workers round about.”

  “How did you find this reef?”

  “Just luck. I was after a wild pig, as it happened. It disappeared somewhere here and I put my rifle down against a rock to have a smoke, and when I picked it up the rock caught my eye, and it seemed a likely bit, so I panned it and it showed up well; I dug a trench or two and the reef went down well, and—so here I am.”

  But Paul was still thinking of his father. He was looking away through the trees, over the wire fence to where the trenches were. “My father says if he proves right hell divine mines for everyone, all over the world, and not only gold but diamonds and coal—and everything!” maintained Paul proudly, with a defiant look at the miner.

  “That’s right, son,” said James nicely, meeting the look seriously. “Your dad’s all right,” he added, to comfort the boy. And Paul was grateful. He used to go over to James every day just after breakfast and return late in the evening when the sun had gone. Maggie did not know what to say to him. He could not be blamed for taking his troubles to someone who was prepared to spend time with him. It was not his fault for having Alec as a father—thus Maggie, secretly feeling disloyal.

  One evening she paid a visit to Alec’s trenches. The reef lay diagonally down the slope of the ridge for about a mile, jutting up slantingly, like a rough ledge. At intervals, trenches had been dug across it and in places it had been blown away by a charge of gelignite.

  Maggie was astonished at the extent of the work. There were about twel
ve labourers, and the sound of picks on flinty earth sounded all around her. From shallow trenches protruded the shoulders and heads of some of the men, but others were out of sight, twelve or more feet down. She stood looking on, feeling sad and tired, computing what the labour must cost each month, let alone the money for gelignite and fuses and picks. Alec was moving through the scrub with his wire. He had a new way of handling it. As a novice he had gripped it carefully, elbows tight at his sides, and walked cautiously as if he were afraid of upsetting the magnetism. Now he strode fast over the ground, his loose bush-shirt flying around him, the wire held lightly between his fingers. He was zigzagging back and forth in a series of twenty-foot stretches, and Maggie saw he was tracking the course of a reef, for at the centre of each of these stretches the wire turned smartly downwards. Maggie could not help thinking there was something rather perfunctory in it. “Let me try,” she asked, and for the first time she held the magic wand. “Walk along here,” her husband ordered, frowning with the concentration he put into it; and she walked as bidden. It was true that the wire seemed to tug and strain her hands; but she tried again and it appeared to her that if she pulled the two ends apart, pressure tugged the point over and down, whereas if she held it without tension it remained unresponsive. Surely it could not be as simple as that? Surely Alec was not willing the wire to move as he wanted? He saw the doubt in her face and said quickly: “Perhaps you haven’t the electricity in you.” “I daresay not,” she agreed, drily; and then asked quickly, trying to sound interested, because at once he reacted like a child to the dry note in her voice: “Is this water or a reef?”

  “A reef.” His face had brightened pathetically at this sign of interest, and he explained: “I’ve worked out that either an iron rod or a twig works equally well for water, but if you neutralize the current with an iron nut on the end there must be mineral beneath, but I don’t know whether gold or just any mineral.”

  Maggie digested this, with difficulty, and then said: “You say an iron rod, but this is just called galvanized iron, it’s just a name, it might be made of anything really, steel or tin—or anything,” she concluded lamely, her list of metals running out.

  His face was perturbed. She saw that this, after all, very simple idea had never occurred to him. “It doesn’t matter,” he said, quickly, “the point is that it works. I’ve proved it on the reefs at the mine.” She saw that he was looking thoughtful, nevertheless, and could not prevent herself thinking sarcastically that she had given birth to a new theory, probably based on the word galvanized. “How do you know it isn’t reacting to water? That mine is always having trouble with water, they say there’s an underground river running parallel to the main reef.” But this was obvious enough to be insulting, and Alec said, indignantly: “Give me credit for some sense. I checked that a long time ago.” He took the wire, slipped an iron nut on each bent end and gripped the ends tight. “Like that,” he said. “The iron neutralizes, do you see?” She nodded, and he took off the iron nuts and then she saw him reach into his pocket and take out his signet ring and put that on the wire.

  “What are you doing?” asked Maggie, with the most curious feeling of dismay. That signet ring she had given him when they were married. She had bought it with money saved from working as a girl in her parents’ shop, and it represented a great deal of sacrifice to her then. Even now, for that matter. And here he was using it as an implement, not even stopping to think how she might feel about it. When he had finished he slipped the gold ring, together with the two iron nuts, back into the pocket of his bush-shirt. “You’ll lose it,” she said, anxiously, but he did not hear her. “If the iron neutralizes the water, which I’ve proved,” he said, worriedly, “then the gold ring should neutralize the gold.” She did not follow the logic of this, though she could not doubt it all had been worked out most logically. He took her slowly along the great reef, talking in that slow, thoughtful way of his. She felt a thwarted misery—for what was the use of being miserable? She did not believe in emotions that were not useful in some way.

  Later he began flying back and forth again over a certain vital patch of earth, and he dropped the signet ring and it rolled off among the long grasses, and she helped him to find it again. “As a matter of fact,” he mused aloud, “I’ll give up the trenches here, I think, and sink a proper shaft. Not here. It’s had a fair chance. I’ll try somewhere new.”

  Before they left at sundown she walked over to one of the deep trenches and stood looking down. It was like a grave, she thought. The mouth was narrow, a slit among the long, straggling grass, with the mounds of rubble banked at the ends, and the rosy evening sun glinted red on the grass-stems and flashed on the pebbles. The trees glowed, and the sky was a wash of colour. The side of the trench showed the strata of soil and stone. First a couple of feet of close, hard, reddish soil, hairy with root-structure; then a slab of pinkish stuff mixed with round white pebbles; then a narrow layer of smooth white that resembled the filling in the cake; and then a deep plunge of greyish shale that broke into flakes at the touch of the pick. There was no sign of any reef at the bottom of the trench; and as Alec looked down he was frowning; and she could see that there should have been a reef, and this trench proved something unsettling to the theory.

  Some days later he remarked that he was taking the workers off the reef to a new site. She did not care to ask where; but soon she saw a bustle of activity in the middle of the great mealie field. Yes, he had decided to sink a shaft just there, he, who had once lost his temper if he found even a small stone in a furrow which might nick the ploughshares.

  It was becoming a very expensive business. The cases of explosive came out from the station twice a month on the waggon; and she had to order boxes of mining candles, instead of packets, from the store. And when Alec panned the samples there were twenty or more, instead of the half-dozen, and he would be working at the water-tanks half the morning. He was very pleased with the shaft; he thought he was on the verge of success. There were always a few grains of gold in the pan, and one day a long trail of it, which he estimated at almost as much as would be worth working. He sent a sample to the Mines Department for a proper test, and it came back confirmed. But this was literally a flash in the pan, for nothing fresh happened, and soon that shaft was abandoned. Workers dragged an untidy straggle of barbed wire around the shaft so that cattle should not stray into it; and the ploughs detoured there; and in the centre of the once unbroken field stood a tall thicket of grass and scrub, which made Paul furious when he came home for the holidays. He remonstrated with his father, who replied that it had been justified, because from that shaft he had learned a great deal, and one must be prepared to pay for knowledge. He used just those words, very seriously, like a scientist. Maggie remarked that the shaft had cost at least a hundred pounds to sink, and she hoped the knowledge was worth that much. It was the sort of remark she never made these days; and she understood she had made it now because Paul was there, who supported her. As soon as Paul came home she always had the most uncomfortable feeling that his very presence tugged her away from her proper loyalty to Alec. She found herself becoming critical and nagging; while the moment Paul had gone she drifted back into a quiet acceptance, like fatalism. It was not long after that bitter remark that Alec finally lost his signet ring; and, because it was necessary to work with a gold ring, asked her for her wedding ring. She had never taken it off her finger since they married, but she slipped it off now and handed it to him without a word. As far as she was concerned it was a moment of spiritual divorce; but a divorce takes two, and if the partner doesn’t even notice it, what then?

  He lost that ring too, of course, but it did not matter by then, for he had amended his theory, and gold rings had become a thing of the past. He was now using a rod of fine copper wire with shreds of asbestos wound about it. Neither Maggie nor Paul asked for explanations, for there were pages of detailed notes on his farm desk, and books about magnetic fields and currents and the sympathy of metals,
and they could not have understood the terms he used, for his philosophy had become the most extraordinary mixture of alchemy and magic and the latest scientific theories. His office, which for years had held nothing but a safe for money and a bookshelf of farming magazines, was now crammed with lumps of stone, crucibles, mortars, and the walls were covered with maps and diagrams, while divining rods in every kind of metal hung from nails. Next to the newest geological map from the Government office was an old map imagined by a seventeenth-century explorer, with mammoth-like beasts scrolling the border; and the names of the territories were fabulous, like El Dorado, and Golconda, and Queen Sheba’s Country. There were shelves of retorts and test-tubes and chemicals, and in a corner stood the skull of an ox, for there was a period of months when Alee roamed the farm with that skull dangling from his divining rod, to test a belief that the substances of bone had affinities with probable underground deposits of lime. The books ranged from the latest Government publications to queer pamphlets with titles such as Metallurgy and the Zodiac, or Gold Deposits on Venus.

  It was in this room that Maggie confronted him with a letter from Paul’s headmaster. The scholarship money was finished. Was it intended that the boy should try for a fresh one to take him through university? In this case, he must change his attitude, for, while he could not be described as stupid, he “showed no real inclination for serious application.” If not, there was “no immediate necessity for reviewing the state of affairs,” but a list of employers was enclosed with whom Mrs. Barnes might care to communicate. In short, the headmaster thought Paul was thick-witted. Maggie was furious. Her son become a mere clerk! She informed Alec, peremptorily, that they must find the money to send Paul through university. Alec was engaged in making a fine diagram of his new shaft in cross-section, and he lifted a blank face to say: “Why spoon-feed the boy? If he was any good he’d work.” The words struck Maggie painfully, for they summed up her own belief; but she found herself thinking that it was all Alec’s fault for being English and infecting her son with laziness. She controlled this thought and said they must find the money, even if Alec curtailed his experimenting. He looked at her in amazement and anger. She saw that the anger was against her false scale of values. He was thinking: What is one child’s future (even if he happens to be my own, which is a mere biological accident, after all) against a discovery which might change the future of the world? He maintained the silence necessary when dealing with little-minded people. But she would not give in. She argued and even wept, and gave him no peace, until his silence crumbled into violence and he shouted: “Oh, all right then, have it your own way.”