Manly Pursuits

by Ann Harries

  And the next album was devoted to little girls. They leaned, one at a time, against trees, staircases, walls, each other; they lay sprawled among cushions, pillows, sheets. They played violins, climbed ladders, held kittens, read books. Group pictures represented the stories of Little Red Riding Hood, St George and the Dragon, Twelfth Night, all in fancy dress. In the ‘Cherry Group’, one little girl dangled a cherry over another’s lips. Yet how knowing those young females looked! Their average age must have been six or seven, yet each child had a world-weary glint in her eye, an ambiguous smile on her lips. They were the loveliest portraits I had ever seen.

  ‘Tea’s ready!’ cried Dodgson. The buttered muffins were hot. I murmured words of praise while sipping the lukewarm liquid. My inarticulate compliments released a wave of new energy from my host. His stammer had vanished.

  ‘At all costs, the children must be absolutely themselves; I must take them unawares – even if it means producing a teacup from my ear …’ (and indeed a teacup identical to those from which we were sipping materialised in Dodgson’s hand as he brushed it against his head) ‘or spending half an hour climbing up ladders or sliding down snakes. Or playing with them in the dressing-up box.’ His gentle eyes grew dreamy. ‘The clouds of glory. The state of innocence. Excuse me.’

  He darted across the room to read a thermometer placed near an oil stove. The reading caused him to adjust the heat of the stove; then, to my surprise, he moved on to another thermometer and another stove, which was also adjusted; then two further thermometers and stoves, which this time he left untouched.

  ‘My theory,’ he said as he hurried back to the teapot, ‘is that all d-draughts will die if the temperature is the same throughout the room. Another muffin? More tea? No?’

  As I stood up, as if to leave, he cried out: ‘Please stay a little longer, Mr Wills! It is not often that I am visited by a fellow-photographer and a zoologist all rolled into one! We must visit the University Museum together and you must tell me about the poor old Dodo, with whom I do so identify!’

  And so began a ten-year friendship, of sorts.

  Cape Town 1899

  ‘Professor Wills?’

  A nervous hand tugged at my arm.

  I awoke in a state of panic, quite unable to locate myself: had I fallen asleep in the Fellows’ Garden grown suddenly wild …?

  ‘I’m so sorry to waken you, but this is my only chance.’

  I turned my head to look down at the speaker, who was now sitting on the bench with me.

  She returned my gaze with steady brown eyes, though her lips could not keep still, as if a barrage of words was waiting to burst through them. Upon her head she wore a concoction of straw and lace and battered silk roses, from beneath which escaped several wild black curls. Even I could recognise that here was a woman to whom clothes were of no importance whatsoever: her bottle-green jacket was ill-matched with her yellowish complexion, and she had made no effort to contain her thickening girth within the incarceration of the female stay. She must have been one of the shortest women I have ever seen – her head scarcely reached my shoulder – but the extreme straightness of her back gave her a dignity that far outweighed any failure to conform to the ideal female figure. She wore no jewellery.

  I recognised her at once as the woman in my photograph.

  ‘Madam, why do you follow me?’

  Her eyes began to swim with some unimaginable emotion, and her low voice trembled.

  ‘I am relying on you, Professor, to help me save this country from total catastrophe!’

  If she had not spoken so solemnly I would have burst into embarrassed laughter; the woman was clearly deranged. Instead of laughing, however, I rounded my eyes as if speaking to Maria and said, to humour her: ‘Madam, I’m afraid I have had no experience of saving countries from catastrophe. I think you have the wrong man.’

  On hearing my words her face froze for a moment as if she realised she did indeed have the wrong man; then a somewhat haughty expression came over her features as she said: ‘Please do not patronise me, Professor. I am quite serious, as you will hear.’

  Immediately adjusting the tone of my voice so as not to incur her anger, I asked: ‘Why me? You don’t even know me.’

  ‘Oh, but I do!’ she at once exclaimed. ‘I have watched you most carefully these past few days and I can see you are a kind, dear Englishman who loves his birds and will do anything to ensure their survival. But more than that – I can see you have the ear of the most powerful man in the Cape!’

  At this point everything in me rose up and told me to turn my back on this woman, to run away from her as fast as my thin legs would carry me, to escape her mesmerising eyes and passionate speech – but my body would not listen to the wisdom of my brain. Like a hopeless insect I was trapped in the web of her strong, mad will.

  ‘What is it you wish me to do?’ I delivered this line of monosyllables without emotion, though my heart was pounding with anxiety – and a form of unwilling gratitude as well, for no one has ever called me a kind, dear Englishman, though as for the survival of my birds – I would rather not think about that.

  At this point a shout of childish laughter rose from the lawns below. The entire Kipling family, nurse and all, had tumbled into the garden and were romping around with what appeared to be a small lion cub. My companion rose at once. ‘Please follow me, Professor. I must not be seen.’

  As there seemed to be no question of my refusing her anything, I leapt to my feet and plunged after her, up the very path I had so recently descended. We rushed upwards at a pace that was too fast for me; nevertheless I called out to the rear of her extraordinary hat: ‘May I ask your name and who you are?’

  ‘My name is Olive,’ she called back. ‘I write books.’

  This reply did not altogether surprise me. In fact, the thought that I might be in the presence of Miss Olive Schreiner had crossed my mind almost at once. Now a dozen questions sprang to my lips, but I thought to save my breath till we sat down.

  She was leading me to Titania’s grove. Her progress through the trees was slowing down inexplicably, but she was nevertheless driven to continue speaking.

  ‘I have written a pamphlet.’ Her voice rang out clear and confident, a voice practised in oratory before large audiences, I could tell. ‘It is an English person’s view of the situation. In it I try to open the eyes of the people of England to the fact that they are being duped by a man who thinks he is Napoleon. I explain that everything must be done to prevent – this –country from – slipping into an abyss of – hatred – from which it will – take – generations – to – crawl – out!’ Her voice began to lose its clarity, as if her vocal cords had been punctured by a spiky growth in her throat. Nevertheless it still rose imperiously above her hat as she called to me in cadences as emphatic as those of a Beethoven symphony: ‘Professor Wills – I – am – talking about – war! A war – which – you – can – help me – prevent!’

  By now she was having to stop every few yards to gasp for air. My own breathing was by no means regular, as a result of the uphill gradient, but I certainly did not yet find it necessary to pant. By the time she had reached the grove, she was no longer able to speak, and collapsed upon a rock by the stream, her shoulders heaving.

  I waited for her breathing to regulate itself, becoming aware that it was not so much the inhalation she found problematic as the process of expelling the air that had found its way into her lungs, which she managed to do only with a great deal of shallow coughing.

  ‘Forgive me,’ she wheezed, in between coughs. Somehow she was able to fumble at her hat pins and remove her great load of millinery, which she tossed carelessly on to the ground.

  ‘Can I be of any help to you?’ I was obliged by good manners to ask.

  ‘If only you could.’ Her breathing had settled enough now for her to be able to infuse these words with bitterness. ‘We asthmatics await the miracle cure!’

  This demonstration of physical frailty had c
reated a sudden bond of sympathy between us, and I considered regaling her with a description of my own recent bronchial attack, which had left its mark in a persistent dry cough, not unlike hers. However, before I had time to embark upon this interesting topic, she had begun to speak again, her hands pressed down hard against her knees so that her back was arched and her chest hollowed, a posture that evidently facilitated her inhalations – or exhalations, I could not be sure. She was looking at me out of the corner of her eyes, with an expression on her face which I could only call coy.

  ‘Do you know why I trust you, Professor?’

  ‘I cannot even begin to think.’ I cast my eye around for somewhere remotely comfortable to sit.

  ‘I trust you because the Child trusts you.’

  ‘You know little Maria, then,’ I asked cautiously.

  She was too busy dividing her breath between speech and exhalations to listen to me, though, as I was to learn, listening was not something that came easily to her. ‘I’ve seen you playing games with her. I’ve heard your beautiful whistling. What further recommendation do I need as to your good character?’

  ‘I am a humble Oxford don,’ I said, ‘whose expertise is in the field of ornithology. I cannot see this as a suitable qualification for averting wars.’

  ‘But that’s just what you aren’t!’ she cried in a stronger voice, her asthma attack evidently abating. ‘At least, you may be humble in your own eyes. But remember that He –’ and here she flicked her fingers in the direction of the Great Granary, an expression of distaste upon her face – ‘has the greatest possible reverence for Oxford. You must know that He took time from the diamond fields to gain an Oxford degree in order to qualify as a superior human being.’ The bitterness in her voice did not escape me.

  She stopped short and sank into a deep reverie, quite as intense as her passionate words. After a full minute of silence I asked her cautiously: ‘Have you known him long?’

  She raised her head. In her dark eyes I could see luminous memories brimming, like water lifted from the deepest well, and her voice, when she at last spoke, quavered a little.

  ‘Professor Wills, may I tell you something that no one else, not even my husband, has heard before?’

  Abandoning all thoughts of a prolonged afternoon rest, I attempted to smile benignly, settled myself on a fallen tree trunk and prepared myself for yet another set of confessions.

  Olive Reveals A Secret

  ‘Some say that the diamond mine at New Rush in the early seventies was a chasm of the damned, the inner circle of an inferno, where Satan himself reigned among a hundred thousand tormented souls. Have you ever see Gustave Doré’s engravings which illustrate Dante’s journey through the rings of hell? Gaze at them, and you will at once see a close representation of life inside the yawning pit which only two years earlier had been a little hill upon which scrawny sheep nosed for green shoots among the thorn bushes. Can you, an Oxford don, even begin to imagine the stench, the dust, the squalor, the drunkenness of the camps that surrounded this hell-hole? Yet it was upon this most unlikely site that I experienced a revelation so intense that it was to change utterly the life of this obscure missionary’s daughter. I was a mere seventeen years when I arrived at the New Rush mining camp – the name was changed to Kimberley during the ten months I spent there with my sister and brother.’

  Miss Schreiner appeared to be serenely confident that her story would be of irresistible interest to me. Her eyes did not leave my face for a second. ‘Theo was what they called a Digger. He worked fourteen hours a day on his claim with a gang of Kaffirs. The natives picked, shovelled, hauled and sifted, while Theo sat under an awning outside his tent and sorted through the red gravel they had mined. Ettie did what she could to provide him with some home comforts within their tent. Through their despair at the excesses of gambling and drinking that dominated life on the fields – for both belonged to various Temperance organisations – the hope that Theo would find a large diamond glittered in their dismal lives quite as brightly as the precious stones themselves.’ She sighed deeply and shook her head.

  ‘Although there was more than enough Cape Brandy there was never enough water; we suffered from scurvy because of a lack of fresh vegetables, and from dysentery because of primitive sanitation, and the flies! The canvas walls were black with flies: they dropped into your tea and coffee and cooking food; they buzzed in your ears and settled on plates and crawled over your dry lips, hoping to find a moist crack into which they could insert their busy probosces – I’m sorry if I disgust you, Professor – you have turned quite pale!’ And indeed I felt quite faint at the image she had just conjured. Although as a child I had pulled the wings off flies, and, as a student, dissected them under microscopes, I have never allowed an insect to crawl across my face. (Alfred was not an insect.)

  ‘But more terrifying than the flies, Professor, were the dust-storms.’ And here she gave an involuntary shudder, though I thought I might prefer dust to flies.

  ‘We would always know when one was about to break: for an hour or so a strange, almost tangible silence would fall upon the camps. Then a faint breeze would flutter among the huts and chase bits of paper into the air. Within minutes corrugated-iron roofs began to rattle, tent ropes creaked and strained, and you could see a dense brown wall blustering towards you from a distance. The closer it got to the camp the thicker it became: then tents were ripped out of the ground, shacks and shanties collapsed like houses of cards, pots and pans rolled across the veld, and vast clouds of dust engulfed the whole settlement. For hours afterwards we became diggers of a different kind as we struggled to spade out the layers of dust and grit that had accumulated in our tent – and which now coated our eyes, mouths, food, clothes and bedding. I remember breathing in clouds of dust and breathing it out again in clouds, like steam from a kettle.

  ‘Afterwards, deep rumbles of thunder would promise refreshing rain – but sometimes the thunderstorms were as terrifying as the dust-storms. Tents would be flooded in the downpour, the ground became sodden, everything was unbearably wet and filthy; often we had to choose between sleeping in a pool of water or upon the table.’ She scrutinised my face even more closely, to see if I appreciated the horror of what she was saying. ‘Needless to say, as a woman I was expected to perform women’s tasks, well away from the masculine preserve of the diamond fields: I helped Ettie tidy our tent, fetched water from the river and wells (two buckets a day was all we were allowed), picked flowers and taught in the night schools. Occasionally I helped at the sorting table, sieving and washing the diamondiferous pebbles. Around us seethed thousands of natives who kicked up the red sand in clouds above their heads; some stark-naked savages from the interior, some half-dressed colonial blacks, but all with one thought in their heads: the guns they would buy with the money they earned. It was a rough, raw environment, Professor.’ She paused for a moment, her eyes and mouth twitching with the emotions awoken by ghastly memories –then set off again.

  ‘Some Diggers who had struck it rich had clubbed together into “messes”: they shared food, expenses and servants. To signal that they had no shortage of food, they had commandeered large trees from which they hung legs of mutton like Christmas decorations. These young bachelors were on the whole a better class of person, not the drunkards and desperadoes who spent all their free time reeling from bars to gambling houses to back-street brothels. I, of course, took no interest in these young men who altogether lacked the spiritual dimension which is of the first importance to me in any man or woman. What little spare time I had was spent reading – John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, John Ruskin – or writing. I had started work on various stories and novels, but could not bring myself to believe my writing was of any value … However, I could not help noticing a tall, fair-haired youth, not much older than myself, whose individual behaviour distinguished him from his companions–’

  At that moment the sound of a disturbance caused us to raise our heads in alarm. A grou
p of treetops began to thrash and sway until out of the foliage exploded a couple of black eagles, their powerful wings whirring like machines. Higher and higher they tumbled into the mountain air, emitting shrieks and howls so piercing that the rest of the forest held its breath. Were they mating or were they marauding? They wheeled in ever larger circles, one apparently chasing the other. My companion, too, was silenced by this outburst, which ceased as suddenly as it had started, as both birds glided back to the very spot from which they had burst.

  ‘Oh look!’ She darted from the bench to pick up a gigantic black feather that had drifted down and landed on the very rim of her discarded hat. Now, as she jabbed the feather into the jumble of lace and roses, it struck me that the Colossus, too, cared little for his appearance because he, like her, was not quite right in the head! You could see it at once in their eyes: a certain madness that goes with obsession on a grand scale, obsessions and dreams that focus not on people or objects, but on whole countries, races, Empires. I peered at her eyes more closely, and fancied I saw in them the great diamond mine of which she spoke with such passion, and more besides that made me uneasy.

  Her hat now reset upon her black curls, she resumed her monologue as if nothing had happened. This young man first came to my attention when I carried a lunch pail to Theo, at work on his claim. My brother was supervising his labourers as they hauled up leather buckets of ore from the bottom of the pit on aerial tramwires, and dumped the flame-coloured gravel into waiting mule carts. All around him the perpetual hum of manual labour rose from the chasm itself: the thud of pick and shovel against the soil, the clank of rope and bucket, the shouted commands between pit and roadway, the breathy songs of native gangs as they worked deep in the crater that was once a kopje. The white supervisors bustled about, sometimes scrambling down the ladderworks into the pit to stand over their gangs to prevent them from hiding – and swallowing – the diamonds their spades had exposed. Let me not talk of the curse of illicit diamond buying, the greatest of all the plagues of the fields, to which every ruined Digger attributed his failure …’