‘But you’re good at your figures, and you have to be, so why not?’
‘I won’t,’ said Tommy, angrily, ‘I won’t, I won’t.’ He glared at them through tears. ‘You just want to get rid of me, that’s all it is. You want me to go away from here, from …’
The parents looked at each other and sighed.
‘Well, if you don’t want to, you don’t have to. But it’s not every boy who has a chance like this.’
‘Why doesn’t he send Dirk?’ asked Tommy, aggressively.
‘Tommy,’ cried Annie Clarke, in great distress.
‘Well, why doesn’t he? He’s much better than me at figures.’
‘Go to bed,’ said Mr Clarke suddenly, in a fit of temper. ‘Go to bed.’
Tommy went out of the room, slamming the door hard. He must be grown-up. His father had never spoken to him like that. He sat on the edge of the bed in stubborn rebellion, listening to the thudding of the stamps. And down in the compound they were dancing, the lights of the fires flickered red on his window-pane.
He wondered if Dirk were there, leaping around the fires with the others.
Next day he asked him: ‘Do you dance with the others?’ At once he knew he had blundered. When Dirk was angry, his eyes darkened and narrowed. When he was hurt, his mouth set in a way which made the flesh pinch thinly under his nose. So he looked now.
‘Listen, white boy. White people don’t like us half-castes. Neither do the blacks like us. No one does. And so I don’t dance with them.’
‘Let’s do some lessons,’ said Tommy, quickly. And they went to their books, dropping the subject.
Later Mr Macintosh came to the Clarkes’ house and asked for Tommy. The parents watched Mr Macintosh and their son walk together along the edge of the great pit. They stood at the window and watched, but they did not speak.
Mr Macintosh was saying easily: ‘Well, laddie, and so you don’t want to be a sailor.’
‘No, Mr Macintosh.’
‘I went to sea when I was fifteen. It’s hard, but you aren’t afraid of that. Besides, you’d be an officer.’
Tommy said nothing.
‘You don’t like the idea?’
Mr Macintosh stopped and looked down into the pit. The earth at the bottom was as yellow as it had been when Tommy was seven, but now it was much deeper. Mr Macintosh did not know how deep, because he had not measured it. Far below, in this man-made valley, the workers were moving and shifting like black seeds tilted on a piece of paper.
‘Your father worked on the mines and he became an engineer working at nights, did you know that?’
‘Yes.’
‘It was very hard for him. He was thirty before he was qualified, and then he earned twenty-five pounds a month until he came to this mine.’
‘Yes.’
‘You don’t want to do that, do you?’
‘I will if I have to,’ muttered Tommy, defiantly.
Mr Macintosh’s face was swelling and purpling. The veins along nose and forehead were black. Mr Macintosh was asking himself why this lad treated him like dirt, when he was offering to do him an immense favour. And yet, in spite of the look of sullen indifference which was so ugly on that young face, he could not help loving him. He was a fine boy, tall, strong, and his hair was a soft, bright brown, and his eyes clear and black. A much better man than his father, who was rough and marked by the long struggle of his youth. He said: ‘Well, you don’t have to be a sailor, perhaps you’d like to go to a university and be a scholar.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Tommy, unwillingly, although his heart had moved suddenly. Pleasure – he was weakening. Then he said suddenly: ‘Mr Macintosh, why do you want to send me to college?’
And Mr Macintosh fell right into the trap. ‘I have no children,’ he said, sentimentally. ‘I feel for you like my own son.’ He stopped. Tommy was looking away towards the compound, and his intention was clear.
‘Very well then,’ said Mr Macintosh, harshly. ‘If you want to be a fool.’
Tommy stood with his eyes lowered and he knew quite well he was a fool. Yet he could not have behaved in any other way.
‘Don’t be hasty,’ said Mr Macintosh, after a pause. ‘Don’t throw away your chances, laddie. You’re nothing but a lad, yet. Take your time.’ And with this tone, he changed all the emphasis of the conflict, and made it simply a question of waiting. Tommy did not move, so Mr Macintosh went on quickly: ‘Yes, that’s right, you just think it over.’ He hastily slipped a pound note from his pocket and put it into the boy’s hand.
‘You know what I’m going to do with it?’ said Tommy, laughing suddenly, and not at all pleasantly.
‘Do what you like, do just as you like, it’s your money,’ said Mr Macintosh, turning away so as not to have to understand.
Tommy took the money to Dirk, who received it as if it were his right, a feeling in which Tommy was now an accomplice, and they sat together in the shed. ‘I’ve got to be something,’ said Tommy angrily. ‘They’re going to make me be something.’
‘They wouldn’t have to make me be anything,’ said Dirk, sardonically. ‘I know what I’d be.’
‘What?’ asked Tommy, enviously.
‘An engineer.’
‘How do you know what you’ve got to do?’
‘That’s what I want,’ said Dirk, stubbornly.
After a while Tommy said: ‘If you went to the city, there’s a school for coloured children.’
‘I wouldn’t see my mother again.’
‘Why not?’
‘There’s laws, white boy, laws. Anyone who lives with and after the fashion of the natives is a native. Therefore I’m a native, and I’m not entitled to go to school with the half-castes.’
‘If you went to the town, you’d not be living with the natives so you’d be classed as a coloured.’
‘But then I couldn’t see my mother, because if she came to town she’d still be a native.’
There was a triumphant conclusiveness in this that made Tommy think: He intends to get what he wants another way … And then: Through me … But he had accepted that justice a long time ago, and now he looked at his own arm that lay on the rough plank of the table. The outer side was burnt dark and dry with the sun, and the hair glinted on it like fine copper. It was no darker than Dirk’s brown arm, and no lighter. He turned it over. Inside, the skin was smooth, dusky white, the veins running blue and strong across the wrist. He looked at Dirk, grinning, who promptly turned his own arm over, in a challenging way. Tommy said, unhappily: ‘You can’t go to school properly because the inside of your arm is brown. And that’s that!’ Dirk’s tight and bitter mouth expanded into the grin that was also his father’s, and he said: ‘That is so, white boy, that is so.’
‘Well, it’s not my fault,’ said Tommy, aggressively, closing his fingers and banging the fists down again and again.
‘I didn’t say it was your fault,’ said Dirk at once.
Tommy said, in that uneasy, aggressive tone: ‘I’ve never even seen your mother.’
To this, Dirk merely laughed, as if to say: You have never wanted to.
Tommy said, after a pause: ‘Let me come and see her now.’
Then Dirk said, in a tone which was uncomfortable, almost like compassion: ‘You don’t have to.’
‘Yes,’ insisted Tommy. ‘Yes, now.’ He got up, and Dirk rose too. ‘She won’t know what to say,’ warned Dirk. ‘She doesn’t speak English.’ He did not really want Tommy to go to the compound; Tommy did not really want to go. Yet they went.
In silence they moved along the path between the trees, in silence skirted the edge of the pit, in silence entered the trees on the other side, and moved along the paths to the compound. It was big, spread over many acres, and the huts were in all stages of growth and decay, some new, with shining thatch, some tumble-down, with dulled and sagging thatch, some in the process of being built, the peeled wands of the roof-frames gleaming like milk in the sun.
Dirk led the way to a big square hu
t. Tommy could see people watching him walking with the coloured boy, and turning to laugh and whisper. Dirk’s face was proud and tight, and he could feel the same look on his own face. Outside the square hut sat a little girl of about ten. She was bronze. Dirk’s colour. Another little girl, black, perhaps six years old, was squatted on a log, finger in mouth, watching them. A baby, still unsteady on its feet, came staggering out of the doorway and collapsed, chuckling, against Dirk’s knees. Its skin was almost white. Then Dirk’s mother came out of the hut after the baby, smiled when she saw Dirk, but went anxious and bashful when she saw Tommy. She made a little bobbing curtsey, and took the baby from Dirk, for the sake of something to hold in her awkward and shy hands.
‘This is Baas Tommy,’ said Dirk. He sounded very embarrassed.
She made another little curtsey and stood smiling.
She was a large woman, round and smooth all over, but her legs were slender, and her arms, wound around the child, thin and knotted. Her round face had a bashful curiosity, and her eyes moved quickly from Dirk to Tommy and back, while she smiled and smiled, biting her lips with strong teeth, and smiled again.
Tommy said: ‘Good morning,’ and she laughed and said, ‘Good morning.’
Then Dirk said: ‘Enough now, let’s go.’ He sounded very angry. Tommy said: ‘Good-bye.’ Dirk’s mother said: ‘Good-bye,’ and made her little bobbing curtsey, and she moved her child from one arm to another and bit her lip anxiously over her gleaming smile.
Tommy and Dirk went away from the square mud hut where the variously-coloured children stood staring after them.
‘There now,’ said Dirk, angrily. ‘You’ve seen my mother.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Tommy uncomfortably, feeling as if the responsibility for the whole thing rested on him. But Dirk laughed suddenly and said: ‘Oh, all right, all right, white boy, it’s not your fault.’
All the same, he seemed pleased that Tommy was upset.
Later, with an affectation of indifference, Tommy asked, thinking of those new children: ‘Does Mr Macintosh come to your mother again now?’
And Dirk answered ‘Yes,’ just one word.
In the shed Dirk studied from a geography book, while Tommy sat idle and thought bitterly that they wanted him to be a sailor. Then his idle hands protested, and he took a knife and began slashing at the edge of the table. When the gashes showed a whiteness from the core of the wood, he took a stick lying on the floor and whittled at it, and when it snapped from thinness he went out to the trees, picked up a lump of old wood from the ground, and brought it back to the shed. He worked on it with his knife, not knowing what it was he made, until a curve under his knife reminded him of Dirk’s sister squatting at the hut door, and then he directed his knife with a purpose. For several days he fought with the lump of wood, while Dirk studied. Then he brought a tin of boot polish from the house, and worked the bright brown wax into the creamy white wood, and soon there was a bronze-coloured figure of the little girl, staring with big, curious eyes while she squatted on spindly legs.
Tommy put it in front of Dirk, who turned it around, grinning a little. ‘It’s like her,’ he said at last. ‘You can have it if you like,’ said Tommy. Dirk’s teeth flashed, he hesitated, and then reached into his pocket and took out a bundle of dirty cloth. He undid it, and Tommy saw the little clay figure he had made of Dirk years ago. It was crumbling, almost-worn to a lump of mud, but in it was still the vigorous challenge of Dirk’s body. Tommy’s mind signalled recognition – for he had forgotten he had ever made it – and he picked it up. ‘You kept it?’ he asked shyly, and Dirk smiled. They looked at each other, smiling. It was a moment of warm, close feeling, and yet in it was the pain that neither of them understood, and also the cruelty and challenge that made them fight. They lowered their eyes unhappily. ‘I’ll do your mother,’ said Tommy, getting up and running away into the trees, in order to escape from the challenging closeness. He searched until he found a thorn tree, which is so hard it turns the edge of an axe, and then he took an axe and worked at the felling of the tree until the sun went down. A big stone near him was kept wet to sharpen the axe, and next day he worked on until the tree fell. He sharpened the worn axe again, and cut a length of tree about two feet, and split off the tough bark, and brought it back to the shed. Dirk had fitted a shelf against the logs of the wall at the back. On it he had set the tiny, crumbling figure of himself, and the new bronze shape of his little sister. There was a space left for the new statue. Tommy said, shyly: ‘I’ll do it as quickly as I can so that it will be done before the term starts.’ Then, lowering his eyes, which suffered under this new contract of shared feeling, he examined the piece of wood. It was not pale and gleaming like almonds, as was the softer wood. It was a gingery brown, a close-fibred, knotted wood, and down its centre, as he knew, was a hard black spine. He turned it between his hands and thought that this was more difficult than anything he had ever done. For the first time he studied a piece of wood before starting on it, with a desired shape in his mind, trying to see how what he wanted would grow out of the dense mass of material he held.
Then he tried his knife on it and it broke. He asked Dirk for his knife. It was a long piece of metal, taken from a pile of scrap mining machinery, sharpened on stone until it was razor-fine. The handle was cloth wrapped tight around.
With this new and unwieldy tool Tommy fought with the wood for many days. When the holidays were ending, the shape was there, but the face was blank. Dirk’s mother was full-bodied, with soft, heavy flesh and full, naked shoulders above a tight, sideways draped cloth. The slender legs were planted firm on naked feet, and the thin arms, knotted with work, were lifted to the weight of a child who, a small, helpless creature swaddled in cloth, looked out with large, curious eyes. But the mother’s face was not yet there.
‘I’ll finish it next holidays,’ said Tommy, and Dirk set it carefully beside the other figures on the shelf. With his back turned he asked cautiously: ‘Perhaps you won’t be here next holidays?’
‘Yes I will,’ said Tommy, after a pause. ‘Yes I will.’
It was a promise, and they gave each other that small, warm, unwilling smile, and turned away, Dirk back to the compound and Tommy to the house, where his trunk was packed for school.
That night Mr Macintosh came over to the Clarkes’ house and spoke with the parents in the front room. Tommy, who was asleep, woke to find Mr Macintosh beside him. He sat on the foot of the bed and said: ‘I want to talk to you, laddie.’ Tommy turned the wick of the oil-lamp, and now he could see in the shadowy light that Mr Macintosh had a look of uneasiness about him. He was sitting with his strong old body balanced behind the big stomach, hands laid on his knees, and his grey Scots eyes were watchful.
‘I want you to think about what I said,’ said Mr Macintosh, in a quick, bluff good-humour. ‘Your mother says in two years’ time you will have matriculated, you’re doing fine at school. And after that you can go to college.’
Tommy lay on his elbow, and in the silence the drums came tapping from the compound, and he said: ‘But Mr Macintosh, I’m not the only one who’s good at his books.’
Mr Macintosh stirred, but said bluffly: ‘Well, but I’m talking about you.’
Tommy was silent, because as usual these opponents were so much stronger than was reasonable, simply because of their ability to make words mean something else. And then, his heart painfully beating, he said: ‘Why don’t you send Dirk to college? You’re so rich, and Dirk knows everything I know. He’s better than me at figures. He’s a whole book ahead of me, and he can do sums I can’t.’
Mr Macintosh crossed his legs impatiently, uncrossed them, and said: ‘Now why should I send Dirk to college?’ For now Tommy would have to put into precise words what he meant, and this Mr Macintosh was quite sure he would not do. But to make certain, he lowered his voice and said: ‘Think of your mother, laddie, she’s worrying about you, and you don’t want to make her worried, do you?’
Tommy look
ed towards the door, under it came a thick yellow streak of light: in that room his mother and father were waiting in silence for Mr Macintosh to emerge with news of Tommy’s sure and wonderful future.
‘You know why Dirk should go to college,’ said Tommy in despair, shifting his body unhappily under the sheets, and Mr Macintosh chose not to hear it. He got up, and said quickly: ‘You just think it over, laddie. There’s no hurry, but by next holidays I want to know.’ And he went out of the room. As he opened the door, a brightly-lit, painful scene was presented to Tommy: his father and mother sat, smiling in embarrassed entreaty at Mr Macintosh. The door shut, and Tommy turned down the light, and there was darkness.
He went to school next day. Mrs Clarke, turning out Mr Macintosh’s house as usual, said unhappily: ‘I think you’ll find everything in its proper place,’ and slipped away, as if she were ashamed.
As for Mr Macintosh, he was in a mood which made others, besides Annie Clarke, speak to him carefully. His cookboy, who had worked for him twelve years, gave notice that month. He had been knocked down twice by that powerful, hairy fist, and he was not a slave, after all, to remain bound to a bad-tempered master. And when a load of rock slipped and crushed the skulls of two workers, and the police came out for an investigation, Mr Macintosh met them irritably, and told them to mind their own business. For the first time in that mine’s history of scandalous recklessness, after many such accidents, Mr Macintosh heard the indignant words from the police officer: ‘You speak as if you were above the law, Mr Macintosh. If this happens again, you’ll see …’
Worst of all, he ordered Dirk to go back to work in the pit, and Dirk refused.
‘You can’t make me,’ said Dirk.
‘Who’s the boss on this mine?’ shouted Mr Macintosh.
‘There’s no law to make children work,’ said the thirteen-year-old, who stood as tall as his father, a straight, lithe youth against the bulky strength of the old man.
The word law whipped the anger in Mr Macintosh to the point where he could feel his eyes go dark, and the blood pounding in that hot darkness in his head. In fact, it was the power of this anger that sobered him, for he had been very young when he had learned to fear his own temper. And above all, he was a shrewd man. He waited until his sight was clear again, and then asked, reasonably: ‘Why do you want to loaf around the compound, why not work for money?’
This Was the Old Chief's Country Page 44