The Missionary's Wife

by Tim Jeal

  *

  Clara could not remember ever being so miserable. Her days were spent in endless meditation on the theme of Robert. Sometimes her longing for his tangible presence was almost too painful to be borne. Yet in spite of her unhappiness, she found that she still had faith in her future. She told herself that people survived even after a spouse had disappeared or died; and hers was not even missing. Surely she could wait courageously for their reunion.

  Just over four months from the day of Robert’s departure, Clara received a letter from him. In it, Robert listed various objectives achieved and others still eluding him. There were anecdotes about the chief and his wives, and about the principal headmen. Yet whether the chief, or anyone else, had been converted, Clara was not told. Nor was this her only disappointment. Robert’s concluding lines were loving, but though she read them many times to tease out every nuance, she still found them insufficiently ardent. In writing to him, she was more passionate and made it clear how much he was missed, even though she knew her letters could not reach him unless a trader rode out to his remote kraal from the nearest mining settlement.

  Sitting in her room, she often recalled individual conversations and acts of love. Sometimes she walked to places they had visited and retraced their steps, as if some vestige of him still lingered there. She was haunted by him – by his ascetic, noble face, by his hands and limbs and body, by his high aims. And always she longed for his next letter. The geographical impediments to their correspondence did not spare her from feeling bitter when, yet again, the postman’s visit failed to yield the thing on earth she most desired.

  Another two months passed without a word, and Clara fought a losing battle against self-pity. Robert might have been dead for weeks, for all she knew. Her father never mentioned this possibility, but Clara suspected that he harboured hopes that the long silence might indeed end with sorrowful news. Certainly, when the next letter eventually came, Alfred was not pleased. Robert informed Clara that the chief’s conversion was imminent and that she should plan to sail for Cape Town at the end of July, months earlier than she had anticipated in her most optimistic daydreams. She felt so rich in happiness that her father’s sighs and long faces made no impression upon her.

  In his letter, Robert advised her to make her travel plans in concert with the foreign secretary of the London Missionary Society, to whom he himself had already written. If no other missionaries and their wives were travelling up from the Cape to Mashonaland, the secretary, Mr Tidman, would inquire whether any Colonial Office staff or any settlers could accompany her during the final stages of her journey. It was exciting to be advised to sew gold sovereigns into the lining of her clothes; and while she tried not to romanticize her journey, she had read too many books by Ballantyne and Rider Haggard not to be thrilled by the ‘Dark Continent’. She had been born the year before Dr Livingstone died, on his knees; and pictures of episodes from his life had stayed with her since Sunday school. Clara would travel by train from the Cape to Mafeking, and thence by coach via Crocodile Pools to Bulawayo and finally by mail cart to Belingwe and Mponda’s kraal.

  If her father could only have managed to be less fatalistic and grief-stricken, this time of waiting could have been among the happiest periods of Clara’s life. But the poor man’s mood was one of bereavement. Yet she still managed to distance herself enough to dream happily of her future. What Robert had struggled so hard to achieve was about to come to pass. The chief had chosen Christ, and this glorious act of faith had made it possible for Clara’s great adventure to begin.

  CHAPTER 3

  For a week the mail cart had been rumbling through a dusty landscape of scrubby trees and unruly hillsides, carved by dry ravines. The half-caste driver gazed ahead with weary, bloodshot eyes as he whipped up his team of mules for another climb, before rewarding himself with a heavy swig of brandy.

  ‘Hirrrie, yoh doppers! Slaagte … Verdommeder skepsels!’ he yelled, between lashes with his long giraffe-hide whip.

  Clara held on tightly as she was bounced and buffeted under the straining canvas. She had experienced discomfort before, but never for such long periods of time. All her joints had been jarred, and her rib cage ached as if she had fallen from a horse. She felt humiliatingly weaker than her travelling companions: the middle-aged wife of the Colonial Office commissioner for Mazoe District and a German mining engineer. Since both were fatter than Clara, they seemed able to absorb constant jolts and bumps while retaining contact with their seats – whereas she, to do the same, had to cling to one of the metal hoops that held up the canvas roof. Clara’s lips and chin were swollen with insect bites, and her face glowed like a farm girl’s; but she cared nothing for the loss of her fashionable pallor. Indeed, there were times when she knew feelings of euphoria sweeter than any experienced in her comfortable past. To her these discomforts were rites of passage into Robert’s harsh but purpose-filled life; and it was a matter of pride that she could endure them bravely.

  Red dust billowed in thick clouds behind the mail cart and, with a following wind, blew in and choked the travellers. It clung to the faint down on Clara’s cheeks and powdered the black moustache and crinkly hair of the German on the bench opposite, giving this prosaic man a strangely theatrical appearance. Next to him, unsoiled behind her chiffon veil, sat the pale-complexioned commissioner’s wife. Mrs Hartley was in her early forties – twenty years Clara’s senior. In England, she had promised Mr Tidman, the mission secretary, to ‘keep an eye on young Mrs Haslam’, but so far – whether in steamship staterooms or railway carriages, or in the archaic leather-sprung Wild West, Buffalo Bill, Deadwood coach on the road to Bulawayo – there had been plenty of other people to draw Mrs Hartley’s attention. Now, in the mail cart, with only the monosyllabic German to divert her, the full force of the woman’s solicitude fell upon Clara.

  Copious advice was suddenly proffered on matters such as the type of clothing most likely to keep out ticks, mosquitoes, and other biting insects – all of which, according to Mrs Hartley, could penetrate linen sleeves and woollen stockings and, it seemed to Clara, every garment she had brought. Clara was not offended to be treated like a greenhorn, but she was angry to find that this wife of a minor official should actually look down upon her for no better reason than her marriage to a missionary. She had been warned that the wives of civil servants, soldiers, and the richer settlers possessed more social cachet in colonial circles than a nonconformist missionary’s wife. The prejudice was hurtful at first hand, less for the affront to herself than for the insult to good men like Robert.

  As the evening sky burned with the improbable colours of a parrot’s plumage, Mrs Hartley questioned Herr Frübeck about the goldfields he had surveyed. If she could make a successful speculation, she confessed, she would swiftly force her husband home.

  ‘Even if he values his work here?’ asked Clara.

  Mrs Hartley smiled serenely. ‘Just you wait, my dear. In a month or two you’ll dream every night about seeing another white face – even if its owner is the stupidest man on earth.’

  Drained by the mail cart’s queasily mesmeric motion, Clara lacked the energy to argue. With Robert always by her side, why would she be tormented by longings to see other white people?

  After supping on bully beef and rice, the three passengers curled up on the floor of the cart, among the mailbags. Outside, the driver and the brakeman built a fire to keep off wild beasts. While Clara watched warm shadows flickering through the canvas, she imagined Robert making love to her. A week, she told herself joyfully. Only a week, my dearest. Across the veld, a creature howled, a small sound in the vast solitude.

  *

  The sun had been up for an hour when the driver of the mail cart galvanized his mules into a shambling canter with a blast on his horn. Clara lifted the canvas. In the distance she saw some low buildings and a raised water tank. Belingwe Camp was a typical tin-hut African township, but Clara was ecstatic to be there. While Mrs Hartley and Herr Frübeck would tra
vel on with the mail cart, Clara was to complete her journey in another vehicle. Here she expected to meet her new driver, John Dukes, an artisan sent out six weeks ahead of her by the London Missionary Society to assist her husband with carpentry and building.

  Along a street of tin shacks and wattle-and-daub houses, there were a store, an eating house, a hotel, a billiard hall, a feed stable, and a toolhouse. Dogs were barking madly and men shouting as the mules slowed to a trot. Mrs Hartley powdered her cheeks before tying her veil under her chin.

  The driver twisted around to address Clara between yells at the mules. ‘Maxim Hotel, miss? Or Mr Greene’s lodgings? Keeps a very nice bar, does Baas Greene.’ The man’s breath reeked of brandy.

  ‘The Maxim will do very well.’

  But first the mail cart halted outside the main store, which also served as the post office. The mails were being tossed out as a red-faced man pushed his way through the crowd of onlookers.

  ‘Moses,’ he shouted at the driver. ‘D’you have a Mrs Haslam on board?’

  ‘That’s me,’ called Clara, stepping down from the tailboard.

  ‘They’ve news for you inside, ma’am.’

  Clara watched the man stride back into the store. His solemn expression had scared her.

  ‘Nothing untoward, I hope,’ gasped Mrs Hartley, following hard on Clara’s heels. Around them, men were buying cartridges, candles, and canned provisions to take to distant diggings. The air was thick with the smell of paraffin and new leather. The man led the two women through the heaps of saddlery and wagon gear to a counter protected by a grille. Clara found herself facing a balding man in a tartan waistcoat.

  ‘Sad news, I fear, Mrs Haslam.’

  ‘My husband?’ she whispered.

  ‘John Dukes … He died at Tuli a month back. Bad place for fever.’

  ‘Poor man,’ murmured Clara, feeling too much relief about Robert to start pretending to be grieved over an unknown man’s fate.

  ‘What will you do now?’ demanded Mrs Hartley. ‘A lone female can’t be left alone with these bar-room loafers.’

  Clara appealed to the man behind the grille. ‘Will nobody take me to the mission?’

  The postmaster slapped at a fly that had settled on his freckled scalp. ‘You’ll have to ask around, ma’am.’

  ‘Precious little chivalry in a place like this,’ sighed Mrs Hartley. She fixed Clara with pitying eyes. ‘To be perfectly frank, Mrs Haslam, it was wrong of your husband not to come for you himself.’

  Clara felt blood rush to her cheeks. ‘Your husband didn’t come for you,’ she blurted out.

  ‘My dear, I’ve made this trip dozens of times before. And unlike you, I’m not trying to find a godforsaken kraal that’s not even on the map.’

  Clara was trembling. How dare the woman criticize Robert? Did she have the first idea about the importance of his work? And why was she ignoring the fact that Robert had relied upon Mr Dukes to meet her? Determined to confound Mrs Hartley with icy calmness, Clara was dismayed to find her voice breathless and unstable. ‘He couldn’t … couldn’t possibly leave his people … not for weeks on end just after the chief’s conversion.’

  ‘They managed quite well before he came.’

  The postmaster chose this moment to thrust a printed page under the grille: it gave notice of a reward being offered for information about the fate of three prospectors who had disappeared a month earlier. ‘They were hunting oribi … Small antelope. They race ’em here, like dogs, see.’

  The smudged photograph showed three bearded young men gazing at the camera with a hint of swagger in their pose. Africa can do its worst, they seemed to say, but we can take it. One wore a straw hat with a striped ribbon around the brim, another sported a thick leather belt with a curious clasp.

  ‘What happened to them?’ snapped Mrs Hartley.

  The man pulled a face. ‘Lost their way, I’d say. Died of thirst, most likely.’

  Mrs Hartley shook her head scornfully, then said very firmly to Clara, ‘You’ll have to come with us now.’

  ‘I can’t do that. Someone’s sure to take me … and if not, well, my husband is bound to fetch me in a week or two.’

  Mrs Hartley studied the poster again, then turned to the postmaster. ‘If these men weren’t murdered, I’m a Chinaman.’

  ‘It’s certainly mysterious, ma’am.’

  Mrs Hartley raised her veil. ‘Don’t fool with me. I’m married to a district commissioner.’ She placed a proprietary hand on Clara’s arm. ‘Frankly, my dear, the niggers have a bad time hereabouts. They grow their own food and only need a yard of cloth to cover themselves. So money means nothing. Of course they refuse to work down the mines, unless forced to.’

  ‘Forced?’ echoed Clara, her stomach tightening. ‘Please be truthful,’ – she appealed to the postmaster – ‘was Mr Dukes murdered too?’

  The man kept his head in his ledger. ‘Blackwater fever, I’ve heard.’

  Clara felt Mrs Hartley touch her elbow and begin to steer her away, past a counter heaped high with brandy bottles, towards the street. She felt shaky and confused. Her only immediate hope of seeing Robert would be to stay on and find someone willing to take her to the mission. But if she failed, and had to wait for Robert himself, how long might she be stranded in this frontier town on her own? In England, she had never spent a night away from home in a place where she was not known. She found Mrs Hartley domineering, but the prospect of her departure had suddenly become frightening.

  *

  A week after watching the mail cart clatter out of town under its cloud of dust and flies, Clara was facing the fact that none of the miners and prospectors were willing to help her. Her hotel had turned out to be the kind of place no decent woman in Sarston would have dared put her nose into. On most evenings there was a drunken brawl in the bar or in the supper room. Since prices were astonishingly high, she had moved out into a quieter lodging house, where meals were rarely more elaborate than bread and cold meat. Without economies, the fifty guineas sewn into the lining of her skirt could not last until a remittance reached her from England.

  In the lodging house, Clara dragged the iron bedstead over to the window and sat on the lumpy mattress for hours, watching for carts or coaches. Life might be quieter here, but she grew to loathe her room, with its cracked mirror and its dressing table made from a packing case. The walls and floor, even the gimcrack sticks of furniture, were crisscrossed with ant trails of sugary-looking red earth.

  As the sun edged across from wall to wall with infinite slowness, Clara was tormented by Robert’s proximity. If I were a bird, she thought, I would fly to him. Her heart beat faster when she imagined him already approaching. As soon as there was any doubt in his mind about her meeting up with the artisan, he would set out at once.

  One hot afternoon, she walked a mile out of town to the prospectors’ camp, with its tattered tents and shanties. Picking her way through the meat tins and broken bottles that littered the stubble, she gazed towards the river. Below her in the shallow water, scores of men were engaged in the tedious process of washing gravel in pans and sluice boxes. The heat was surging up through the soles of her shoes as she made for the shade of some mahogany trees.

  Where the road crossed the riverbed, several girls were washing clothes in a pool; they were bare to the waist and glistened with sweat. They waved to Clara, who waved back. The rutted clay of the wagon track swam in the heat haze, as desolate and empty as it always was.

  Might Robert have set out, only to meet with the same fate as John Dukes? She was pondering this cruel possibility, when her attention was gripped. Two mounted men were splashing across the ford and riding on in the direction of the town. They had clearly come from afar, and so might be passing through. As if gazing upon the horsemen of the Apocalypse, Clara uttered a faint cry and ran after them. Behind her, an ox wagon lumbered out of the mopane woods towards the ford.

  When Clara reached the Maxim Hotel, she learned that the men had tak
en rooms and were resting. Outside, their oxen were being unyoked. Before returning to her lodgings, she left a note with the sleepy doorman. In it, she explained that she was a woman on her own, needing unspecified but urgent assistance. Would they kindly spare her a few minutes later that evening? She could be contacted opposite at Mackenzie’s lodging house.

  As evening drew in, diggers in broad-brimmed hats and muddy moleskins stumbled up from the river, eager for refreshment. The smell of spirits and tobacco wafted in at Clara’s window. A group of Mashona girls clustered around the hotel door, calling out, ‘Jig-jig two sheeleeng’; they looked very young with their jutting breasts and blue bead aprons.

  As a blood-red sun transformed the town’s tin shacks into magical structures, Clara leapt to her feet. At last, praise be, a native boy was sauntering across from the hotel with something in his hand.

  Clara took the proffered paper nervously – a few words scrawled on the back of an old bill: ‘Mr H. Fynn and Captain Vaughan will be glad of Mrs Haslam’s company this evening for dinner at the Hotel Maxim at eight.’ She folded the paper and slowly raised it to her lips.

  CHAPTER 4

  Clara’s eyes were smarting within moments of her entering the smoke-filled supper room of the hotel. The smell of warm bodies and alcohol was overpowering. Seated at rickety tables, the diners were chatting and gesticulating, most of them the worse for drink. Just as had happened when she was staying here, her entrance caused a startled lowering of voices. Women were a great deal rarer than gold dust in Belingwe. One man was so eager to get a look at her that he knocked his table over.

  From the adjacent bar came shouting, as if someone was being ejected. Brought up to believe that men did not swear in front of women in public, Clara had still not reconciled herself to the diggers’ foul language. A group of cardplayers, who were unaware of anything but their game, seemed scarcely sober enough to know what cards they held.