This Was the Old Chief's Country

by Doris Lessing

  For a few years the hollow in the mountains was left silent, no smoke rose to dim the sky, except perhaps for an occasional prospector, whose fire was a single column of wavering blue smoke, as from the cigarette of a giant, rising into the blue, hot sky.

  Then all at once the hollow was filled with violence and noise and activity and hundreds of people. Mr Macintosh had bought the rights to mine this gold. They told him he was foolish, that no single man, no matter how rich, could afford to take chances in this place.

  But they did not reckon with the character of Mr Macintosh, who had already made a fortune and lost it, in Australia, and then made another in New Zealand, which he still had. He proposed to increase it here. Of course, he had no intention of sinking those expensive shafts which might or might not reach gold and hold the dipping, chancy reefs and seams. The right course was quite clear to Mr Macintosh, and this course he followed, though it was against every known rule of proper mining.

  He simply hired hundreds of African labourers and set them to shovel up the soil in the centre of that high, enclosed hollow in the mountains, so that there was soon a deeper hollow, then a vast pit, then a gulf like an inverted mountain. Mr Macintosh was taking great swallows of the earth, like a gold-eating monster, with no fancy ideas about digging shafts or spending money on roofing tunnels. The earth was hauled, at first, up the shelving sides of the gulf in buckets, and these were suspended by ropes made of twisted bark fibre, for why spend money on steel ropes when this fibre was offered free to mankind on every tree? And if it got brittle and broke and the buckets went plunging into the pit, then they were not harmed by the fall, and there was plenty of fibre left on the trees. Later, when the gulf grew too deep, there were trucks on rails, and it was not unknown for these, too, to go sliding and plunging to the bottom, because in all Mr Macintosh’s dealings there was a fine, easy good-humour, which meant he was more likely to laugh at such an accident than grow angry. And if someone’s head got in the way of falling buckets or trucks, then there were plenty of black heads and hands for the hiring. And if the loose, sloping bluffs of soil fell in landslides, or if a tunnel, narrow as an antbear’s hole, that was run off sideways from the main pit like a tentacle exploring for new reefs, caved in suddenly, swallowing half a dozen men – well, one can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. This was Mr Macintosh’s favourite motto.

  The Africans who worked this mine called it ‘the pit of death’, and they called Mr Macintosh ‘The Gold Stomach’. Nevertheless, they came in their hundreds to work for him, thus providing free arguments for those who said: ‘The native doesn’t understand good treatment, he only appreciates the whip, look at Macintosh, he’s never short of labour.’

  Mr Macintosh’s mine, raised high in the mountains, was far from the nearest police station, and he took care that there was always plenty of kaffir beer brewed in the compound, and if the police patrols came searching for criminals, these could count on Mr Macintosh facing the police for them and assuring them that such and such a native, Registration Number Y2345678, had never worked for him. Yes, of course they could see his books.

  Mr Macintosh’s books and records might appear to the simple-minded as casual and ineffective, but these were not the words used of his methods by those who worked for him, and so Mr Macintosh kept his books himself. He employed no book-keeper, no clerk. In fact, he employed only one white man, an engineer. For the rest, he had six overseers or bossboys whom he paid good salaries and treated like important people.

  The engineer was Mr Clarke, and his house and Mr Macintosh’s house were on one side of the big pit, and the compound for the Africans was on the other side. Mr Clarke earned fifty pounds a month, which was more than he would earn anywhere else. He was a silent, hardworking man, except when he got drunk, which was not often. Three or four times in the year he would be off work for a week, and then Mr Macintosh did his work for him till he recovered, when he greeted him with the good-humoured words: ‘Well, laddie, got that off your chest?’

  Mr Macintosh did not drink at all. His not drinking was a passionate business, for like many Scots people he ran to extremes. Never a drop of liquor could be found in his house. Also, he was religious, in a reminiscent sort of way, because of his parents, who had been very religious. He lived in a two-roomed shack, with a bare wooden table in it, three wooden chairs, a bed and a wardrobe. The cook boiled beef and carrots and potatoes three days a week, roasted beef three days, and cooked a chicken on Sundays.

  Mr Macintosh was one of the richest men in the country, he was more than a millionaire. People used to say to him: But for heaven’s sake, he could do anything, go anywhere, what’s the point of having so much money if you live in the back of beyond with a parcel of blacks on top of a big hole in the ground?

  But to Mr Macintosh it seemed quite natural to live so, and when he went for a holiday to Cape Town, where he lived in the most expensive hotel, he always came back again long before he was expected. He did not like holidays. He liked working.

  He wore old, oily khaki trousers, tied at the waist with an old red tie, and he wore a red handkerchief loose around his neck over a white singlet. He was short and broad and strong, with a big square head tilted back on a thick neck. His heavy brown arms and neck sprouted thick black hair around the edges of the singlet. His eyes were small and grey and shrewd. His mouth was thin, pressed tight in the middle. He wore an old felt hat on the back of his head, and carried a stick cut from the bush, and he went strolling around the edge of the pit, slashing the stick at bushes and grass or sometimes at lazy Africans, and he shouted orders to his bossboys, and watched the swarms of workers far below him in the bottom of the pit, and then he would go to his little office and make up his books, and so he spent his day. In the evenings he sometimes asked Mr Clarke to come over and play cards.

  Then Mr Clarke would say to his wife: ‘Annie, he wants me,’ and she nodded and told her cook to make supper early.

  Mrs Clarke was the only white woman on the mine. She did not mind this, being a naturally solitary person. Also, she had been profoundly grateful to reach this haven of fifty pounds a month with a man who did not mind her husband’s bouts of drinking. She was a woman of early middle age, with a thin, flat body, a thin, colourless face, and quiet blue eyes. Living here, in this destroying heat, year after year, did not make her ill, it sapped her slowly, leaving her rather numbed and silent. She spoke very little, but then she roused herself and said what was necessary.

  For instance, when they first arrived at the mine it was to a two-roomed house. She walked over to Mr Macintosh and said: ‘You are alone, but you have four rooms. There are two of us and the baby, and we have two rooms. There’s no sense in it.’ Mr Macintosh gave her a quick, hard look, his mouth tightened, and then he began to laugh. ‘Well, yes, that is so,’ he said, laughing, and he made the change at once, chuckling every time he remembered how the quiet Annie Clarke had put him in his place.

  Similarly, about once a month Annie Clarke went to his house and said: ‘Now get out of my way, I’ll get things straight for you.’ And when she’d finished tidying up she said: ‘You’re nothing but a pig, and that’s the truth.’ She was referring to his habit of throwing his clothes everywhere, or wearing them for weeks unwashed, and also to other matters which no one else dared to refer to, even as indirectly as this. To this he might reply, chuckling with the pleasure of teasing her: ‘You’re a married woman, Mrs Clarke,’ and she said: ‘Nothing stops you getting married that I can see.’ And she walked away very straight, her cheeks burning with indignation.

  She was very fond of him, and he of her. And Mr Clarke liked and admired him, and he liked Mr Clarke. And since Mr Clarke and Mrs Clarke lived amiably together in their four-roomed house, sharing bed and board without ever quarrelling, it was to be presumed they liked each other too. But they seldom spoke. What was there to say?

  It was to this silence, to these understood truths, that little Tommy had to grow up and adjust him
self.

  Tommy Clarke was three months when he came to the mine, and day and night his ears were filled with noise, every day and every night for years, so that he did not think of it as noise, rather it was a different sort of silence. The mine-stamps thudded gold, gold, gold, gold, gold, gold, on and on, never changing, never stopping. So he did not hear them. But there came a day when the machinery broke, and it was when Tommy was three years old, and the silence was so terrible and so empty that he went screeching to his mother: ‘It’s stopped, it’s stopped,’ and he wept, shivering, in a corner until the thudding began again. It was as if the heart of the world had gone silent. But when it started to beat, Tommy heard it, and he knew the difference between silence and sound, and his ears acquired a new sensitivity, like a conscience. He heard the shouting and the singing from the swarms of working Africans, reckless, noisy people because of the danger they always must live with. He heard the picks ringing on stone, the softer, deeper thud of picks on thick earth. He heard the clang of the trucks, and the roar of falling earth, and the rumbling of trolleys on rails. And at night the owls hooted and the nightjars screamed, and the crickets chirped. And when it stormed it seemed the sky itself was flinging down bolts of noise against the mountains, for the thunder rolled and crashed, and the lightning darted from peak to peak around him. It was never silent, ever, save for that awful moment when the heart stopped beating. Yet later he longed for it to stop again, just for an hour, so that he might hear a true silence. That was when he was a little older, and the quietness of his parents was beginning to trouble him. There they were, always so gentle, saying so little, only: That’s how things are; or: You ask so many questions; or: You’ll understand when you grow up.

  It was a false silence, much worse than that real silence had been.

  He would play beside his mother in the kitchen, who never said anything but Yes, and No, and – with a patient, sighing voice, as if even his voice tired her: You talk so much, Tommy!

  And he was carried on his father’s shoulders around the big, black working machines, and they couldn’t speak because of the din the machines made. And Mr Macintosh would say: Well, laddie? and give him sweets from his pocket, which he always kept there, especially for Tommy. And once he saw Mr Macintosh and his father playing cards in the evening, and they didn’t talk at all, except for the words that the game needed.

  So Tommy escaped to the friendly din of the compound across the great gulf and played all day with the black children, dancing in their dances, running through the bush after rabbits, or working wet clay into shapes of bird or beast. No silence there, everything noisy and cheerful, and at evening he returned to his equable, silent parents, and after the meal he lay in bed listening to the thud, thud, thud, thud, thud, thud, of the stamps. In the compound across the gulf they were drinking and dancing, the drums made a quick beating against the slow thud of the stamps, and the dancers around the fires yelled, a high, undulating sound like a big wind coming fast and crooked through a gap in the mountains. That was a different world, to which he belonged as much as to this one, where people said: Finish your pudding; or: It’s time for bed; and very little else.

  When he was five years old he got malaria and was very sick. He recovered, but in the rainy season of the next year he got it again. Both times, Mr Macintosh got into his big American car and went streaking across the thirty miles of bush to the nearest hospital for the doctor. The doctor said quinine, and be careful to screen for mosquitoes. It was easy to give quinine, but Mrs Clarke, that tired, easy-going woman, found it hard to say: Don’t, and Be in by six; and Don’t go near water; and so, when Tommy was seven, he got malaria again. And now Mrs Clarke was worried, because the doctor spoke severely, mentioning blackwater.

  Mr Macintosh drove the doctor back to his hospital and then came home, and at once went to see Tommy, for he loved Tommy very deeply.

  Mrs Clarke said: ‘What do you expect, with all these holes everywhere, they’re full of water all the wet season.’

  ‘Well, lassie, I can’t fill in all the holes and shafts, people have been digging up here since the Queen of Sheba.’

  ‘Never mind about the Queen of Sheba. At least you could screen our house properly.’

  ‘I pay your husband fifty pounds a month,’ said Mr Macintosh, conscious of being in the right.

  ‘Fifty pounds and a proper house,’ said Annie Clarke.

  Mr Macintosh gave her that quick, narrow look, and then laughed loudly. A week later the house was encased in fine wire mesh all around from roof-edge to veranda-edge, so that it looked like a new meat safe, and Mrs Clarke went over to Mr Macintosh’s house and gave it a grand cleaning, and when she left she said: ‘You’re nothing but a pig, you’re as rich as the Oppenheimers, why don’t you buy yourself some new vests at least? And you’ll be getting malaria, too, the way you go traipsing about at nights.’

  She turned to Tommy, who was seated on the veranda behind the grey-glistening wire-netting, in a big deck chair. He was very thin and white after the fever. He was a long child, bony, and his eyes were big and black, and his mouth full and pouting from the petulances of the illness. He had a mass of richly-brown hair, like caramels, on his head. His mother looked at this pale child of hers, who was yet so brightly coloured and full of vitality, ad her tired will-power revived enough to determine a new régime for him. He was never to be out after six at night, when the mosquitoes were abroad. He was never to be out before the sun rose.

  ‘You can get up,’ she said, and he got up, thankfully throwing aside his covers.

  ‘I’ll go over to the compound,’ he said at once.

  She hesitated, and then said: ‘You mustn’t play there any more.’

  ‘Why not?’ he asked, already fidgeting on the steps outside the wire-netting cage.

  Ah, how she hated these Whys, and Why nots! They tired her utterly. ‘Because I say so,’ she snapped.

  But he persisted: ‘I always play there.’

  ‘You’re getting too big now, and you’ll be going to school soon.’

  Tommy sank on to the steps and remained there, looking away over the great pit to the busy, sunlit compound. He had known this moment was coming, of course. It was a knowledge that was part of the silence. And yet he had not known it. He said: ‘Why, why, why, why?’ singing it out in a persistent wail.

  ‘Because I say so.’ Then, in tired desperation: ‘You get sick from the Africans, too.’

  At this, he switched his large black eyes from the scenery to his mother, and she flushed a little. For they were derisively scornful. Yet she half-believed it herself, or rather, must believe it, for all through the wet season the bush would lie waterlogged and festering with mosquitoes, and nothing could be done about it, and one has to put the blame on something.

  She said: ‘Don’t argue. You’re not to play with them. You’re too big now to play with a lot of dirty kaffirs. When you were little it was different, but now you’re a big boy.’

  Tommy sat on the steps in the sweltering afternoon sun that came thick and yellow through the haze of dust and smoke over the mountains, and he said nothing. He made no attempt to go near the compound, now that his growing to manhood depended on his not playing with the black people. So he had been made to feel. Yet he did not believe a word of it, not really.

  Some days later, he was kicking a football by himself around the back of the house when a group of black children called to him from the bush and he turned away as if he had not seen them. They called again, and then ran away. And Tommy wept bitterly, for now he was alone.

  He went to the edge of the big pit and lay on his stomach looking down. The sun blazed through him so that his bones ached, and he shook his mass of hair forward over his eyes to shield them. Below, the great pit was so deep that the men working on the bottom of it were like ants. The trucks that climbed up the almost vertical sides were matchboxes. The system of ladders and steps cut in the earth, which the workers used to climb up and down, seemed so fli
msy across the gulf that a stone might dislodge it. Indeed, falling stones often did. Tommy sprawled, gripping the earth tight with tense belly and flung limbs, and stared down. They were all like ants and flies. Mr Macintosh, too, when he went down, which he did often, for no one could say he was a coward. And his father, and Tommy himself, they were all no bigger than little insects.

  It was like an enormous ant-working, as brightly tinted as a fresh antheap. The levels of earth around the mouth of the pit were reddish, then lower down grey and gravelly, and lower still, clear yellow. Heaps of the inert, heavy yellow soil, brought up from the bottom, lay all around him. He stretched out his hand and took some of it. It was unresponsive, lying lifeless and dense on his fingers, a little damp from the rain. He clenched his fist, and loosened it, and now the mass of yellow earth lay shaped on his palm, showing the marks of his fingers. A shape like – what? A bit of root? A fragment of rock rotted by water? He rolled his palms vigorously around it, and it became smooth like a water-ground stone. Then he sat up and took more earth, formed a pit, and up the sides flying ladders with bits of stick, and little kips of wetted earth for the trucks. Soon the sun dried it, and it all cracked and fell apart. Tommy gave the model a kick and went moodily back to the house. The sun was going down. It seemed that he had left a golden age of freedom behind, and now there was a new country of restrictions and time-tables.

  His mother saw how he suffered, but thought: Soon he’ll go to school and find companions.

  But he was only just seven, and very young to go all the way to the city to boarding-school. She sent for school-books, and taught him to read. Yet this was for only two or three hours in the day, and for the rest he mooned about, as she complained, gazing away over the gulf to the compound, from where he could hear the noise of the playing children. He was stoical about it, or so it seemed, but underneath he was suffering badly from this new knowledge, which was much more vital than anything he had learned from the school-books. He knew the word loneliness, and lying at the edge of the pit he formed the yellow clay into little figures which he called Betty and Freddy and Dirk. Playmates. Dirk was the name of the boy he liked best among the children in the compound over the gulf.