The Tomorrow-Tamer

by Margaret Laurence

  Ruth was there, standing apart from the others. Each of the girls in turn filled a bucket, hoisted it up onto her head and sauntered off, still chattering and waving, without spilling a drop. Ruth was left alone to fill her bucket. Then, carrying it with both her hands clutched around the handle, she began to struggle back along the path. Perhaps foolishly, I smiled. It was done only in encouragement, but she mistook my meaning.

  “I expect it looks very funny,” she burst out. “I expect they all think so, too.”

  Before I could speak she had swung the full bucket and thrown it from her as hard as she could. The water struck at the ground, turning the dust to ochre mud, and the bucket rattled and rolled, dislodging pebbles along its way. The laughter among the feathery niim trees further up the path suddenly stopped, as a dozen pairs of hidden eyes peered. Looking bewildered, as though she were surprised and shocked by what she had done, Ruth sat down, her sturdy legs rigid in front of her, her child’s soft face creased in tears.

  “I didn’t know it would be like this, here,” she said at last. “I didn’t know at all.”

  In the evenings the senior girls were allowed to change from their school uniforms to African cloth, and they usually did so, for they were very concerned with their appearances and they rightly believed that the dark-printed lengths of mammy-cloth were more becoming to them than their short school frocks. Twice a week it was my responsibility to hobble over and make the evening rounds of the residence. Ruth, I noticed, changed into one of her English frocks, a different one each time, it appeared. Tact had never been my greatest strength, but I tried to suggest that it might be better if she would wear cloth like the rest.

  “Your father would be glad to buy one for you, I’m sure.”

  “I’ve got one–it was my mother’s,” Ruth replied. She frowned. “I don’t know how to put it on properly. They–they’d only laugh if I asked them. And anyway–”

  Her face took on that defiance which is really a betrayal of uncertainty.

  “I don’t like those cloths,” she said clearly. “They look like fancy-dress costumes to me. I’d feel frightfully silly in one. I suppose the people here haven’t got anything better to wear.”

  In class she had no restraint. She was clever, and she knew more about English literature and composition than the other girls, for she had been taught always in English, whereas for the first six years of their schooling they had received most of their instruction in their own language. But she would talk interminably, if allowed, and she rushed to answer my questions before anyone else had a chance. Abenaa, Mary Ansah, Yaa, Kwaale and all the rest would regard her with eyes which she possibly took to be full of awe for her erudition. I knew something of those bland brown eyes, however, and I believed them to contain only scorn for one who would so blatantly show off. But I was wrong. The afternoon Kwaale came to see me, I learned that in those first few weeks the other girls had believed, quite simply, that Ruth was insane.

  The junior teachers live in residence in the main building, but Miss Povey and I have our own bungalows, hers on one side of the grounds, mine on the other. A small grove of bamboo partially shields my house, and although Yindo the garden boy deplores my taste, I keep the great spiny clumps of prickly pear that grow beside my door. Hilda Povey grows zinnia and nasturtiums, and spends hours trying to coax an exiled rosebush into bloom, but I will have no English flowers. My garden burns magnificently with jungle lily and poinsettia, which Yindo gently uproots from the forest and puts in here.

  The rains had broken and the air was cool and lightened. The downpour began predictably each evening around dusk, so I was still able to have my tea outside. I was exceedingly fond of my garden chair. I discovered it years ago at Jillaram’s Silk Palace, a tatty little Indian shop in the side streets of the city which I seldom visited. The chair was rattan with a high fan-shaped back like a throne or a peacock’s tail, enamelled in Chinese red and decorated extravagantly with gilt. I had never seen anything so splendidly garish, so I bought it. The red had since been subdued by sun and the gilt was flaking, but I still sat enthroned in it each afternoon, my ebony sceptre by my side.

  I did not hear Kwaale until she greeted me. She was wearing her good cloth, an orange one patterned with small black stars that wavered in their firmament as she moved. Kwaale had never been unaware of her womanhood. Even as a child she walked with that same slow grace. We did not need to hope that she would go on and take teacher training or anything of that sort. She would marry when she left school, and I believed that would be the right thing for her to do. But sometimes it saddened me to think of what life would probably be for her, bearing too many children in too short a span of years, mourning the inevitable deaths of some of them, working bent double at the planting and hoeing until her slim straightness was warped. All at once I felt ashamed in the presence of this young queen, who had only an inheritance of poverty to return to, ashamed of my comfort and my heaviness, ashamed of my decrepit scarlet throne and trivial game.

  “Did you want to see me, Kwaale?” I spoke brusquely.

  “Yes.” She sat down on the stool at my feet. At first they had thought Ruth demented, she said, but now they had changed their minds. They had seen how well she did on her test papers. She was sane, they had decided, but this was so much the worse for her, for now she could be held responsible for what she did.

  “What does she do, Kwaale?”

  “She will not speak with us, nor eat with us. She pretends not to eat at all. But we have seen her. She has money, you know, from her father. The big palm grove–she goes there, and eats chocolate and biscuits. By herself. Not one to anyone else. Such a thing.”

  Kwaale was genuinely shocked. Where these girls came from, sharing was not done as a matter of moral principle, but as a necessary condition of life.

  “If one alone eats the honey,” Kwaale said primly in Twi, “it plagues his stomach.”

  It was, of course, a proverb. Kwaale was full of them. Her father was a village elder in Eburaso, and although he did precious little work, he was a highly respected man. He spoke continuously in proverbs and dispensed his wisdom freely. He was a charming person, but it was his wife, with the cassava and peppers and medicinal herbs she sold in the market, who had made it possible for some of their children to obtain an education.

  “That is not all,” Kwaale went on. “There is much worse. She becomes angry, even at the young ones. Yesterday Ayesha spoke to her, and she hit the child on the face. Ayesha–if it had been one of the others, even–”

  Ayesha, my youngest one, who had had to bear so much. Tears of rage must have come to my eyes, for Kwaale glanced at me, then lowered her head with that courtesy of the heart which forbids the observing of another’s pain. I struggled with myself to be fair to Ruth. I called to mind the bleakness of her face as she trudged up the path with the water bucket.

  “She is lonely, Kwaale, and does not quite know what to do. Try to be patient with her.”

  Kwaale sighed. “It is not easy–”

  Then her resentment gained command. “The stranger is like passing water in the drain,” she said fiercely.

  Another of her father’s proverbs. I looked at her in dismay.

  “There is a different saying on that subject,” I said dryly, at last. “We had it in chapel not so long ago–don’t you remember? From Exodus. ‘Thou shalt not oppress a stranger, for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt’.”

  But Kwaale’s eyes remained implacable. She had never been a stranger in the land of Egypt.

  When Kwaale had gone, I sat unmoving for a while in my ridiculous rattan throne. Then I saw Ayesha walking along the path, so I called to her. We spoke together in Twi, Ayesha and I. She had begun to learn English, but she found it difficult and I tried not to press her beyond her present limits. She did not even speak her own language very well, if it was actually her own language–no one knew for certain. She was tiny for her age, approximately six
. In her school dress she looked like one of those stick figures I used to draw as a child–billowing garments, straight lines for limbs, and the same disproportionately large eyes.

  “Come here, Ayesha.”

  Obediently she came. Then, after the first moment of watchful survey which she still found necessary to observe, she scrambled onto my lap. I was careful–we were all careful here–not to establish bonds of too-great affection. As Miss Povey was fond of reminding us, these were not our children. But with Ayesha, the rule was sometimes hard to remember. I touched her face lightly with my hand.

  “Did an older girl strike you, little one?”

  She nodded wordlessly. She did not look angry or upset. She made no bid for sympathy because she had no sense of having been unfairly treated. A slap was not a very great injury to Ayesha.

  “Why?” I asked gently. “Do you know why she did that thing?”

  She shook her head. Then she lifted her eyes to mine.

  “Where is the monkey today?”

  She wanted to ignore the slap, to forget it. Forgetfulness is her protection. Sometimes I wondered, though, how much could be truly forgotten and what happened to it when it was entombed.

  “The monkey is in my house,” I said. “Do you want to see her?”

  “Yes.” So we walked inside and brought her out into the garden, my small and regal Ankyeo who was named, perhaps frivolously, after a great queen mother of this country. I did not know what species of monkey Ankyeo was. She was delicate-boned as a bird, and her fur was silver. She picked with her doll fingers at a pink hibiscus blossom, and Ayesha laughed. I wanted to make Ankyeo perform all her tricks, in order to hear again that rare laughter. But I knew I must not try to go too fast. After a while Ayesha tired of watching the monkey and sat cross-legged beside my chair, the old look of passivity on her face. We would have to move indoors before the rain started, but for the moment I left her as she was.

  Ruth did not approach silently, as Kwaale and Ayesha had done, but with a loud crunching of shoes on the gravel path. When she saw Ayesha she stopped.

  “I suppose you know.”

  “Yes. But it was not Ayesha who told me.”

  “Who, then?”

  Of course I would not tell her. Her face grew sullen.

  “Whoever it was, I think it was rotten of her to tell–”

  “It did not appear that way to the girl in question. She was protecting the others from you, and that is a higher good in her eyes than any individual honour in not tattling.”

  “Protecting–from me?” There was desolation in her voice, and I relented.

  “They will change, Ruth, once they see they can trust you. Why did you hit Ayesha?”

  “It was a stupid thing to do,” Ruth said in a voice almost inaudible with shame, “and I felt awful about it, and I’m terribly sorry. But she–she kept asking me something, you see, over and over again, in a sort of whining voice, and I–I just couldn’t stand it anymore.”

  “What did she ask you?”

  “How should I know?” Ruth said. “I don’t speak Twi.”

  I stared at her. “Not–any? I thought you might be a little rusty, but I never imagined–my dear child, it’s your own language, after all.”

  “My father has always spoken English to me,” she said. “My mother spoke in Twi, I suppose, but she died when I was under a year old.”

  “Why on earth didn’t you tell the girls?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know why I didn’t–”

  I noticed then how much thinner she had grown and how her expression had altered. She no longer looked like a child. Her eyes were implacable as Kwaale’s.

  “They don’t know anything outside this place,” she said. “I don’t care if I can’t understand what they’re saying to each other. I’m not interested, anyway.”

  Then her glance went to Ayesha once more.

  “But why were they so angry–about her? I know it was mean, and I said I was sorry. But the way they all looked–”

  “Ayesha was found by the police in Lagos,” I said reluctantly. “She was sent back to this country because one of the constables recognized her speech as Twi. We heard about her and offered to have her here. There are many like her, I’m afraid, who are not found or heard about. She must have been stolen, you see, or sold when she was very young. She has not been able to tell us much. But the Nigerian police traced her back to several slave-dealers. When they discovered her she was being used as a child prostitute. She was very injured when she came to us here.”

  Ruth put her head down on her hands. She sat without speaking. Then her shoulders, hunched and still, began to tremble.

  “You didn’t know,” I said. “There’s no point in reproaching yourself now.”

  She looked up at me with a kind of naive horror, the look of someone who recognizes for the first time the existence of cruelty.

  “Things like that really happen here?”

  I sighed. “Not just here. Evil does not select one place for its province.”

  But I could see that she did not believe me. The wind was beginning to rise, so we went indoors. Ayesha carried the stool, Ruth lifted my red throne, and I limped after them, feeling exhausted and not at all convinced just then that God was in His heaven. What a mercy for me that the church in whose mission school I had spent much of my adult life did not possess the means of scrutinizing too precisely the souls of its faithful servants.

  We had barely got inside the bungalow when Ayesha missed the monkey. She flew outside to look for it, but no amount of searching revealed Ankyeo. Certain the monkey was gone forever, Ayesha threw herself down on the damp ground. While the wind moaned and screeched, the child, who never wept for herself, wept for a lost monkey and would not be comforted. I did not dare kneel beside her. My leg was too unreliable, and I knew I would not be able to get up again. I stood there, lumpish and helpless, while Ruth in the doorway shivered in her thin and daisied dress.

  Then, like a veritable angel of the Lord, Yindo appeared, carrying Ankyeo. Immediately I experienced a resurrection of faith, while at the same time thinking how frail and fickle my belief must be, to be so influenced by a child and a silver-furred monkey.

  Yindo grinned and knelt beside Ayesha. He was no more than sixteen, a tall thin-wristed boy, a Dagomba from the northern desert. He had come here when he was twelve, one of the scores of young who were herded down each year to work the cocoa farms because their own arid land had no place for them. He was one of our best garden boys, but he could not speak to anyone around here except in hesitant pidgin English, for no one here knew his language. His speech lack never bothered him with Ayesha. The two communicated in some fashion without words. He put the monkey in her arms and she held Ankyeo closely. Then she made a slight and courtly bow to Yindo. He laughed and shook his head. Drawing from his pocket a small charm, he showed it to her. It was the dried head of a chameleon, with blue glass beads and a puff of unwholesome-looking fur tied around it. Ayesha understood at once that it was this object which had enabled Yindo to find the monkey. She made another and deeper obeisance and from her own pocket drew the only thing she had to offer, a toffee wrapped in silver foil which I had given her at least two weeks ago. Yindo took it, touched it to his talisman, and put both carefully away.

  Ruth had not missed the significance of the ritual. Her eyes were dilated with curiosity and contempt.

  “He believes in it, doesn’t he?” she said. “He actually believes in it.”

  “Don’t be so quick to condemn the things you don’t comprehend,” I said sharply.

  “I think it’s horrible.” She sounded frightened. “He’s just a savage, isn’t he, just a–”

  “Stop it, Ruth. That’s quite enough.”

  “I hate it here!” she cried. “I wish I were back at home.”

  “Child,” I said, “this is your home.”

  She did not reply, but the denial in her face made me marvel at my own hypocrisy.

&nb
sp; Each Friday Dr. Quansah drove over to see Ruth, and usually on these afternoons he would call in at my bungalow for a few minutes to discuss her progress. At first our conversations were completely false, each of us politely telling the other that Ruth was getting on reasonably well. Then one day he dropped the pretence.

  “She is very unhappy, isn’t she? Please–don’t think I am blaming you, Miss Nedden. Myself, rather. It is too different. What should I have done, all those years ago?”

  “Don’t be offended, Dr. Quansah, but why wasn’t she taught her own language?”

  He waited a long moment before replying. He studied the clear amber tea in his cup.

  “I was brought up in a small village,” he said at last. “English came hard to me. When I went to Secondary School I experienced great difficulty at first in understanding even the gist of the lectures. I was determined that the same thing would not happen to Ruth. I suppose I imagined she would pick up her own language easily, once she returned here, as though the knowledge of one’s family tongue was inherited. Of course, if her mother had lived–”

  He set down the teacup and knotted his huge hands together in an unexpressed anguish that was painful to see.

  “Both of them uprooted,” he said. “It was my fault, I guess, and yet–”

  He fell silent. Finally, his need to speak was greater than his reluctance to reveal himself.

  “You see, my wife hated England, always. I knew, although she never spoke of it. Such women don’t. She was a quiet woman, gentle and–obedient. My parents had chosen her and I had married her when I was a very young man, before I first left this country. Our differences were not so great, then, but later in those years in London–she was like a plant, expected to grow where the soil is not suitable for it. My friends and associates–the places I went for dinner–she did not accompany me. I never asked her to entertain those people in our house. I could not–you see that?”

  I nodded and he continued in the same low voice with its burden of self-reproach.

  “She was illiterate,” he said. “She did not know anything of my life, as it became. She did not want to know. She refused to learn. I was–impatient with her. I know that. But–”