This Was the Old Chief's Country

by Doris Lessing

  ‘In about a week.’

  Again Paul and she exchanged glances, and they went indoors, leaving Alec to finish the panning. Paul said, with that grudging enthusiasm: ‘You know, mother, if it’s true …’

  ‘If …’ she scoffed.

  ‘But he says if this works it means he can divine anything. He says Governments will be sending for him to divine their coalfields, water, gold – everything!”

  ‘But Paul,’ she said, wearily, ‘they can find coalfields and minerals with scientific instruments, they don’t need black magic.’ She even felt a little mean to damp the boy in this way. ‘Can they?’ he asked, doubtfully. He didn’t want to believe it because it sounded so dull to him. ‘But mother, even if he can’t divine, and it’s all nonsense, we’ll have a rich mine on this farm.’

  ‘That won’t satisfy your father,’ she said. ‘He’ll rest at nothing less than a universal theory.’

  The rocks were sent off that same day to the station; and now they were restless and eager, even Maggie, who tried not to show it. They all went to examine this vital shaft one afternoon. It was in a thick patch of bush and they had to walk along a native path to reach the rough clearing, where a simple windlass and swinging iron bucket marked the shaft. Maggie leaned over. There being no gleam of water, as in a well, to mark the bottom, she could see nothing at first. For a short distance the circular hole plunged rockily, with an occasional flash of light from a faceted pebble; then a complete darkness. But as she looked there was a glow of light far below and she could see the tiny form of a man against the lit rock face. ‘How deep?’ she asked, shuddering a little.

  ‘Over a hundred now,’ said Alec, casually. ‘I’ll go down and have a look.’ The Africans swung the bucket out into the centre of the shaft and Alec pulled the rope to him, so that the bucket inclined at the edge, slid in one leg and thrust himself out, so that he hung in space, clinging to the rope with one hand and using an arm and a leg to fend off the walls as the rope unwound him down into the blackness. Maggie found it frightening to watch so she pulled her head back from the shaft so as not to look; but Paul lay on his stomach and peered over.

  At last Alec came up again. He scrambled lightly from the rocking bucket to safety, and Maggie suppressed a sigh of relief. ‘You should see that reef,’ he said, proudly, ‘it’s three feet wide. I’ve cross-cut in three places and it doesn’t break at all.’

  Maggie was thinking: Only three days of waiting gone! They were all waiting now, in a condition of hallucinatory calm, for the result to come back from the Assay Department. When only five days had passed Alec said: ‘Let’s send the boy in for the post.’ She had been expecting this, and although she said ‘Silly to send so soon,’ she was eager to do so; after all, they might have replied, one never knew – and so the houseboy made the trip in to the station. Usually they only sent twice a week for letters. Next day he went again – nothing. And now a week had passed and the three of them were hanging helplessly about the house, watching the road for the post-boy. Eight days: Alec could not work, could not eat, and Paul lounged about the veranda, saying: ‘Won’t it be funny to have a big mine just down there, on our own farm. There’ll be a town around it, and think what this land will be worth then!’

  ‘Don’t count your chickens,’ said Maggie. But all kinds of half-suppressed longings were flooding up in her. It would be nice to have good clothes again; to buy nice linen, instead of the thin, washed-out stuff they had been using for years. Perhaps she could go to the doctor for her headaches, and he would prescribe a holiday, and they could go to Scotland for a holiday and see the old people …

  Nine days. The tension was no longer pleasant. Paul and Alec quarrelled. Alec said he would refuse to allow a town to be built around the mine; it would be a pity to waste good farming land. Paul said he was mad – look at Johannesburg, the building lots there were worth thousands the square inch. Maggie again told them not to be foolish; and they laughed at her and said she had no imagination.

  The tenth day was a regular mail-day. If there was no letter then Alec said he would telephone the Department; but this was a mere threat, because the Department dealt with hundreds of samples from hopeful gold-searchers all over the country and could not be expected to make special arrangements for one person. But Alec said: ‘I’m surprised they haven’t telephoned before. Just like a Government department not to see the importance of something like this.’ The post was late. They sat on the darkening veranda, gazing down the road through the mealie-fields, and when the man came at last there was still no letter. They had all three expected it.

  And now there was a feeling of anti-climax, and Maggie found a private belief confirmed: that nothing could happen to this family in neat, tidy events; everything must always drag itself out, everything declined and decayed and muddled itself along. Even if there is gold, she thought, secretly, there’ll be all kinds of trouble with selling it, and it’ll drag out for months and months! That eleventh day was a long torture. Alec sat in his office, anxiously checking his calculations, drinking cup after cup of strong, sweet tea. Paul pretended to read, and yawned, and watched the clock until Maggie lost her temper with him. The houseboy, now rather resentful because of these repeated trips of seven miles each way on foot, set off late after lunch to the station. They tried to sleep the afternoon away, but could not keep their eyes closed. When the sun was hanging just over the mountains, they again arranged themselves on the veranda to wait. The sun sank, and Maggie telephoned the station: Yes, the train had been two hours late. They ate supper in tense silence and went back to the veranda. The moon was up and everything flooded with that weird light which made the mealie-fields lose solidity, so that there was a swaying and murmuring like a sea all around them. At last Paul shouted: ‘Here he comes!’ And now, when they could see the swinging hurricane lamp, that sent a dim, red flicker along the earth across the bright moonlight, they could hardly bring themselves to move. They were thinking: Well, it needn’t be today, after all – perhaps we’ll have this waiting tomorrow, too.

  The man handed in the sack. Maggie took it, removed the bundle of letters and handed them to Alec; she could see a Government envelope. She was feeling sick, and Paul was white, the bones of his face showed too sharply. Alec dropped the letters and then clumsily picked them up. He made several attempts to open the envelope and at last ripped it across, tearing the letter itself. He straightened the paper, held it steady, and – but Maggie had averted her eyes and glanced at Paul. He was looking at her with a sickly and shamed smile.

  Alec held the piece of paper loose by one corner, and he was sitting rigid, his eyes dark and blank. ‘No good,’ he said at last, in a difficult, jerking voice. He seemed to have shrunk, and the flesh on his face was tight. His lips were blue. He dropped the paper and sat staring. Then he muttered: ‘I can’t understand it, I simply can’t understand it.’

  Maggie whispered to Paul. He jumped up, relieved to get away, and went to the kitchen and soon returned with a tray of tea. Maggie poured out a big cup, sugared it heavily and handed it to Alec. Those blue lips worried her. He put it at his side, but she took it again and held it in front of him and he drank it off, rather impatiently. It was that impatient movement which reassured her. He was now sitting more easily and his face was flushed. ‘I can’t understand it,’ he said again, in an aggrieved voice, and Maggie understood that the worst was over. She was aching with pity for him and for Paul, who was pretending to read. She could see how badly the disappointment had gripped him. But he was only a child she thought; he would get over it.

  ‘Perhaps we should go to bed,’ she suggested, in a small voice; but Alec said: ‘That means …’ he paused, then thought for a moment and said: ‘I must have been wrong over – all this time I’ve been over-estimating the amount in a sample. I thought that was going ounces to the ton. And it means that my theory about the copper was …’ He sat leaning forward, arms hanging loosely before him; then he jumped up, strode through to his off
ice and returned with a divining wire. She saw it was one of the old ones, a plain iron rod. ‘Have you anything gold about you?’ he asked, impatiently.

  She handed him a brooch her mother had given her. He took it and went towards the veranda. ‘Alec,’ she protested. ‘Not tonight.’ But he was already outside. Paul put down his book and smiled ruefully at her. She smiled back. She did not have to tell him to forget all the wild-goose daydreams. Life would seem flat and grey for a while, but not for long – that was what she wanted to say to him; she would have liked, too, to add a little lecture about working for what one wanted in life, and not to trust to luck; but the words stuck. ‘Get yourself to bed,’ she suggested; but he shook his head and handed her his cup for more tea. He was looking out at the moonlight, where a black, restless shape could be seen passing backwards and forwards.

  She went quietly to a window and looked out, shielding herself with a curtain, as though she felt ashamed of this anxious supervision which Alec would most certainly resent if he knew. But he did not notice. The moon shone monotonously down, it looked like a polished silver sixpence; and Alec’s shadow jerked and lengthened over the rough ground as he walked up and down with his divining rod. Sometimes he stopped and stood thinking. She went back to sit by Paul. She slipped an arm around him, and so they remained for a time, thinking of the man outside. Later she went to the window again, and this time beckoned to Paul and he stood with her, silently watching Alec.

  ‘He’s a very brave man,’ she found herself saying, in a choked voice; for she found that determined figure in the moonlight unbearably pathetic. Paul felt awkward because of her emotion, and looked down when she insisted: ‘Your father’s a very brave man and don’t you ever forget it.’ His embarrassment sent him off to bed. He could not stand her emotion as well as his own.

  Afterwards she understood that her pity for Alec was a false feeling – he did not need pity. It flashed through her mind, too – though she suppressed the thought – that words like brave were as false.

  Until the moon slid down behind the house and the veld went dark, Alec remained pacing the patch of ground before the house. At last he came morosely to bed, but without the look of exposed and pitiful fear she had learned to dread: he was safe in the orderly inner world he had built for himself. She heard him remark from the bed on the other side of the room where he was sitting smoking in the dark: ‘If that reef outside the front door is what I think it is, then I’ve found where I was wrong. Quite a silly little mistake, really.’

  Cautiously she enquired: ‘Are you going on with that shaft?’

  ‘I’ll see in the morning. I’ll just check up on my new idea first.’ They exchanged a few remarks of this kind; and then he crushed out his cigarette and lay down. He slept immediately; but she lay awake, thinking drearily of Paul’s future.

  In the morning Alec went straight off down to his shaft, while Paul forced himself to go and interview the bossboys about the farmwork. Maggie was planning a straight talk with the boy about his school, but his present mood frightened her. Several times he said, scornfully, just as if he had not himself been intoxicated: ‘Father’s crazy. He’s got no sense left.’ He laughed in an arrogant, half-ashamed way; and she controlled her anger at this youthful unfairness. She was tired, and afraid of her own irritability, which these days seemed to explode in the middle of the most trifling arguments. She did not want to be irritable with Paul because, when this happened, he treated her tolerantly, as a grown man would, and did not take her seriously. She waited days before the opportunity came, and then the discussion went badly after all.

  ‘Why do you want me to be different, mother?’ he asked, sullenly, when she insisted he should study for a scholarship. ‘You and father were just like everybody else, but I’ve got to be something high and mighty.’ Maggie already found herself growing angry. She said, as her mother might have done: ‘Everybody has the duty to better themselves and get on. If you try you can be anything you like.’ The boy’s face was set against her. There was something in the air of this country which had formed him that made the other, older voice seem like an anachronism. Maggie persisted: ‘Your great-grandparents were small farmers. They rented their land from a lord. But they saved enough to give your grandfather fifty pounds to take to the city. He got his own shop by working for it. Your father was just an ordinary clerk, but he took his opportunities and made his way here. But you see no shame in accepting a nobody’s job, wherever someone’s kind enough to offer it to you.’ He seemed embarrassed, and finally remarked: ‘All that class business doesn’t mean anything out here. Besides, my father’s a small farmer, just like his grandparents. I don’t see what’s so new about that.’ At this, as if his words had released a spring marked anger, she snapped out: ‘So, if that’s what you are, the way you look at things, it’s a waste of time even …’ She checked herself, but it was too late. Her loss of control had ended the contact between them. Afterwards she wondered if perhaps he was right. In a way, the wheel had come the circle: the difference between that old Scotsman and Alec was that one worked his land with his own hands; he was limited only by his own capacities; while the other worked through a large labour-force: he was as much a slave to his ill-fed, backward, and sullen labourers as they were to him. Well then, and if this were true, and Paul could see it as clearly as she did, why could he not decide to break the circle and join the men who had power because they had knowledge: the free men, that was how she saw them. Knowledge freed a man; and to that belief she clung, because it was her nature; and she was to grieve all her life because such a simple and obvious truth was not simple for Paul.

  Some days later she said, tartly, to Paul: ‘If you’re not going back to school, then you might as well put your mind to the farmwork.’ He replied that he was trying to; to her impatience he answered with an appeal: ‘It’s difficult, mother. Everything’s in such a mess. I don’t know where to start. I haven’t the experience.’ Maggie tried hard to control that demon of disappointment and anger in her that made her hard, unsympathetic; but her voice was dry: ‘You’ll get experience by working.’

  And so Paul went to his father. He suggested, practically, that Alec should spend a month (‘only a month, Dad, it’s not so long’) showing him the important things. Alec agreed, but Paul could see, as they went from plough to wagon, field to grazing land, that Alec’s thoughts were not with him. He would ask a question, and Alec did not hear. And at the end of three days he gave it up. The boy was seething with frustration and misery. ‘What do they expect me to do?’ he kept muttering to himself, ‘what do they want?’ His mother was like a cold wall; she would not love him unless he became a college boy; his father was amiably uninterested. He took himself off to neighbouring farmers. They were kind, for everyone was sorry for him. But after a week or so of listening to advice, he was more dismayed than before. ‘You’d better do something about your soil, lad,’ they said. ‘Your Dad’s worked it out.’ Or: ‘The first thing is to plant trees, the wind’ll blow what soil there is away unless you do something quickly.’ Or: ‘That big vlei of yours: do you know it was dry a month before the rains last year? Your father has ploughed up the catchment area; you’d better sink some wells quickly.’ It meant a complete reorganization. He could do it, of course, but … the truth was he had not the heart to do it, when no one was interested in him. They just don’t care, he said to himself; and after a few weeks of desultory work he took himself off to James, his adopted father. Part of the day he would spend on the lands, just to keep things going, and then he drifted over to the mine.

  James was a big, gaunt man, with a broad and bony face. Small grey eyes looked steadily from deep sockets, his mouth was hard. He stood loosely, bending from the shoulders, and his hands swung loose beside him so that there was something of a gorilla-look about him. Strength – that was the impression he gave, and that was what Paul found in him. And yet there was also a hesitancy, a moment of indecision before he moved or spoke, and a sardonic note
in his drawl – it was strength on the defensive, a watchful and precarious strength. He smoked heavily, rough cigarettes he rolled for himself between yellow-stained fingers; and regularly drank just a little too much. He would get really drunk several times a year, but between these indulgences kept to his three whiskies at sundown. He would toss these back, standing, one after another, when he came in from work; and then give the bottle a long look, a malevolent look, and put it away where he could not see it. Then he took his dinner, without pleasure, to feed the drink; and immediately went to bed. Once Paul found him at a week-end lying sodden and asleep sprawled over the table, and he was sickened; but afterwards James was simple and kindly as always; nor did he apologize, but took it as a matter of course that a man needed to drink himself blind from time to time. This, oddly enough, reassured the boy. His own father never drank, and Maggie had a puritan horror of it; though she would offer visitors a drink from politeness. It was a problem that had never touched him; and now it was presented crudely to him and seemed no problem at all.

  He asked questions about James’s life. James would give him that shrewd, slow look, hesitate a little and then in a rather tired voice, as if talking were disagreeable, answer the boy’s clumsy questions. He was always very patient with Paul; but behind the good-natured patience was another emotion, like a restrained cruelty; it was not a personal cruelty, directed against Paul, but the self-punishment of fatalism, in which Paul was included.

  James’s mother was Afrikaans and his father English. He had the practicality, the humour, the good sense of his mother’s people, and the inverted and tongue-tied poetry of the English, which expressed itself in just that angry fatalism and perhaps also in the drink. He had been raised in a suburb of Johannesburg, and went early to the mines. He spoke of that city with a mixture of loathing and fascination, so that to Paul it became an epitome of all the great and glamorous cities of the world. But even while Paul was dreaming of its delights he would hear James drawl: ‘I got out of it in time, I had that much sense.’ And though he did not want to have his dream darkened, he had to listen: ‘When you first go down, you get paid like a prince and the world’s your oyster. Then you get married and tie yourself up with a houseful of furniture on the hire-purchase and a house under a mortgage. Your car’s your own, and you exchange it for a new one every year. It’s a hell of a life, money pouring in and money pouring out, and your wife loves you, and everything’s fine, parties and a good time for one and all. And then your best friend finds his chest is giving him trouble and he goes to the doctor, and then suddenly you find he’s dropped out of the crowd; he’s on half the money and all the bills to pay. His wife finds it no fun and off she goes with someone else. Then you discover it’s not just one of your friends, but half the men you know are in just that position, crooks at thirty and owning nothing but the car, and they soon sell that to pay alimony. You find you drink too much – there’s something on your mind, as you might say. Then, if you’ve got sense, you walk out while the going’s good. If not, you think: It can’t happen to me, and you stay on.’ He allowed a minute to pass while he looked at the boy to see how much had sunk in. Then he repeated, firmly: ‘That’s not just my story, son, take it from me. It’s happened to hundreds.’