Manly Pursuits

by Ann Harries

  Upon a bench sat a tall, well-dressed young man, his face buried in his hands, his body shaking with grief. Even though I could not see his features I recognised him at once to be one of the secretaries, and his blond locks suggested he might be Joubert. As I stood uncertain as to whether I should tiptoe past him or announce my presence by a clearing of the throat, the young man withdrew his hands in a rush and stared straight at me with reddened eyes. Those orbs, swollen and bloodshot as they were through excessive weeping, shone more brilliantly blue than I had imagined possible. I began to tremble. Should I comment on the pleasantness of the weather or the beauty of the lilies that sprang around his feet? Should I offer him a handkerchief with which to relieve his clogged nostrils? Instead, I uttered his name: ‘Joubert!’ Thus did the surge of sympathy which swelled my throat translate into a smooth, neutral greeting.

  I expect I anticipated some display of embarrassment in his response; a manly attempt to disguise his tears in a flurry of coughs – instead he opened his mouth in a great round O, like a small boy who has broken his favourite toy, and bawled: ‘Oh Professor, I am so unhappy!’

  I slipped on to the bench beside him and placed a restraining hand on his sleeve.

  ‘Tell me why,’ I said.

  For a moment Joubert was too overcome with misery to use his breath for speech and I found myself patting his back and murmuring clichés like: ‘It can’t be as bad as all that, old chap,’ in an undertone which I hoped he wouldn’t hear, but finally he regained sufficient control of himself to sob out four doom-laden words before collapsing back into his stricken state:

  ‘He has dismissed me!’

  ‘Good heavens!’ I felt a slight shock. ‘Why?’

  Much trumpeting of nose in handkerchief before the revelation: ‘Because I have become engaged – to Miss Pennyfeather!’

  I had no idea who Miss Pennyfeather was but I seized upon her as the saviour of the situation.

  ‘But surely that is an event to celebrate?’

  Joubert stopped sniffing and stared into the distance. ‘He always warned us that he wanted only single men to work for him. That marriage gets in the way of work. That wives get in the way of Great Ideas.’ He fell silent for a while. A plumbago petal drifted on to his knee. ‘Even his loyalest servants …’

  ‘Come on, man,’ I said in a bright voice, ‘he’ll write you a good reference. You’ll easily find other work.’

  Joubert gazed at me uncomprehendingly. ‘You don’t understand, do you? I worship him like a god! We all do. I loved and served him as I cannot possibly serve another man again.’

  His voice began to disintegrate so I said firmly: ‘But now you will love and serve Miss Pennyfeather.’

  Joubert ignored this. ‘No father could have reposed greater confidence in his son than he placed in me. He hid nothing from me. Not even the whole Raid episode.’ He shook his head and groaned as he remembered. ‘Just think, Professor, I was there when the telegrams came through. He was frantic. But he still didn’t blame Jimjam for going in without permission. I think he actually admired him for his foolhardiness! I made him coffee the whole night through. He wouldn’t touch his whisky. Then he resigned as Prime Minister the next morning. Do you know what, Professor?’ He turned his beautiful tear-stained face to me. ‘At five o’clock in the morning he put his head on my chest and groaned, “It’s all over for me now, Joubert.” We clung together for hours, it seemed. Schreiner left the room. We never saw him again.’

  ‘Schreiner?’

  ‘He was our Attorney-General then. Now he’s our Prime Minister. And we’re his Opposition. The Raid split us apart. That night Schreiner understood for the first time that we were all in it up to the neck, not just Jimjam. He felt betrayed.’ Joubert’s eyes were drying as he recollected this historic night. ‘It didn’t bother me. I think if he had asked me to walk through the gates of Hell I would have done so. The greatness of the man! Do you know, Professor, that the morning after that terrible night, when he saw his whole career collapse in smoking ruins, he entertained an entire cricket team for lunch! You’d have thought he hadn’t a care in the world! And he’d just that morning resigned!’ Joubert’s amazement, though four years old, had lost none of its freshness. He extended his arms towards the rustling forest. ‘But it was the mountain that saved him. He spent the next five days and nights up here – alone most of the time, though he once asked me to accompany him. He had just heard that Jimjam and the raiders had been captured and put into a Boer prison. His whole face had collapsed, I can’t describe it any other way. His voice shook as he said, “Well, it is a little history being made, that is all.” We sat on this very bench and once again he laid his head on my breast as if the warmth of my body was his only consolation. Within a few days his hair had turned completely grey. I placed my hand on his brow and stroked it.’ Joubert’s eyes became dreamy. ‘As we sat together on this bench, my arm round his shoulders in an attempt to comfort him in his appalling tragedy, I thought back to the time when I was a mere Clerk of the Papers in the House of Assembly. I was only twenty when I first met him.’

  This could only mean a new wave of confession about to break, so I consulted my fob-watch somewhat ostentatiously. Joubert took the hint.

  ‘I’m sorry to go on like this, Professor. I won’t keep you any longer.’ He tried to suppress a slight tremble in his voice.

  ‘No, no, not at all, this is very interesting,’ I murmured, in spite of myself. I could tell that the fellow was gaining some relief by his outpouring, and envied his ability to bare his heart so spontaneously.

  ‘It was shortly before he became Prime Minister. He noticed me in my office off the Assembly Chamber and after that he always had a kind word for me,’ Joubert continued as if he had never been interrupted. ‘He asked if I could speak Dutch and whether I had a knowledge of shorthand. I replied I could not write shorthand. He said to me – very emphatically – “You must learn shorthand!” and went into the House. It was then that the most uncontrollable desire took hold of me to become his secretary!’ Joubert clasped his hands together and nearly jumped off the bench in his excitement. ‘I developed the strongest imaginable hero-worship for him. Just the thought that he was present in the House made me the happiest man on earth. I loved to see his face if I left the door that led from my room into the Chamber slightly ajar and sometimes I fancied he caught my eye. I would lie awake at night in a state of almost delirious joy thinking of the pleasure that would be mine when I became his secretary and would always be with him! That was all I wanted! Sorry, Professor, to take up your time like this but I want you to understand how the greatest man in South Africa can change the lives of the most ordinary men on earth, like me, as well as the most rich and famous – like Mr Chamberlain and Sir Alfred.’ As he seemed to be subsiding I rose from the bench but he held my arm. ‘Then one day in March 1894 I received a private letter saying he wanted to appoint me as his chief clerk! I will never forget that day –the most important day of my whole life, Professor! I wrote back joyfully, accepting the appointment. Two weeks later I assumed duty in the Prime Minister’s department. The Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, as he was by then, called me into his private office. He said to me: “I suppose you thought I had forgotten all about you. Now let me ask you something: “Do you know shorthand?”’

  And the irrepressible Joubert burst out laughing at the wonder of this scene, allowing me to smile back at him, and, with some relief, take my leave. I heard him whistle as he descended the path back to the Great Granary.

  Maria was waiting for me at the same rocky spot of our encounter the day before. While I groped in my mind for the appropriate greeting and appellation, she waved her hand in the air, positively jumping up and down with excitement, and cried out: ‘Look!’

  I had yet to learn that young untrained children do not see the point in hellos, howd’ye-do’s or good afternoons, these verbal rituals being entirely foreign to their spontaneity. But I was an avid and quick pupil,
and instantly swallowed whatever unnecessary greetings were forming on my lips.

  She held something between her thumb and index finger, which she thrust before me, while performing a little dance of triumph on the uneven rocks.

  ‘Hold still,’ I said gently, and put my own hand on her wrist to prevent it from waving about. She seemed quite happy about a stranger’s touch, even as I marvelled at the silken texture of the child’s skin. It was then that I realised, with a sudden grief-stricken surge, that I had only once before held a small child’s hand. Still grasping her by the wrist I drew her hand close to my eyes, and observed between her fingers not the trapped firefly I had expected but a tiny whiteish cube, which I could not immediately identify.

  ‘Look!’ she exclaimed again, this time waggling the tip of her tongue in a gap which had opened up in the very centre of her front teeth.

  ‘You’ve lost a tooth!’ I cried, and instinctively felt with my own tongue for the gaps in the back of my ageing mouth.

  ‘I’m gonna hide it for the tooth fairy,’ she announced in her strange colonial accents, clambering off the rock and obliging me to relinquish my hold. ‘My mommy said I must hide it under the pillow, but I’m not going to.’ She pattered down to the stream. ‘There’s l-l–lots of nice places down here and this is where the fairies live so now they won’t have to come all the way to my h-h–house to find it.’

  The delightful child had not so much a stutter as a shimmering delay round certain words, not dissimilar to Dodgson’s. In my panic the day before I had not noticed her charming defect.

  ‘That’s very considerate of you,’ I murmured. ‘The fairies will be very grateful.’ My head began to spin (rustily) with plans to visit this place later that night and leave behind – what? ‘What do you think they’ll leave you?’

  ‘A tickey,’ said the child promptly. Then they can t-take my t-tooth and use it like a brick to build they own house. Where shall I hide it?’

  We poked about the pebbles and shelves of moss and starry flowers, I the ass to her Titania. I have to confess that, entranced as I was, I nevertheless managed to catch and trap in my specimen bottle several unusual species of flying insect, some gleaming with phosphorescence, some equipped with poisonous stings, some with abnormally large antennae. Since Mr Darwin’s voyage to the Galapagos it has become difficult for the scientist to view mossy banks with the serenity of Shakespeare. What was once an emblem of permanence and harmony is now a battleground for survival and reproduction: thank heavens for fairies, a species for whose continued existence the evolutionary process holds no threat!

  Finally we settled on a perfectly round pebble in a cluster of wild violets which seemed a likely enough home for Maria’s benefactors-to-be. It was also positioned directly in line with a fallen pine, which would make discovery in the dark easier. I had no idea what a tickey was – no doubt some form of remuneration for loss of tooth – and would have to make immediate enquiries.

  The child chattered on in the disconnected way of young children, apparently not requiring the stimulus of questioning. However there was one piece of information I urgently required from her, and when we had finished burying the tooth I said, as casually as I could: ‘And is your daddy at home now?’

  ‘I only got a mommy not a daddy.’ She pushed some fallen hair back into a band round her head and momentarily became interested in me. ‘And where is your children, can I please play with them?’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t have any children, Maria,’ I said. ‘And do you have brothers and sisters?’

  ‘No, it’s only me.’ For a few moments she lapsed into some private world, then widened her eyes, contracted her lips, and began to whistle.

  For the next ten minutes or so I tried to impart to her my secret techniques for reproducing birdsong, even demonstrating how the two hands can augment and manipulate the sound chamber of the mouth by clenching and fluttering, thus providing improbable passages in which to convert breath into music. The child did not have the quick facility of Salisbury and Chamberlain, and soon grew frustrated when her repeated attempts at trilling and warbling continued to fail. Finally she flung her plump little hands from her mouth and, to my inexpressible alarm, burst into piteous tears.

  Tears would seem to flow more easily in the Southern hemisphere. This situation was unique: what do I do to staunch this flow, my second of the morning? My twin impulse was both to run away fast and to gather her in my comforting arms. As neither response would be appropriate, I opened my mouth and hoped my vocal cords would be inspired.

  ‘Oh dear!’ I cried in a loud voice that gained her immediate tear-stained attention. ‘Look what’s happened to my ears!’

  Pointing ostentatiously at my left ear, I observed her gaze settle in astonishment upon the antics of that well-trained auricle. (Never before had anyone save my own reflection been permitted to observe the rotations, flaps and quivers that each of my ears could perform independently. This unusual skill had been privately acquired during my early years in bed, before the mirror.)

  Her tears vanished in a trice. After a minute or so’s admiration of my left ear, her gaze shifted to the right one, which instantly obliged with even more outrageous stunts.

  ‘Do them both together!’ she begged.

  Could I really enjoy playing with children? Certainly I seemed to be an endless source of entertainment to this young creature. And I myself was experiencing something very like pleasure: I suppose peals of happy laughter after each new antic do have an uplifting, even regenerating, effect on the meanest of spirits. Like Oscar’s Selfish Giant, hope began to blossom in my selfish old heart.

  By the end of my performance Maria’s face had that look of wide-eyed astonishment and awe that is so conspicuously absent from the faces of my students of ornithology. For a few minutes she was tentatively struck dumb as she considered the expertise of my ears and the wonder of my whistles. Taking advantage of her silence, I embarked on a short biology lesson, thinly disguised as an anthropomorphic story.

  ‘Once there were three friends who also had ears,’ said I. ‘Friend number one was the cicada.’ I waved my hand as if to point to the invisible creatures responsible for the shrilling that never ceases in Africa. ‘He wanted to waggle his ears too, but he couldn’t ‘cause the cicada’s ears are on his tummy!’ (My listener’s hands stole to her own firm abdominal region to check for growths.) ‘Friend number two was the cricket.’ (At present creaking a semitone below the cicada.) ‘He couldn’t waggle his ears either because they were on his legs!’

  ‘All of them?’ Alert.

  ‘The first walking legs. Friend number three was the mosquito. He couldn’t waggle his ears either because his ears were on his feelers!’ (I waggled a forefinger on either side of my forehead, astonished at how easily so unaccustomed an activity came to me.)

  ‘A mosquito bit me last night,’ said the child, rejecting my educational story for the more immediate gratifications of personal experience. ‘Look!’ She rolled up her sleeve and exposed the most delightful rosy bump just below her elbow. My finger itched to stroke it and feel the silk again. I tutted in sympathy. ‘And guess where the blood is now.’

  ‘The blood?’

  ‘From my arm, you silly. That the m-mosquito sucked out.’

  ‘In his – tummy, perhaps?’

  The child burst out into sudden fiendish laughter. ‘It’s splatted up against the wall – splosh! Like that!’ And she smacked her two hands together with some violence. ‘My mommy killed it.’ She paused. ‘My mommy says I mustn’t come here.’

  I understood at once. ‘Perhaps if I came to visit your mother … ?’

  ‘OK.’ She shrugged off the idea, with liquid, narrow shoulders. ‘I have to go now. B-but I’ll come tomorrow for my tickey, hey?’

  ‘Even though Mother says you’re not to?’

  She cocked her head on one side as if deliberating a reply, but I could see her eyes resting on my ear. I gave it a quick jiggle and she rewarde
d me with a missing-tooth smile.

  ‘Where do you live?’ I called as she flew off. No kiss today.

  She shouted out some guttural Afrikaans name and fluttered away. From the depths of the forest three words floated up. ‘Down – the – avenue!’

  ‘Shall I come and see you?’ I cupped my hands round my mouth to make a loudhailer. ‘I want to ask your mother something.’

  No response, only the patter of little feet in pine needles.

  I followed her slowly; then collapsed on to the teak bench half-way down the mountain path, yielding to a wave of joyous exhaustion.

  * * *

  ‘You are old, Father William,’ the young man said,

  ‘And your hair has become very white:

  And yet you incessantly stand on your head –

  Do you think, at your age, it is right?’

  Hinksey 1874

  Ruskin’s road was a challenge to rail. It was also an art school project: in wanting to demonstrate to his drawing class an understanding of a perfect country road, he proposed that they should build one. He had already found the spot.

  The village of Hinksey just outside Oxford suffered from a surfeit of water in its surrounding fields, with the result that it had become impossible to walk across the waterlogged green in ordinary shoes. Thus it was that the Slade Professor of Art arranged for his drawing class to level and drain the ground, and sow the banks with the wild flowers that ought to be growing on them. This Human Pathway, rightly made, would be an example to Britain of the superiority of Road over Rail (following the natural curves of the country rather than jackknifing through them), as well as an opportunity for the upper classes to demonstrate their ability to use their muscles, serviceably, for once. The project appealed to a number of high-thinking undergraduates who felt some dim need to be useful to the lower classes.