This Was the Old Chief's Country

by Doris Lessing

  Kate watched Mrs Lacey pull her baby’s arms away from her neck, and then gently place it in the pram. She was frowning. ‘Babies shouldn’t be messed about,’ she remarked; and Kate saw that her dislike of whatever had just happened was stronger even than her fear of Kate’s parents.

  Kate got up, saying: ‘I feel funny.’ She walked blindly through the house in the direction of the bedroom. The light had got inside her head: that was how it felt; her brain was swaying on waves of light. She got past Mrs Lacey’s bed and collapsed on the stool of the dressing-table, burying her face in her arms. When she lifted her eyes, she saw Mrs Lacey standing beside her. She saw that her own shoes had left brownish patches on the carpet, and that along the folds of the crystalline drapery at the windows were yellowish streaks.

  Gazing into the mirror, her own face stared back. It was a narrow face, pale and freckled; a serious lanky face, and incongruously above it perched a large blue silk bow from which pale lanky hair straggled. Kate stood up and looked at her body in shame. She was long, thin, bony. The legs were a boy’s legs still, flat lean legs set on to a plumping body. Two triangular lumps stood out from her tight child’s bodice. Kate turned in agony from this reflection of herself, which seemed to be rather of several different young boys and girls haphazardly mingled, and fixed her attention to Mrs Lacey, who was frowning as she listened to the baby’s crying from the veranda: this time he had not liked being put down. ‘There!’ she exclaimed angrily, ‘that’s what happens if you give in to them.’ Something rose in a wave to Kate’s head: ‘Why did they say the baby is exactly like Mr Hackett?’ she demanded, without knowing she had intended to speak at all. Looking wonderingly up at Mrs Lacey she saw the shadows round her chin deepen into long blue lines that ran from nose to chin; Mrs Lacey had become as pinched and diminished as her room now appeared. She drew in her breath violently: then held herself tight, and smiled. ‘Why, what an extraordinary thing for them to say,’ she commented, walking away from Kate to fetch a handkerchief from a drawer, where she stood for a while with her back turned, giving them both an opportunity to recover. Then, turning, she looked long and closely at Kate, trying to determine whether the child had known what it was she had said.

  Kate faced her with wide and deliberately innocent eyes; inside she was gripped with amazement at the strength of her own desire to hurt the beloved Mrs Lacey, who had hurt her so badly: it was this that the innocence was designed to conceal.

  They both moved away from the room to the veranda, with the careful steps of people conscious of every step, every action. There was, however, not a word spoken.

  As they passed through the big room Mrs Lacey took a photograph album from a bookstand and carried it with her to the chairs. When Kate had seated herself, the album was deposited on her lap; and Mrs Lacey said: ‘Look at these; here are pictures of Mr Lacey when he was a baby; you can see that the baby is the image of him.’ Kate looked dutifully at several pages of photographs of yet another fat, smiling, contented baby, feeling more and more surprised at Mrs Lacey. The fact was that whether the baby did or did not look like Mr Hackett was not the point; it was hard to believe that Mrs Lacey did not understand this, had not understood the truth, which was that the remark had been made in the first place as a sort of stick snatched up to beat her with. She put down the album and said: ‘Yes, they do look alike, don’t they?’ Mrs Lacey remarked casually: ‘For the year before the baby was born I and Mr Lacey were living alone on a ranch. Mr Hackett was visiting his parents in America.’ Kate made an impatient movement which Mrs Lacey misinterpreted. She said reproachfully: ‘That was a terrible thing to say, Kate.’ ‘But I didn’t say it.’ ‘No matter who said it, it was a terrible thing.’ Kate saw that tears were pouring down Mrs Lacey’s cheeks.

  ‘But …’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘It isn’t the point.’

  ‘What isn’t the point?’

  Kate was silent: there seemed such a distance between what she felt and how Mrs Lacey was speaking. She got up, propelled by the pressure of these unsayable things, and began wandering about the veranda in front of Mrs Lacey. ‘You see,’ she said helplessly, ‘we’ve all been living together so long. We all know each other very well.”

  ‘You are telling me,’ commented Mrs Lacey, with an unpleasant laugh. ‘Well?’

  Kate sighed. ‘Well, we have all got to go on living together, haven’t we? I mean, when people have got to live together …’ She looked at Mrs Lacey to see if she had understood.

  She had not.

  Kate had, for a moment, a vivid sense of Mrs Sinclair standing there beside her; and from this reinforcement she gained new words: ‘Don’t you see? It’s not what people do, it’s how they do it. It can’t be broken up.’

  Mrs Lacey’s knotted forehead smoothed, and she looked ruefully at Kate: ‘I haven’t a notion of what I’ve done, even now.’ This note, the playful note, stung Kate again: it was as if Mrs Lacey had decided that the whole thing was too childish to matter.

  She walked to the end of the veranda, thinking of Mrs Sinclair. ‘I wonder who will live here next?’ she said dreamily, and turned to see Mrs Lacey’s furious eyes. ‘You might wait till we’ve gone,’ she said. ‘What makes you think we are going?’

  Kate looked at her in amazement: it was so clear to her that the Laceys would soon go.

  Seeing Kate’s face, Mrs Lacey grew sober. In a chastened voice she said: ‘You frighten me.’ Then she laughed, rather shrilly.

  ‘Why did you come here?’ asked Kate unwillingly.

  ‘But why on earth shouldn’t we?’

  ‘I mean, why this district. Why so far out, away from everything?’

  Mrs Lacey’s eyes bored cruelly into Kate’s. ‘What have they been saying? What are they saying about us?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Kate, puzzled, seeing that there was a new thing here, that people could have said.

  ‘I suppose that old story about the money? It isn’t true. It isn’t true. Kate.’ Once again tears poured down Mrs Lacey’s face and her shoulders shook.

  ‘No one has said anything about money. Except that you must have a lot.’ said Kate. Mrs Lacey wiped her eyes dry and peered at Kate to see if she were telling the truth. Then her face hardened. ‘Well, I suppose they’ll start saying it now,’ she said bitterly.

  Kate understood that there was something ugly in this, and directed at her, but not what it could be. She turned away from Mrs Lacey, filled again with the knowledge of injustice.

  ‘Aren’t I ever to have a home? Can’t I ever have a home?’ wept Mrs Lacey.

  ‘Haven’t you ever had one?’

  ‘No, never. This time I thought I would be settled for good.’

  ‘I think you’ll have to move again,’ said Kate reasonably. She looked around her, again trying to picture what would happen to Old John’s Place when the new people came. Seeing that look, Mrs Lacey said quickly: ‘That’s superstition. It isn’t possible that places can affect people.’

  ‘I didn’t say they did.’

  ‘What are you saying, then?’

  ‘But you get angry when I do say. I was just thinking that …’

  ‘Well?’

  Kate stammered: ‘You ought to go somewhere where … that has your kind of people.’ She saw this so clearly.

  Mrs Lacey glared at her and snapped: ‘When I was your age I thought of nothing but hockey.’ Then she picked up her sewing as she might have swallowed an aspirin tablet, and sat stitching with trembling, angry fingers.

  Kate’s lips quivered. Hockey and healthy games were what her own mother constantly prescribed as prophylactics against the little girl she did not want to be.

  Mrs Lacey went on: ‘Don’t you go to school?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you like it?’

  Kate replied: Yes, knowing it was impossible to explain what school meant to her: it was a recurring episode in the city where time raced by, since there was nothing of importance to slow it.
School had so little to do with this life, on the farm, and the things she lived by, that it was like being taken to the pictures as a treat. One went politely, feeling grateful, then sat back and let what happened on the screen come at you and flow over you. You left with relief, to resume a real life.

  She said slowly to Mrs Lacey, trying to express that injustice that was corroding her: ‘But if I had been – like you want – you wouldn’t have been able to – find out what you wanted, would you?’

  Mrs Lacey stared, ‘If you were mine I’d …’ She bit off her thread angrily.

  ‘You’d dress me properly,’ said Kate sarcastically, quivering with hate, and saw Mrs Lacey crimson from throat to hairline.

  ‘I think I’d better be going home,’ she remarked, sidling to the door.

  ‘You must come over again sometime,’ remarked Mrs Lacey brightly, the fear lying deep in her eyes.

  ‘You know I can’t come back,’ said Kate awkwardly.

  ‘Why not?’ said Mrs Lacey, just as if the whole conversation had never happened.

  ‘My parents won’t let me. They say you are bad for me.’

  ‘Do you think I am bad for you?’ asked Mrs Lacey, with her high gay laugh.

  Kate stared at her incredulously. ‘I’m awfully glad to have met you,’ she stammered finally, with embarrassment thick in her tongue. She smiled politely, through tears, and went away down the road to home.

  ‘Leopard’ George

  George Chester did not earn his title for some years after he first started farming. He was well into middle age when people began to greet him with a friendly clout across the shoulders and the query: ‘Well, what’s the score now?’ Their faces expressed the amused and admiring tolerance extorted by a man who has proved himself in other ways, a man entitled to eccentricities. But George’s passion for hunting leopards was more than a hobby. There was a period of years when the District Notes in the local paper were headed, Friday after Friday, by a description of his week-end party: ‘The Four Winds’ Hunt Club bag this Sunday was four jackals and a leopard’ – or a wild dog and two leopards, as the case might be. All kinds of game make good chasing; the horses and dogs went haring across the veld every week after whatever offered itself. As for George, it was a recognized thing that if there was a chance of a leopard, the pack must be called off its hare, its duiker, its jackal, and directed after the wily spotted beast, no matter what the cost in time or patience or torn dogs. George had been known to climb a kopje alone, with a wounded leopard waiting for him in the tumbled chaos of boulder and tree; they told stories of how he walked once into a winding black cave (his ammunition finished and his torch smashed) and finally clouted the clawing spitting beast to death with the butt of his rifle. The scars of that fight were all over his body. When he strode into the post office or store, in shorts, his sleeves rolled up, people looked at the flesh that was raked from shoulder to knuckle and from thigh to ankle with great white weals, and quickly turned their eyes away. Behind his back they might smile, their lips compressed forbearingly.

  But that was when he was one of the wealthiest men in the district: one of those tough, shrewd farmers who seem ageless, for sun and hard work and good eating have shaped their bodies into cases of muscle that time can hardly touch.

  George was the child of one of the first settlers. He was bred on a farm, and towns made him restless. When the First World War began he set off at once for England where he joined up in a unit that promised plenty of what he called fun. After five years of fighting he had collected three decorations, half a dozen minor wounds and the name ‘Lucky George’. He allowed himself to be demobilized with the air of one who does not insist on taking more than his fair share of opportunities.

  When he returned to Southern Rhodesia, it was not to that part of it he had made his own as a child; that was probably because his father’s name was so well known there, and George was not a man to be the mere son of his father.

  He saw many farms before finally choosing Four Winds. The agent was a man who had known his father well: this kind of thing still counts for more than money in places where there is space and time for respect of the past, and George was offered farms at prices which broke the agent’s businessman’s heart. Besides, he was a war hero. But the agent was defeated by George. He had been selling farms long enough to recognize the look that comes into a man’s face when he is standing on land that appeals to him, land which he will shape and knead and alter to the scale of his own understanding – the look of the creator. That look did not appear on George’s face.

  After months of visiting one district after another, the agent took George to buy a farm so beautiful that it seemed impossible he could refuse to buy it. It was low lying and thickly covered with trees, and the long fat strip of rich red land was held between two rivers. The house had gardens running away on two sides to vistas of water. Rivers and richness and unspoiled trees and lush grass for cattle – such farms are not to be had for whistling in Africa. But George stood there on a rise between the stretches of water where they ran close to each other, and moved his shoulders restlessly in a way which the agent had grown to understand. ‘No good?’ he said, sounding disgruntled. But by now there was that tolerance in him for George which he was always to make people feel: his standards were different. Incomprehensible they might be; but the agent at last saw that George was not looking for the fat ease promised by this farm. ‘If you could only tell me what you are looking for,’ he suggested, rather irritably.

  ‘This is a fine farm,’ said George, walking away from it, holding his shoulders rigid. The agent grabbed his elbow and made him stop. ‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘This must be one of the finest farms in the country.’

  ‘I know,’ said George.

  ‘If you want me to get you a farm, you’ll have to get your mind clear about what you need.’

  George said: ‘I’ll know it when I see it.’

  ‘Have I got to drive you to every free farm in a thousand miles of Africa? God damn it, man,’ he expostulated, ‘be reasonable. This is my job. I am supposed to be earning my living by it.’

  George shrugged. The agent let go his arm, and the two men walked along beside each other, George looking away over the thick dark trees of the river to the slopes on the other side. There were the mountains, range on range of them, rising high and glistening into the fresh blue sky.

  The agent followed that look, and began to think for himself. He peered hard at George. This man, in appearance, was what one might expect after such a childhood, all freedom and sunlight, and after five years of such fighting. He was very lean and brown, with loose broad shoulders and an easy swinging way of moving. His face was lean and angled, his eyes grey and shrewd, his mouth hard but also dissatisfied. He reminded the agent of his father at the same age; George’s father had left everything familiar to him, in an old and comfortable country, to make a new way of living with new people. The agent said tentatively: ‘Good to get away from people, eh? Too many people crowded together over there in the Old Country?’ exactly as he might have done to the older man. George’s face did not change: this idea seemed to mean nothing to him. He merely continued to stare, his eyes tightened, at the mountains. But now the agent knew what he had to do. Next day he drove him to Four Winds, which had just been surveyed for sale. It was five thousand acres of virgin bush, lying irregularly over the lower slopes of a range of kopjes that crossed high over a plain where there were still few farms. Four Winds was all rocky outcrops, scrubby trees and wastes of shimmering grass, backed by mountains. There was no house, no river, not so much as a fence; no one could call it a desirable farm. George’s face cleared to content as he walked over it, and on it came that look for which the agent had been waiting.

  He slouched comfortably all through that day over those bare and bony acres, rather in the way a dog will use to make a new place its own, ranging to pick up a smell here or a memory there, anything that can be formed into a shell of familiarity for
comfort against strangeness. But white men coming to Africa take not only what is there, but also impose on it a pattern of their own, from other countries. This accounts for the fine range of variation one can find in a day’s travelling from farm to farm across any district. Each house will be different, suggesting a different country, climate, or way of speech.

  Towards late afternoon, with the blaze of yellow sunlight falling directly across his face and dazzling into his eyes, and glazing the wilderness of rock and grass and tree with the sad glitter of sunset, George stooped suddenly in a place where gullies ran down from all sides into a flat place among bushes. ‘There should be water here, for a borehole,’ he said. And, after a moment: ‘There was a windmill I caught sight of in Norfolk from a train. I liked the look of it. The shape of it, I mean. It would do well here …’

  It was in this way that George said he was buying the farm, and showed his satisfaction at the place. The restless, rather wolfish look had gone from the long bony face.

  ‘Your nearest neighbour is fifteen miles away,’ was the last warning the agent gave.

  George answered indifferently: ‘This part of the country is opening up. isn’t it?’ And the next day he signed the papers.

  He was no recluse after all, or at least, not in the way the agent had suspected.

  He went round to what farms there were, as is the custom, paying his respects, saying he had bought Four Winds, and would be a neighbour, though not a near one. And the house he built himself was not a shack, the sort of house a man throws together to hold off the weather for a season.

  He intended to live there, though it was not finished. It looked as if it had been finely planned and then cut in half. There were, to begin with, three large rooms, raftered with that timber that sends out a pungent fragrance when the weather changes, and floored with dark red wood. These were furnished properly, there were no makeshifts here, either. And he was seen at the station on mail days, not often, but often enough, where he was greeted in the way proper not only to his father’s son and to his war record, but because people approved what he was doing. For after both wars there has been a sudden appearance of restless young men whose phrases: ‘I want to be my own boss’, and ‘I’m not going to spend my life wearing out the seat of my trousers on a stool’, though clichés, still express the spirit that opened up the country in the first place. Between wars there is a different kind of immigrant, who use their money as spades to dig warm corners to sleep in. Because of these people who have turned an adventurous country into a sluggish one, and because of the memory of something different, restless young men find there is no need to apologize for striking out for themselves. It is as if they are regarded as a sort of flag, or even a conscience. When people heard that George had bought Four Winds, a bare, gusty rocky stretch of veld on the side of a mountain, they remarked, ‘Good luck to him,’ which is exactly how they speak when a returning traveller says: ‘There is a man on the shores of Lake Nyasa who has lived alone in a hut by himself for twenty years,’ or ‘I heard of someone who has gone native in the Valley – he goes away into the bush if a white person comes near him.’ There is no condemnation, but rather a recognition of something in themselves to which they pay tribute by proxy.