This Was the Old Chief's Country

by Doris Lessing

  He always slept alone in the house, for the cookboy and the houseboys went back to the compound every night after finishing the washing up, but one of the garden boys slept in a shed at the back with the dogs, as a guard against thieves. George’s garden boys, unlike his personal servants, were not permanent, but came and went at short intervals of a few months. The present one had been with him for only a few weeks, and he had not troubled to make a friend of him.

  Towards midnight there was a knock at the back door, and when George opened it he found this garden boy standing there, and there was a grin on his face that George had never seen on the face of a native before – at least, not directed at himself. He indicated a shadowy human shape that stood under a large tree which rose huge and glittering in the strong moonlight, and said intimately: ‘She’s there, baas, waiting for you.’ George promptly cuffed him, in order to correct his expression, and then strode out into the moonlight. The girl neither moved nor looked at him. A statue of grief, she stood waiting with her hands hanging at her sides. Those hands – the helplessness of them – particularly infuriated George. ‘I told you to get back to where you belong,’ he said, in a low angry voice. ‘But, baas, I am afraid.’ She began to cry again.

  ‘What are you afraid of?’

  The girl, her eyeballs glinting in the gleams of moonlight that fell strong through the boughs overhead, looked along to the compound. It was a mile of bush, with kopjes rising on either side of the path, big rocks throwing deep shadows all the way. Somewhere a dog was howling at the moon; all the sounds of night rose from the bush, bird noises, insect noises, animal noises that could not be named: here was a vast protean life, and a cruel one. George, looking towards the compound, which in this unreal glinting light had shrunk back, absorbed, into the background of tree and rock, without even a glow of fire to indicate its presence, felt as he always did: it was the feeling which had brought him here so many years before. It was as if, while he looked, he was flowing softly outwards, diffused into the bush and the moonlight. He knew no terror; he could not understand fear; he contained that cruelty within himself, shut safe in some deep place. And this girl, who was bred of the bush and of the wildness, had no right to tremble with fright. That, obscurely, was what he felt.

  With the moonlight pouring over him, showing how his lips were momentarily curled back from his teeth, he pulled the girl roughly towards him out of the shade, turned her round so that she faced the compound, and said: ‘Go, now.’

  She was trembling, in sharp spasms, from head to foot. He could feel her convulse against him as if in the convulsions of love, and he pushed her away so that she staggered. ‘Go,’ he ordered, again. She was now sobbing wildly, with her arm across her eyes. George called to the garden boy who was standing near the house watching the scene, his face expressing an emotion George did not choose to recognize. ‘Take this woman back to the compound.’

  For the first time in his life George was disobeyed by a native. The youth simply shook his head, and said with a directness that was not intended to be rude, but was rather a rebuke for asking something that could not be asked: ‘No, baas.’ George understood he could not press the point.

  Impatiently he turned back to the girl and dismissed the matter by saying: ‘I’m not going to argue with you.’

  He went indoors, and to bed. There he listened futilely for sounds of conversation: he was hoping that the two people outside might come to some arrangement. After a few moments he heard the scraping of chains along earth, and the barking of dogs; then a door shut. The garden boy had gone back to his shed. George repressed a desire to go to the window and see if the girl was still there. He imagined that she might perhaps steal into one of the outhouses for shelter. Not all of them were locked.

  It was hours before he slept. It was the first night in years that he had difficulty in sleeping. He was still angry, yes; he was uncomfortable because of his false relationship to old Smoke, because he had betrayed the old man; but beyond these emotions was another; again he felt that discrepancy, something discordant which expressed itself through him in a violent irritation; it was as if a fermenting chemical had been poured into a still liquid. He was intolerably restless, and his limbs twitched. It seemed as if something large and challenging were outside himself saying: And how are you going to include me? It was only by turning his back on that challenge that he eventually managed to sleep.

  Before sunrise next day, before the smoke began to curl up from the huts in the compound, George called the garden boy, who emerged sleepy and red-eyed from the shed, the dogs at his heels, and told him to fetch old Smoke. George felt he had to apologize to him; he must put himself right with that human being to whom he felt closer than he had ever felt to anyone since his parents died.

  He dressed while waiting. The house was quite empty, as the servants had not yet come from the compound. He was in a fever of unrest for the atonement it was necessary for him to make. But the old man delayed his coming. The sun was blazing over the kopjes, and the smells of coffee and hot fat were pervading the house from the kitchen when George, waiting impatiently on the veranda, saw a group of natives coming through the trees. Old Smoke was wrapped in a blanket, and supported on each side by a young man; and he moved as if each step were an effort to him. By the time the three natives had reached the steps, George was feeling like an accused person. Nor did any of his accusers look at him directly.

  He said at once: ‘Smoke, I am very sorry. I did not know she was your wife.’ Still they did not look at him. Already irritation was growing inside him, because they did not accept his contrition. He repeated sternly: ‘How was I to know? How could I?’

  Instead of answering directly, Smoke said in the feeble and querulous tones of a very old man: ‘Where is she?’

  This George had not foreseen. Irritation surged through him with surprising violence. ‘I sent her home,’ he said angrily. It was the strength of his own anger that quieted him. He did not know himself what was happening within him.

  The group in front of him remained silent. The two young men, each supporting Smoke with an arm under his shoulders, kept their eyes down. Smoke was looking vaguely beyond the trees and over the slopes of grass to the valley; he was looking for something, but looking without hope. He was defeated.

  With a conscious effort at controlling his voice, George said: ‘Till last night I did not know she was your wife.’ He paused, swallowed, and continued, dealing with the point which he understood now was where he stood accused: ‘She came to me last night, and I told her to go home. She came late. Has she not returned to you?’

  Smoke did not answer: his eyes were ranging over the kopjes tumbled all about them. ‘She did not come home,’ said one of the young men at last.

  ‘She has not perhaps gone to the hut of a friend?’ suggested George futilely.

  ‘She is not in the compound,’ said the same young man, speaking for Smoke.

  After a delay, the old man looked straight at George for the first time, but it was as if George were an object, a thing, which had nothing to do with him. Then he moved himself against the arms of the young man in an effort towards independence; and, seeing what he wanted, his escort turned gently round with him, and the three moved slowly off again to the compound.

  George was quite lost; he did not know what to do. He stood on the steps, smoking, looking vaguely about him at the scenery, the familiar wild scenery, and down to the valley. But it was necessary to do something. Finally he again raised his voice for the servant. When he came, orders were given that the garden boy should be questioned. The houseboy returned with a reflection of the garden boy’s insolent grin on his face, and said: ‘The garden boy says he does not know what happened, baas. He went to bed, leaving the girl outside – just as the baas did himself.’ This final phrase showed itself as a direct repetition of the insolent accusation the garden boy had made. But George did not act as he would have done even the day before. He ignored the insolence.

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nbsp; ‘Where is she?’ he asked the houseboy at last.

  The houseboy seemed surprised; it was a question he thought foolish, and he did not answer it. But he raised his eyes, as Smoke had done, to the kopjes, in a questing hopeless way; and George was made to admit something to his mind he had been careful not to admit.

  In that moment, while he stood following the direction of his servant’s eyes with his own, a change took place in him; he was gazing at a towering tumbling heap of boulders that stood sharp and black against a high fresh blue, the young blue of an African morning, and it was as if that familiar and loved shape moved back from him, reared menacingly like an animal and admitted danger – a sharp danger, capable of striking from a dark place that was a place of fear. Fear moved in George; it was something he had not before known; it crept along his flesh with a chilling touch, and he shivered. It was so new to him that he could not speak. With the care that one uses for a fragile, easily destroyable thing he took himself inside for breakfast, and went through the meal conscious of being sustained by the ceremony he always insisted on. Inside him a purpose was growing, and he was shielding it tenderly; for he did not know what it was. All he knew was, when he had laid down his coffee cup, and rung the bell for the servants, and gone outside to the veranda, that there the familiar landscape was outside of him, and that something within him was pointing a finger at it. In the now strong sunlight he shivered again; and crossed his arms so that his hands cupped his shoulders: they felt oddly frail. Till lately they had included the pushing strength of mountains; till this morning his arms had been branches and the birds sang in them; within him had been that terror which now waited outside and which he must fight.

  He spent that day doing nothing, sitting on his veranda with his pipe. His servants avoided the front part of the house.

  Towards sundown he fetched his rifle which he used only on the rare occasions when there was a snake that must be killed, for he had never shot a bird or a beast with it, and cleaned it, very carefully. He ordered his dinner for an hour earlier than usual, and several times during that meal went outside to look at the sky. It was clear from horizon to horizon, and a luminous glow was spreading over the rocks. When a heavy yellow moon was separated from the highest boulder of the mountain by a hairline, he said to the boys that he was going out with his gun. This they accepted as a thing he must do; nor did they make any move to leave the house for the compound: they were waiting for him to return.

  George passed the ruffling surface of the swimming pool, picked his way through the rock garden, and came to where his garden merged imperceptibly, in the reaching tendrils of the creepers, with the bush. For a few yards the path passed through short and trodden grass, and then it forked, one branch leading off to the business part of the farm, the other leading straight on through a grove of trees. Through the dense shadows George moved steadily; for the grass was still short, and the tree trunks glimmered low to the ground. Between the edge of this belt of trees and the half mile of path that wound in and around the big boulders of the kopje was a space filled with low jagged rocks, that seemed higher and sharper than they were because of the shadows of the moon. Here it was clear moving. The moon poured down its yellow flood; and his shadow moved beside him, lengthening and shortening with the unevenness of the ground. Behind him were the trees in their gulf of black, before him the kopje, the surfaces of granite showing white and glittering, like plates of crusted salt. Between, the broken shadows, of a dim purple colour, dappled with moonlight. To the left of him the rocks swept up sharply to another kopje; on the other side the ground fell away into a gulley which in its turn widened into the long grass slope, which, moving gently in the breeze, presented a gently gleaming surface, flattening and lifting so that there was a perpetual sweeping movement of light across miles of descending country. Far below was the valley, where the lights of homesteads gleamed steadily.

  The kopje in front of him was silent, dead silent. Not a bird stirred, and only the insects kept up their small shrilling. George moved into the shadows with a sharp tug of the heart, holding his fear in him cold and alive, like a weapon. But his rifle he handled carelessly.

  With cautious, directed glances he moved along and up the path as it rose through the boulders on the side of the kopje. As he went he prayed. He was praying that the enemy might present itself and be slain. It was when he was on the height of the path so that half a mile behind showed the lit veranda of his house, and half a mile in front the illuminated shapes of the huts in the compound, that he stopped and waited. He remained quite still, and allowed his fear to grow inside him, a controlled fear, so that while his skin crept and his scalp tingled, yet his hands remained steady on the rifle. To one side of him was a large rock, leaning forward and over him in a black shelf. On the other was a rock-encumbered space, girt by a tangle of branches and foliage. There were, in fact, trees and rocks all about him; the thing might come from any side. But this was the place; he knew it by instinct. And he kept perfectly still for fear that his enemy might be scared away. He did not have to wait long. Before the melancholy howling of the moonstruck dogs in the compound had had time to set the rhythm of his nerves, before his neck had time to ache with the continual alert movements of his head from side to side, he saw one of the shadows a dozen paces from him lengthen gradually, and at last separate itself from the rock. The low, ground-creeping thing showed a green glitter of eyes, and a sheen of moonlight shifted with the moving muscles of the flank. When the shape stilled and flattened itself for a spring, George lifted his rifle and fired. There was a coughing noise, and the shape lay still. George lowered the rifle and looked at it, almost puzzled, and stood still. There lay the enemy, dead, not a couple of paces from him. Sprawled almost at his feet was the leopard, its body still tensing convulsing in death. Anger sprang up again in George: it had all been so easy, so easy! Again he looked in wonder at his rifle; then he kicked the unresisting flesh of the leopard, first with a kind of curiosity, then brutally. Finally he smashed the butt of the rifle, again and again, in hard, thudding blows, against the head. There was no resistance, no sound, nothing.

  Finally, as the smell of blood and flesh began to fill him, he desisted, weak and helpless. He was let down. He had not been given what he had come for. When he finally left the beast lying there and walked home again, his legs were weak under him and his breath was coming in sobs; he was crying the peevish, frustrated tears of a disappointed man.

  The houseboys went out without complaint, into the temporarily safe night, to drag the body into the homestead. They began skinning the beast by lamplight. George slept heavily; and in the morning found the skin pegged in the sunshine, flesh side uppermost, and the fine papery inner skin was already blistering and puffing in the heat. George went to the kopje, and after a morning’s search among thorn and blackjack and stinging-nettle, found the mouth of a cave. There were fresh human bones lying there, and the bones of cattle, and smaller bones, probably of buck and hare.

  But the thing had been killed, and George was still left empty, a hungry man without possibility of food. He did not know what satisfaction it was he needed.

  The farm boys came to him for instructions; and he told them, impatiently, not to bother him, but to go to old Smoke.

  In a few days old Smoke himself came to see him, an evasive, sorrowful, dignified figure, to say he was going home: he was too old now to work for the Old Baas’s son.

  A few days later his compound was half empty. It was the urgent necessity of attracting new labour that pulled George together. He knew that an era was finished for him. While not all old Smoke’s kinsmen had left, there was now no focus, no authority, in his compound. He himself, now, would have to provide that focus, with his own will, his own authority; and he knew very well the perpetual strain and worry he must face. He was in the position of his neighbours.

  He patched things up, as he could; and while he was reordering his life, found that he was behaving towards himself as he might to
a convalescent. For there was a hurt place in him, and a hungry anger that no work could assuage.

  For a while he did nothing. Then he suddenly filled his stables with horses; and his home became a centre for the horse-loving people about him. He ran a pack of dogs, too, trained by himself; and took down those notices along his boundaries. For ‘Leopard’ George had been born. For him, now, the landscape was simply a home for leopards. Every week-end his big house was filled with people, young and old, male and female, who came for various reasons; some for the hospitality, some for love of George, some, indeed, for the fun of the Sunday’s hunting, which was always followed by a gigantic feast of food and drink.

  Quite soon George married Mrs Whately, a woman who had the intelligence to understand what she could and could not do if she wished to remain the mistress of Four Winds.

  Winter in July

  The three of them were sitting at their evening meal on the veranda. From behind, the living-room shed light on to the table, where their moving hands, the cutlery, the food, showed dimly, but clear enough for efficiency. Julia liked the half-tone. A lamp or candles would close them into a soft illuminated space, but obliterate the sky, which now bent towards them through the pillars of the veranda, a full deep sky, holding a yellowy bloom from an invisible moon that absorbed the stars into a faint far glitter.

  Sometimes Tom said, grumbling humorously: ‘Romantic, that’s what she is’; and Kenneth would answer, but with an abrupt, rather grudging laugh: ‘I like to see what I am eating.’ Kenneth was altogether an abrupt person. That quick, quickly-checked laugh, the swift critical look he gave her (which she met with her own eyes, as critical as his) were part of the long dialogue between them. For Kenneth did not accept her. He resisted her. Tom accepted her, as he accepted everything. For Julia it was not a question of preference: the two men supported her in their different manners. And the things they said, the three of them, seemed hardly to matter. The real thing was the soft elastic tension that bound them close.