The Missionary's Wife

by Tim Jeal

  The room was L-shaped, and when Clara turned the corner, she knew at once that she was looking at the men she had come to meet. They were sitting at a table near the far wall; the older of the two had his back to her, and the younger, a strikingly handsome man in his late twenties, was too interested in what his companion was saying to look in Clara’s direction. She paused between two tables, suddenly scared. If they turned her down, how long would it be till others came? She could offer money, but would they accept it if they were going in another direction? The one who was a captain would be a gentleman, so an offer of money might insult him.

  The man with his back to her spoke with an American accent. He was telling a rambling story about a doctor who had stripped off all his clothes to cross a swollen river. He had tied these garments to his horse’s back and then clung to the creature’s tail while it swam across.

  ‘When that darn horse reached dry land, he sprang up the bank so fast my pal lost his grip on his tail. And could he catch him after? No, sir. That stallion trotted right on into Mazoe township as lively as you like, with Doc Brand puffing along behind him in a state of nature.’

  As she was smiling at the absurdity of this vision, the handsome man looked up and caught her eye. She blushed and tried to straighten her smile.

  ‘Good God,’ he muttered, jumping to his feet. ‘Who’d have thought it? Incredible. You must be Mrs Haslam. We thought you’d be some batty old widow. Come and join us. I’m Francis Vaughan.’ He held out a hand. ‘How do you do?’

  His face was deeply tanned, and under his trim straw-coloured moustache his lips curved into a pleasing smile. Clara took Francis Vaughan’s hand and found herself smiling too. His eyes were incredibly blue. Shimmering under thick flaxen hair, they made her think of cornflowers in a summer field. Suddenly the American’s chair shot back, and he too was on his feet, pressing the fingers of Clara’s other hand between huge palms. His head was crowned with a mane of grey and tawny hair, swept back and secured with a leather thong in a kind of pigtail.

  ‘Heywood Fynn at your service, ma’am.’ His teeth glinted between wisps of beard. He was not tall, but Clara was aware of a massive hairy chest framed by his open flannel shirt. ‘Now, what’s this “assistance” you’re a-wantin’, Mrs Haslam?’

  *

  Three days later, seated on the swaying box of Fynn’s wagon, Clara gazed across endless bleached grass to grape-blue hills. Her happiness seemed to shimmer in the bright air above flat-topped acacias and gouty baobabs. Heading north in any case, Heywood Fynn had laughed at her for imagining he might have balked at a detour. If they found elephant spoor on the way, why, then she would have to wait a few days while they tracked and shot a few beasts. Was that fair? Clara had thought it very fair indeed – so fair she burst into tears and hugged them both.

  Captain Vaughan, who was sharing the costs and profits of the hunting expedition, had said that he would be happy to shoot nothing until Clara had been safely deposited on her husband’s doorstep. But when Fynn swore that no ivory was going to be lost for Mrs Haslam or for anyone else, Vaughan had simply shrugged and smiled. He reminded Clara a little of her faithless Charles; but since she was not involved with Francis, she found his insouciance amusing. Having thought all cavalry officers rich, she was astonished to learn that whenever Francis had any leave, he came up to Mashonaland from the Cape, where his regiment was stationed, to earn money as a professional hunter. He also dabbled in journalism and conducted a trade in native curios, all to reduce his accumulated mess debts.

  Fynn’s life also surprised her – ‘the best dime novel that’s never been written,’ was his own assessment. Riding messages for a telegraph company by the age of twelve, and scouting for the cavalry by eighteen, he sailed for Africa, aged forty-four, when the West had finally grown too civilized for his taste. He could be coarse at times – not least when he ate – but Clara felt priggish for noticing it, given his kindness. He rigged up a canvas sunshade for her on the box; and when they camped near a river, he obliged his men to fetch enough water for her to take a bath. He also answered all her questions, even telling her why old Ezekiel Malatsi, his normally patient driver, sometimes spat in the face of Conate, the boy who directed the leading oxen.

  Francis often rode ahead of the ox wagon. For all his cheerfulness in company, there was a brooding side to his nature. Fynn, by contrast, rarely rode his horse but slept in the moving wagon in the early afternoon and chatted with Clara when he woke.

  One overcast afternoon, all three were sitting on the box. The surrounding scrub had been charred by bush fires, making the landscape look smudged and dreary. The sultry air and the rolling motion of the wagon soon had Francis drifting into fitful sleep, but he woke at once on hearing raised voices.

  Fynn was saying, ‘Yeah, but must they give up their wives when he’s made ’em Christians? That’s what you haven’t said, Mrs Haslam. Does your husband make ’em do that?’

  ‘He can’t make anybody do anything they don’t want to,’ replied Clara.

  ‘He can say they’ll burn in hell if they don’t do it.’

  ‘Mr Haslam doesn’t say things like that.’

  Francis felt suddenly anxious for the young woman. Fynn was a very difficult man to argue with, and he made no concessions to age or sex.

  ‘All preachers tell ’em they’ll burn,’ Fynn insisted.

  Francis said firmly to Fynn, ‘She said her husband doesn’t say that.’ Francis knew that Fynn kept two black mistresses at Tuli and had recently been reproved by a missionary for going native. But how could his resentment be explained to pretty Mrs Haslam? And by God, she was pretty! A wonderful face that was both fervent and appealing, demure and playful. Francis felt a stab of indignation. Those humorously curving eyebrows, the gently tilting nose and soft lips were all the property of some miserable minister. The bloody waste! She was wearing a long, tight-waisted dress, checked with brown, not the kind of thing a missionary’s wife could run up for herself. But could she be a lady? Out here?

  Fynn appealed to Francis. ‘She won’t say if her goddamn husband asks ’em to give up their wives.’

  ‘Of course he does,’ cried Clara, suddenly exasperated. ‘Who’s ever heard of a Christian with lots of wives?’

  Fynn glared at her. His grey, rather flat eyes had the same extraordinary alertness and vigour seen in the gaze of Bushmen. ‘Didn’t they join together in good faith, them natives and their wives? What’s wrong with that, Mrs Haslam? Why should they split, and make their children bastards?’

  ‘A man with many wives thinks he owns them like things. That’s wrong, Mr Fynn. Isn’t that obvious?’

  Fynn’s broad face expressed vehement opposition. ‘Take away their wives and they’ll get themselves concubines. They sure ain’t goin’ to keep themselves to one woman after years of doin’ somethin’ else.’

  ‘So it’s never the right time to stop a bad habit?’ asked Clara with an unshaken sense of rectitude.

  ‘Tell me what’ll happen to the children of them concubines? The fathers won’t feed ’em.’

  Clara looked stern. ‘Married or not, Mr Fynn, no man with twenty children can look after them properly.’

  ‘With help from his wives … sure he can.’

  ‘He’d hardly recognize them all, let alone have time to play with them.’

  ‘Play?’ Fynn groaned. ‘A father doesn’t play. He teaches his sons to hunt and herd. Your husband’s told you plenty, ma’am, but you’d best see for yourself how these people live before you decide what’s right and wrong for them.’

  Francis feared that Clara was about to embark on a long list of moral improvements that her husband was taking in hand. To his relief, she said pleasantly, ‘It’s good of you to offer me advice, Mr Fynn.’

  Later, when Clara was resting on her bed in the wagon, Fynn said to Francis, ‘We ought to tell her what to expect, Vaughan. She’s a good woman, and she deserves some honesty.’

  ‘We can’t help her.’


  ‘I meant … make things less of a shock for her.’

  Francis said gently, ‘We can’t know what she’s expecting, and it’s not our business. She may think it’s going to be hell on earth, for all we know.’ He clapped the American on the back, determined to joke him out of any attempt to undermine the woman’s faith in her husband. ‘Truth is, Fynn, some people like to suffer. Hair shirts, living in barrels … they’ve done it all, religious people, and never been happier.’

  ‘How many diggers have vanished into thin air inside a month? Six, seven? That’s a heap too many to ignore, Vaughan.’

  ‘Native risings don’t start like that. Not in my experience. The balloon bursts suddenly. One moment everything’s sweet and peaceful; the next, hundreds are slaughtered out of the blue.’

  Fynn sighed deeply. ‘I don’t want to see nothin’ bad happen to her.’ He pulled down the brim of his Stetson against the late-afternoon sun. ‘Should have kept quiet, maybe. But I never could abide missionaries. All that shit ’bout sin and sinners, and saving themselves for the great hereafter. Never a word ’bout happiness here and now. That’s not right for a young girl, Vaughan.’

  Francis did not answer. He too was mystified by missionaries. He thought of Clara, sleeping in the hot and musty space under the canvas, breathing in the reek of spirits and drying animal skins. He could imagine the rise and fall of her breasts under her cotton dress; the slight moisture on her forehead; her loose black hair, no longer pinned back severely. Clara made him conscious of everything that was wrong with his life: the lack of tenderness in it; the impossibility of returning to England until he could afford the extra expense of a home posting; the futility of hoping he might marry, lacking money as he did. And yet this missionary, with nothing but a shack in the wilds, invites a lovely, high-spirited girl to share the harshest life imaginable, and she comes running. Because she thought God had ordained it all. A pity God couldn’t do some ‘ordaining’ for a few army officers for a change. A great pity.

  *

  The more Clara saw of Fynn and Francis together, the more she liked them. She was impressed by Francis’s ability to remain indifferent to Fynn’s most sardonic remarks. At times it seemed they were playing a game, with the American going out of his way to speak disparagingly of the kid-gloved and monocled type of English officer he sometimes took hunting for a fee, implying that Francis too, if not quite kid-gloved, was refined enough to be first cousin to those stiff-necked specimens. But the hunter’s keenest scorn was reserved for another group of Englishmen: colonial officials who made much of their ‘mission to educate and civilize’. To lure Africans away from their kraals with the promise of cheap cloth and beads, and then to call this process ‘civilizing’ them, was contemptible hypocrisy.

  ‘Worse than butchering the Sioux and Apache?’ inquired Francis meekly.

  ‘That was honest butchery,’ Fynn had rumbled back, insisting that the only honest whites in Mashonaland were adventurers, traders, and hunters like himself, who had no pretensions to altruism. ‘But you, Vaughan,’ he had mocked on another occasion, ‘you’re just the sanctimonious type to risk your neck for guys like me when the blacks want our blood.’

  Yet Clara could not think of Fynn as the gruff, tough, unsentimental man he would have had her believe him. She sensed his concern for her far too often to think him less sensitive than Francis. Certainly Fynn knew more than Francis about the bush and was not reluctant to air his superior knowledge. Often he would point into a meaningless tangle of branches, to reveal the twisted horns of a male kudu or wildebeest. Earlier in the day, Francis had spotted a motionless giraffe, which Fynn had missed. Francis’s eye had been drawn by some tiny birds darting in and out of the creature’s ears in search of parasites; and Clara had been surprised by his loud whoop of triumph, so out of character had it seemed in a man whom she had previously thought unemotional.

  They did not come upon the prints of an elephant until Clara’s fifth day with them. After examining the deep round indentations of a massive solitary animal, Fynn pronounced them the tracks of a rogue bull. Size apart, why was he so sure? Clara wanted to know. Because normal elephants did not go foraging alone on moonless nights. Being shortsighted, they banded together in protective herds. And how did he know this lone beast’s tracks had been made at night? Because they had been crossed and recrossed by the fresh spoor of mice and other nocturnal creatures.

  By midmorning, they were still hard on his tracks. The animal’s droppings were moist, so he could not be far away. It being August and midwinter, the scaly mopane trees were decorated with only a sprinkling of tawny leaves. In this dead, dry world no birds sang, and not even an impala was to be seen. But within less than an hour, they were dropping down from the dusty escarpment into the fertile valley of the Kasangwa. Below them, the plumes of green papyrus reeds faded into the haze like an endless colony of egrets. Between its blue-green banks, the sandy riverbed shone a mottled silver, its surface pitted with rocks and isolated pools.

  Fynn’s driver, Ezekiel, brought the oxen to a halt in the bed of the river, where the huge footprints of the elephant were plainly to be seen heading upstream. Francis scrambled up on to the far bank and scanned the low hills through his field glasses. He signalled urgently to Fynn, who was soon peering at the enlarged image of a huge grey tusker standing beneath an overhanging outcrop. The elephant rubbed a back leg against the rock as if trying to dislodge something. Suddenly the creature trumpeted – a sound more savage than the roaring of a lion.

  ‘Him plenty evil, Bwana.’ Fynn chuckled, looking again at the elephant. ‘This one’s for you, huh?’

  ‘I’ll try and shoot him, certainly,’ said Francis solemnly. He was fed up with Fynn’s automatic assumption that he would always yield pride of place to him when any difficult situation arose. Clara had now come up beside the two men. It worried her that Francis seemed unaware that Fynn’s invitation to shoot the elephant had been meant ironically.

  Fynn chuckled softly. ‘Try to shoot him? Brother, you’ll be in trouble if you don’t damn well succeed.’

  Clara’s heart beat faster as the men loaded two guns each. Francis fumbled as he took bullets from his ammunition pouch. Surely, she thought, he’ll give way now. It’s just another of their elaborate games. Rogue elephants ought to be dealt with by the more experienced man. She tried to catch Francis’s eye to smile at him, hoping to end his brooding mood. As if he had guessed her intention, he looked away.

  Francis knew very well that Fynn expected him to back down. It was childish not to; and yet he couldn’t bring himself to do so. If Clara hadn’t come up at the crucial moment, he might have told Fynn to do the shooting. But with this lovely woman watching his every move, his situation had become impossible. Preserving a facade of calm, Francis checked his rifles and released the safety catch of one. Later, the slightest sound might alert the animal, with fatal consequences. At least they were downwind of the elephant, or had been before the wind dropped, so they ought to be able to approach their quarry along the riverbed in perfect safety.

  Clara knew that Fynn kept a telescope in the locker under the box. With its help, she watched the two men as they reached rising ground where the long grass began to thin. They dropped on to their stomachs and began to zigzag from one patch of scrub to another. Several hundred yards beyond them, the beast lumbered toward a baobab tree, flapping his great ragged ears. Then he backed his leathery haunches up to the tree trunk and rubbed his left hind leg against the bark.

  From their position, Fynn and Francis watched the same movements and were not reassured to hear the elephant’s angry squeals.

  ‘He’s mad, all right,’ murmured Fynn, studying the animal through his field glasses from the cover of an anthill. As the elephant turned, he whispered: ‘Is that guy in a mess? Take a look.’

  Francis lifted the glasses. A dark gash extended from the creature’s tail all down his left leg. The precise nature of the injury was impossible to tell.
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  ‘How will you shoot him, Vaughan?’ Francis recognized the same half-playful tone, but he was not fooled. Fynn was afraid that he might after all go through with it.

  Francis frowned. ‘Think I’ll work my way round to his side to get a brain shot.’

  ‘Where will you take cover?’ Francis thought about this and then pointed to several possible positions.

  Fynn said gently, ‘Let’s say I come along too, huh?’

  ‘I’ll manage.’

  ‘You sure about that?’ No hint of joking now. ‘If you miss, you’re dead, Vaughan. You know that?’

  Francis said nothing. Slinging one rifle across his back, he grasped the other; and holding it slightly behind him so that the barrel did not glint in the sun, he moved swiftly into a patch of tall grass, crouching as low as he could. His objective was a distant clump of thornbushes. From there, if the beast did not move away from the baobab, Francis hoped to reach a jumble of rocks to the right of a wild fig tree. Even in winter, the sun by midday was fierce; and without any breeze, Francis could feel the sweat beading above his temples and on his forehead, threatening to drip down and blur his vision.

  Through her shaking telescope, Clara followed the movements of the elephant. Prehistoric, seemingly invincible, he ambled away from the baobab on a line that would enable him to see Francis from the corner of his eye, should he happen to turn a little; but the tusker’s attention was fixed upon another tree, laden with edible pods. Instead of troubling to pick them individually, he leaned his forehead against the bark, with his tusks on either side, and shook the tree back and forth until pods rained down on him. Clara hated to watch and yet could not look away. She told herself that this young man was a vainglorious idiot; that she knew nothing about him, except that he was handsome, which was no reason for being concerned with anyone’s fate. But her quaking stomach and shaking hands told her something else.

  As the elephant examined the fallen fruits with his trunk tip, Francis sprinted for the thornbushes. His dash ended with a frantic scramble on his hands and knees that brought him safely to the concealing thorn barrier just thirty paces from the rocks he had selected for his final approach.