This Was the Old Chief's Country

by Doris Lessing

  Marina happened to be turning into a shop one morning, where she hoped to buy a table for her new house, and saw, without really seeing them, a file of such handcuffed Africans passing her. They were talking and laughing among themselves, and with the black policemen who herded them, and called back loud and jocular remarks at their women. In Marina’s mind the vision of that ideal table (for which she had been searching for some days, without success) was rather stronger than what she actually saw; and it was not until the prisoners had passed that she suddenly said to herself: ‘Good heavens, that man looks rather like Charlie – and that girl behind there, the plump girl with the spindly legs, there was something about the back view of that girl that was very like Theresa …’ The file had in the meantime turned a corner and was out of sight. For a moment Marina thought: Perhaps I should follow and see? Then she thought: Nonsense, I’m seeing things, of course it can’t be Charlie, he must have reached home by now … And she went into the shop to buy her table.

  Eldorado

  Hundreds of miles south were the gold-bearing reefs of Johannesburg; hundreds of miles north, the rich copper mines. These the two lodestars of the great central plateau, these the magnets which drew men, white and black; drew money from the world’s counting-house; concentrated streets, shops, gardens; attracted riches and misery – particularly misery.

  But this, here, was farming country, true farming land, a pocket of good, dark, rich soil in the wastes of the light sandveld. A ‘pocket’ some hundreds of miles in depth, and only to be considered in such midget terms by comparison with those eternal sandy wastes which fed cattle, though poorly, and satisfied that shallow weed tobacco. For that is how a certain kind of farmer sees it; a man of the old-fashioned sort will think of farming as the making of food, and of tobacco as a nervous, unsatisfactory crop, geared to centres in London and New York; he will watch the fields fill and crowd with new, bright leaf, and imagine it crushed through factory and warehouse to end in a wisp of pale smoke, he will not like to imagine the substance of his soil dissipating in smoke. And if sensible people argue: Yes, but people must smoke, you smoke yourself, you’re not being reasonable; he is likely to reply (rather irritably perhaps): ‘Yes, of course, you’re right but I want to grow food, the others can grow tobacco.’

  When Alec Barnes came searching for a farm, he chose the rich maize soil, though cleverer, experienced men told him the big money was to be found only in tobacco. Tobacco and gold, gold and tobacco – these were the moneymakers. For this country had gold too, a great deal of it; but perhaps there is only room in one’s mind for one symbol, one type; and when people say ‘gold’ they think of the Transvaal, and so it was with Alec. There were many ways of seeing this new country, and Alec Barnes chose to see it with the eye of the food producer. He had not left England, he said, to worry about money and chase success. He wanted a slow, satisfying life, taking things easy.

  He bought a small farm, about two thousand acres, from a man who had gone bankrupt. There was a house already built. It was a pleasant house, in the style of the country, of light red brick with a corrugated iron roof, big, bare rooms and a wide veranda. Shrubs and creepers, now rather neglected, showed scarlet against the dull green scrub, or hung in showers of gold and purple from the trees. The rainy season had sprung new grass high and thick over paths, over flower-beds. When the Barnes family came in they had to send an African ahead with a scythe to cut an opening through thickets of growth, and in the front room the bricks of the floor were being tumbled aside by the shoots from old tree roots. There was a great deal to do before the place could be comfortable, and Maggie Barnes set herself to work. She was the daughter of a small Glasgow shopkeeper, and it might be thought that everything would be strange to her; but her grandparents had farmed and she remembered visiting the old people as a child, playing with a shaggy old cart-horse, feeding the chickens. That way of farming could hardly be compared to this, but in a sense it was like returning to her roots. At least, that was how she thought of it. She would pause in her work, duster in hand, at a window or on the veranda, and look over the scrub to the mealie-fields, and it did not seem so odd that she should be here in this big house, with black servants to wait on her, not so outlandish that she might walk an hour across country and call the soil underfoot her soil. There was no domesticated cart-horse to take sugar from her hand, only teams of sharp-horned and wild-eyed oxen; but there were chickens and turkeys and geese – she had no intention of paying good money for what she could grow herself, not she who knew the value of money! Besides, a busy woman has no time for fainthearted comparisons, and there was so much to do; and she intended that all this activity should earn its proper reward. She had gone beyond her grandparents, with their tight, frugal farm, which earned a living but no more, had gone beyond her parents, counting their modest profits in the back rooms of the grocery shop. In a sense she included both generations, could see the merits and failings of both, but – she and her husband would ‘get on’, they would be prosperous as the farmers around them were prosperous. It was true that when the neighbours made doubtful faces at their growing small-scale maize, and said there could be no ‘taking it easy’ on that farm, she felt a little troubled. But she approved her husband’s choice, the growing of food satisfied her ideas of what was right, and connected her with her religious and respectable grandparents. Besides, many of the things Alec said she simply did not take seriously. When he said, fiercely, how glad he was to be out of England, out of the fight for success and the struggle to be better than one’s neighbours, she merely smiled: what was the matter with getting on and bettering oneself? They were just words to her. She would say, in her bluff, affectionate way, of Alec: ‘He’s a queer man, being English, I canna get used to the way of him.’ For she put down his high-flown notions to his being English. Also, he was strange to her because of his gentleness: the men of her people were outspoken and determined and did not defer to their women. Alec deferred to her. Sometimes she could not understand him; but she was happy with him, and with her son, who was still a small child.

  She sent Paul out with a native servant to play in the veld, while she worked, whitewashing the house, even climbing the roof herself to see to the guttering. Paul learned a new way of playing. He spread himself, ranging over the farm, so that the native youth who had the care of him found himself kept running. His toys, the substitutes for the real thing, mechanical lorries and bricks and dolls, were left in cupboards; and he made dams in the mud of the fields, plunged fearfully on the plough behind the oxen, rode high on the sacks of the wagons. He lost the pretty, sheltered look of the child from ‘home’, who must be nervous of streets and traffic, always conscious of the pressure of the neighbours. He grew fast and tall, big-boned and muscular, and lean and burnt. Sometimes Maggie would say, with that good-natured laugh: ‘Well, and I don’t know myself with this change-child!’ Perhaps the laugh was a little uneasy, too. For she was not as thick-fibred as she looked. She was that Scots type, rather short, but finely made, even fragile, with the great blue eyes and easily-freckling fair skin and a mass of light black curls. Even after the hard work and the sunlight, which thickened her into a sturdy, energetic body of a woman, she kept, under the appearance of strength, that fine-boned delicacy and a certain shy charm. And here was her son shooting up into a lanky, bony youngster, the whites of his eyes always a little reddened by glare, his dark hair tumbling rough over his head with rusty bleached locks where the sun had struck. She looked at him in the bath, showing smooth dark-brown all over, save for the tender, milky skin like a loincloth where the strong khaki shorts kept the sun off. She felt a little perturbed, as if in some way he was most flagrantly betraying her by growing so, away from the fair, clear, open looks of her good Scots ancestors. There was something stubborn and secretive about him – perhaps even something a little coarse. But then – she reminded herself – he was half-English, too, and Alec was tall, long-headed, with a closed English face, and slow English speech
which concealed more than it said. For a time she tried to change the child, to make him more dependent, until Alec noticed it and was angry. She had never seen him so angry before. He was a mild, easy man, who noticed very little, content to work at the farm and leave the rest to her. But now they fought. ‘What are you coddling him for?’ Alec shouted. ‘What’s the good of bringing him here to a country where he can grow up a man if you’re going to fuss and worry all the time?’ She gave him back as good; for to her women friends she would expound her philosophy of men: ‘You’ve got to stand against them once in a way, it doesnae do to be too sweet to them.’ But these remarks, she soon understood, sounded rather foolish; for when did she need to ‘stand against’ Alec? She had her own way over everything. Except in this, for the very country was against her. Soon she left the boy to do as he liked on the veld. He was at an age when children at ‘home’ would be around their mothers, but at seven and eight he was quite independent, had thrown off the attendant servant, and would spend all day on the fields, coming in for meals as if – so Maggie complained in that soft, pretty, Scots voice: ‘As if I’m no better than a restaurant!’ But she accepted it, she was not the complaining sort; it was only a comfortable grumble to her woman friends. Besides, living here had hardened her a little. Perhaps hardened was not the right word? It was a kind of fatalism, the easy atmosphere of the country which might bring in Paul and her husband an hour late for a meal, looking at her oddly if she complained of the time. What’s an hour? they seemed to be asking; even: ‘What’s time at all?’ She could understand it, she was beginning to feel a little that way herself. But in her heart she was determined that Paul would not grow up lax and happy-go-lucky, like a Colonial. Soon he would be going to school and he would ‘have it knocked out of him’. She had that good sturdy Scottish attitude towards education. She expected children to work and win scholarships. And indeed, it would be necessary, for the farm could hardly support a son through the sort of schooling she visualized for him. She was beginning to understand that it never would. At the end of the first five years she understood that their neighbours had been right: this farm would never do more than make a scanty living.

  When she spoke to Alec he seemed to turn against her, not noisily, in a healthy and understandable quarrel, but in a stubborn, silent way. Surely he wanted Paul to make something of himself? she demanded. Put like that, of course, Alec had to agree, but he agreed vaguely. It was this vagueness that upset Maggie, for there was no way of answering it. It seemed to be saying: All these things are quite irrelevant; I don’t understand you.

  Alec had been a clerk in a bank until the First World War. After the upheaval he could not go back into an office. He married Maggie and came to this new country. There were farmers in his family, too, a long way back, though he had only come to remember this when he felt a need to explain, even excuse, that dissident streak which had made a conventional English life impossible. He would talk of a certain great-uncle, who had ridden a wild black horse around the shires, fathering illegitimate children and drinking and behaving so that he ended in prison for smuggling. Yes, this was all very well, thought Maggie, but what has that old rascal got to do with Alec, and what with my son? For Alec would talk of this unsatisfactory ancestor with pride and his eyes would rest speculatively on Paul – it gave Maggie goose-flesh to see him.

  Alec grew even vaguer as time went by. He used to stand at the edge of a field, gazing dimly across it at a ridge of bush which rose sharp to the great blue sky; or at the end of the big vlei, which cut across the farm in a shallow, golden swathe of rustling grasses, with a sluggish watercourse showing green down its centre. He would stand on a moonlit night staring across the fields which now appeared like a diffusing green sea, the white crests of the maize shifting like foam; or at midday, looking over the stretching acres of brown and heaving clods, warm and rich with sunlight; or at sunset, when the miles of bush flared gold and red. Distance – that was what he needed. It was what he had left England to find.

  He cleared new ground every year. When he first came it was mostly bush, with a few cleared patches. The house was bedded in trees. Now one walked from the house through Maggie’s pretty garden, and the mealies stood like a green wall on three sides of the homestead. From a little hillock behind the house, the swaying green showed solid and unbroken, hundreds of acres of it, beautiful to look at until one remembered that the experts were warning against this kind of planting. Better small fields with trees to guard them from wind; better girdles of grass, so that the precious soil might be held by the roots and not wash away with the flooding storm-waters. But Alec’s instinct was for space, and soon half the surface of the farm was exposed, and the plough drove a straight line from boundary to boundary, and the labourers worked in a straight line, like an advancing army, their hoes rising and falling and flashing like spears in the sun. The vivid green of the leaves rippled and glittered, or shone soft with moonlight; or at reaping time the land lay bare and hard, and over it the tarnished litter of the fallen husks; or at planting, a wide sweep of dark-brown clods which turned to harsh red under the rain. Beautiful it was and Maggie could understand Alec’s satisfaction in it; but it was disturbing when the rains drove the soil along the gulleys; when the experts came from town and told Alec he was ruining his farm; when at the season’s end the yield rose hardly at all in spite of the constantly increased acreage. But Alec set that obstinate face of his against the experts and the evidence of the books, and cut more trees, exposing the new soil which fed fine, strong plants, showing the richness of their growth in the heavy cobs. One could mark the newly-cleared area in the great field every year; the maize stood a couple of feet shorter on the old soil. Alec sent gangs of workers into the trees, and through the dry season the dull thud-thud of axes sounded across the wide, clean air, and the trees crashed one after another into the wreckage of their branches. Always a new field, or rather, the old one extended; always fine new soil ready for the planting, but there came a time when it was not possible to cut more trees, for where would the cattle graze? There must be sufficient veld left to feed them, for without them the ploughs and wagons could not move, and there wasn’t sufficient capital for a tractor. So Alec rested on his laurels for a couple of years, working the great field, and Maggie sent her son off to school in town a hundred miles away. He would return only for the holidays – would return, she hoped, brisker, with purpose, the languor of the farm driven out of him. She missed him badly, but it was a relief that he was with other children, and this relief made up for the loss. As for Alec, Paul’s going made him uneasy. Now he was actually at school, he must face his responsibility for the child’s future. He wandered over his farm rather less vaguely and wondered how Paul thought of the town. For that was how he saw it; not that he was at school, but in town; and it was the reason why he had been so reluctant for him to go. He did not want him to grow into an office-worker, a pen-user, a city-cypher, the sort of person he had been himself and now disowned. But what if Paul did not feel as he did? Alec would stand looking at a tree, or a stretch of water, thinking: What docs this mean to Paul, what does he think when he swims here? – in the secretive, nostalgic way of parents trying to guess at their children’s souls. What sort of a creature was Paul? When he came to it, he had no idea at all, although the child was so like him, a long, lean, dark, silent boy, with contemplative dark eyes and a slow way of speaking. And here was Maggie, with such plans for him, determined that he must be an engineer, a scientist, a doctor, and nothing less than famous. The fame could be discounted, tolerantly, with her maternal pride and possessiveness, but scientists of any kind are not produced on the sort of profit he was making.

  He thought worriedly about the farm. Perhaps he could lease adjoining land and graze his beasts there, and leave his own good land free for cutting? But all the land was taken up. He knew quite well, too, that the problem was deeper. He should change his way of farming. There were all sorts of things he could do –should do, at on
ce; but at the idea of them a lassitude crept over him and he thought, obstinately: Why should I, why fuss and worry, when I’m free of all that, free of the competition in the Old Country? I didn’t come here to fight myself into a shadow over getting rich … But the truth was, though he did not admit it to himself, not for a second, he was very bored. He had come to the limits of his old way, and now, to succeed, it would be going over the same ground, but in a different way – nothing new; that was the point. Rather guiltily he found himself daydreaming about pulling up his roots here and going off somewhere else – South America, China – why not? Then he pulled himself together. To postpone the problem he cut another small area of trees, and the cutting of them exposed all the ground to where the ridge lifted itself; they could see clear from the house across the vlei and up the other side; all mealies, all a shimmering mass of green; and on the ridge was the boundary of the next farm, a low barbed-wire fence, and against the fence was a small mine. It was nothing very grand; just a two-stamp affair, run by a single man who got what gold he could from a poor but steady seam. The mine had been there for years. The mine-stamp thudded day and night, coming loud or soft, according to the direction of the wind. But to Alec there was something new and even terrible about seeing the black dump of the mine buildings, seeing the black smoke drifting up into the blue, fresh sky. His deep and thoughtful eyes would often turn that way. How strange that from that cluster of black ugliness, under the hanging smoke, gold should come from the earth. It was unpleasant, too. This was farming land. It was outrageous that the good soil should be covered, even for a mere five acres or so, by buildings and iron gear and the sordid mine compound.