This Was the Old Chief's Country

by Doris Lessing

  Dirk said: ‘I can read and write, and I know my figures better than Tommy – Baas Tommy,’ he added, in a way which made the anger rise again in Mr Macintosh, so that he had to make a fresh effort to subdue it.

  But Tommy was a point of weakness in Mr Macintosh, and it was then that he spoke the words which afterwards made him wonder if he’d gone suddenly crazy. For he said: ‘Very well, when you’re sixteen you can come and do my books and write the letters for the mine.’

  Dirk said: ‘All right,’ as if this were no more than his due, and walked off, leaving Mr Macintosh impotently furious with himself. For how could anyone but himself see the books? Such a person would be his master. It was impossible, he had no intention of ever letting Dirk, or anyone else, see them. Yet he had made the promise. And so he would have to find another way of using Dirk, or – and the words came involuntarily – getting rid of him.

  From a mood of settled bad temper, Mr Macintosh dropped into one of sullen thoughtfulness, which was entirely foreign to his character. Being shrewd is quite different from the process of thinking. Shrewdness, particularly the money-making shrewdness, is a kind of instinct. While Mr Macintosh had always known what he wanted to do, and how to do it, that did not mean he had known why he wanted so much money, or why he had chosen these ways of making it. Mr Macintosh felt like a cat whose nose has been rubbed into its own dirt, and for many nights he sat in the hot little house, that vibrated continually from the noise of the mine-stamps, most uncomfortably considering himself and his life. He reminded himself, for instance, that he was sixty, and presumably had not more than ten or fifteen years to live. It was not a thought that an unreflective man enjoys, particularly when he had never considered his age at all. He was so healthy, strong, tough. But he was sixty nevertheless, and what would be his monument? An enormous pit in the earth, and a million pounds’ worth of property. Then how should he spend ten or fifteen years? Exactly as he had the preceding sixty, for he hated being away from this place, and this gave him a caged and useless sensation, for it had never entered his head before that he was not as free as he felt himself to be.

  Well, then – and this thought gnawed most closely to Mr Macintosh’s pain – why had he not married? For he considered himself a marrying sort of man, and had always intended to find himself the right sort of woman and marry her. Yet he was already sixty. The truth was that Mr Macintosh had no idea at all why he had not married and got himself sons; and in these slow, uncomfortable ponderings the thought of Dirk’s mother intruded itself only to be hastily thrust away. Mr Macintosh, the sensualist, had a taste for dark-skinned women; and now it was certainly too late to admit as a permanent feature of his character something he had always considered as a sort of temporary whim, or makeshift, like someone who learns to enjoy an inferior brand of tobacco when better brands are not available.

  He thought of Tommy, of whom he had been used to say: ‘I’ve taken a fancy to the laddie.’ Now it was not so much a fancy as a deep, grieving love. And Tommy was the son of his employee, and looked at him with contempt, and he, Mr Macintosh, reacted with angry shame as if he were guilty of something. Of what? It was ridiculous.

  The whole situation was ridiculous, and so Mr Macintosh allowed himself to slide back into his usual frame of mind. Tommy’s only a boy, he thought, and he’ll see reason in a year or so. And as for Dirk, I’ll find him some kind of a job when the time comes …

  At the end of the term, when Tommy came home, Mr Macintosh asked, as usual, to see the school report, which usually filled him with pride. Instead of heading the class with approbation from the teachers and high marks in all subjects, Tommy was near the bottom, with such remarks as Slovenly, and Lazy, and Bad-mannered. The only subject in which he got any marks at all was that called Art, which Mr Macintosh did not take into account.

  When Tommy was asked by his parents why he was not working, he replied, impatiently: ‘I don’t know,’ which was quite true; and at once escaped to the anthill. Dirk was there, waiting for the books Tommy always brought for him. Tommy reached at once up to the shelf where stood the figure of Dirk’s mother, lifted it down and examined the unworked space which would be the face. ‘I know how to do it,’ he said to Dirk, and took out some knives and chisels he had brought from the city.

  This was how he spent the three weeks of that holiday, and when he met Mr Macintosh he was sullen and uncomfortable. ‘You’ll have to be working a bit better,’ he said, before Tommy went back, to which he received no answer but an unwilling smile.

  During that term Tommy distinguished himself in two ways besides being steadily at the bottom of the class he had so recently led. He made a fiery speech in the debating society on the iniquity of the colour bar, which rather pleased his teachers, since it is a well-known fact that the young must pass through these phases of rebellion before settling down to conformity. In fact, the greater the verbal rebellion, the more settled was the conformity likely to be. In secret Tommy got books from the city library such as are not usually read by boys of his age, on the history of Africa, and on comparative anthropology, and passed from there to the history of the moment – he ordered papers from the Government Stationery Office, on the laws of the country. Most particularly those affecting the relations between black and white and coloured. These he bought in order to take back to Dirk. But in addition to all this ferment, there was that subject Art, which in this school meant a drawing lesson twice a week, copying busts of Julius Caesar, or it might be Nelson, or shading in fronds of fern or leaves, or copying a large vase or a table standing diagonally to the class, thus learning what he was told were the laws of Perspective. There was no modelling, nothing approaching sculpture in this school, but this was the nearest thing to it, and that mysterious prohibition which forbade him to distinguish himself in Geometry or English, was silent when it came to using the pencil.

  At the end of the term his report was very bad, but it admitted that he had An Interest in Current Events, and a Talent for Art.

  And now this word Art, coming at the end of two successive terms, disturbed his parents and forced itself on Mr Macintosh. He said to Annie Clarke: ‘It’s a nice thing to make pictures, but the lad won’t earn a living by it.’ And Mrs Clarke said reproachfully to Tommy: ‘It’s all very well, Tommy, but you aren’t going to earn a living drawing pictures.’

  ‘I didn’t say I wanted to earn a living with it,’ shouted Tommy, miserably. ‘Why have I got to be something, you’re always wanting me to be something.’

  That holidays Dirk spent studying the Acts of Parliament and the Reports of Commissions and Sub-Committees which Tommy had brought him, while Tommy attempted something new. There was a square piece of soft white wood which Dirk had pilfered from the mine, thinking Tommy might use it. And Tommy set it against the walls of the shed, and knelt before it and attempted a frieze or engraving – he did not know the words for what he was doing. He cut out a great pit, surrounded by mounds of earth and rock, with the peaks of great mountains beyond, and at the edge of the pit stood a big man carrying a stick, and over the edge of the pit wound a file of black figures, tumbling into the gulf. From the pit came flames and smoke. Tommy took green ooze from leaves and mixed clay to colour the mountains and edges of the pit, and he made the little figures black with charcoal, and he made the flames writhing up out of the pit red with the paint used for parts of the mining machinery.

  ‘If you leave it here, the ants’ll eat it,’ said Dirk, looking with grim pleasure at the crude but effective picture.

  To which Tommy shrugged. For while he was always solemnly intent on a piece of work in hand, afraid of anything that might mar it, or even distract his attention from it, once it was finished he cared for it not at all.

  It was Dirk who had painted the shelf which held the other figures with a mixture that discouraged ants, and it was now Dirk who set the piece of square wood on a sheet of tin smeared with the same mixture, and balanced it in a way so it should not touch any part of the
walls of the shed, where the ants might climb up.

  And so Tommy went back to school, still in that mood of obstinate disaffection, to make more copies of Julius Caesar and vases of flowers, and Dirk remained with his books and his Acts of Parliament. They would be fourteen before they met again, and both knew that crises and decisions faced them. Yet they said no more than the usual: Well, so long, before they parted. Nor did they ever write to each other, although this term Tommy had a commission to send certain books and other Acts of Parliament for a purpose which he entirely approved.

  Dirk had built himself a new hut in the compound, where he lived alone, in the compound but not of it, affectionate to his mother, but apart from her. And to this hut at night came certain of the workers who forgot their dislike of the half-caste, that cuckoo in their nest, in their common interest in what he told them of the Acts and Reports. What he told them was what he had learnt himself in the proud loneliness of his isolation. ‘Education,’ he said, ‘education, that’s the key’ – and Tommy agreed with him, although he had, or so one might suppose from the way he was behaving, abandoned all idea of getting an education for himself. All that term parcels came to ‘Dirk, c/o Mr Macintosh’, and Mr Macintosh delivered them to Dirk without any questions.

  In the dim and smoky hut every night, half a dozen of the workers laboured with stubs of pencil and the exercise books sent by Tommy, to learn to write and do sums and understand the Laws.

  One night Mr Macintosh came rather late out of that other hut, and saw the red light from a fire moving softly on the rough ground outside the door of Dirk’s hut. All the others were dark. He moved cautiously among them until he stood in the shadows outside the door, and looked in. Dirk was squatting on the floor, surrounded by half a dozen men, looking at a newspaper.

  Mr Macintosh walked thoughtfully home in the starlight. Dirk, had he known what Mr Macintosh was thinking, would have been very angry, for all his flaming rebellion, his words of resentment were directed against Mr Macintosh and his tyranny. Yet for the first time Mr Macintosh was thinking of Dirk with a certain rough, amused pride. Perhaps it was because he was a Scot, after all, and in every one of his nation is an instinctive respect for learning and people with the determination to ‘get on’. A chip off the old block, thought Mr Macintosh, remembering how he, as a boy, had laboured to get a bit of education. And if the chip was the wrong colour – well, he would do something for Dirk. Something, he would decide when the time came. As for the others who were with Dirk, there was nothing easier than to sack a worker and engage another. Mr Macintosh went to his bed, dressed as usual in vest and pyjama trousers, unwashed and thrifty in candlelight.

  In the morning he gave orders to one of the overseers that Dirk should be summoned. His heart was already soft with thinking about the generous scene which would shortly take place. He was going to suggest that Dirk should teach all the overseers to read and write – on a salary from himself, of course – in order that these same overseers should be more useful in the work. They might learn to mark pay-sheets, for instance.

  The overseer said that Baas Dirk spent his days studying in Baas Tommy’s hut – with the suggestion in his manner that Baas Dirk could not be disturbed while so occupied, and that this was on Tommy’s account.

  The man, closely studying the effect of his words, saw how Mr Macintosh’s big, veiny face swelled, and he stepped back a pace. He was not one of Dirk’s admirers.

  Mr Macintosh, after some moments of heavy breathing, allowed his shrewdness to direct his anger. He dismissed the man, and turned away.

  During that morning he left his great pit and walked off into the bush in the direction of the towering blue peak. He had heard vaguely that Tommy had some kind of hut, but imagined it as a child’s thing. He was still very angry because of that calculated ‘Baas Dirk’. He walked for a while along a smooth path through the trees, and came to a clearing. On the other side was an anthill, and on the anthill a well-built hut, draped with Christmas fern around the open front, like curtains. In the opening sat Dirk. He wore a clean white shirt, and long smooth trousers. His head, oiled and brushed close, was bent over books. The hand that turned the pages of the books had a brass ring on the little finger. He was the very image of an aspiring clerk: that form of humanity which Mr Macintosh despised most.

  Mr Macintosh remained on the edge of the clearing for some time, vaguely waiting for something to happen, so that he might fling himself, armoured and directed by his contemptuous anger, into a crisis which would destroy Dirk for ever. But nothing did happen. Dirk continued to turn the pages of the books, so Mr Macintosh went back to his house, where he ate boiled beef and carrots for his dinner.

  Afterwards he went to a certain drawer in his bedroom, and from it took an object carelessly wrapped in cloth which, exposed, showed itself as that figure of Dirk the boy Tommy had made and sold for five pounds. And Mr Macintosh turned and handled and pored over that crude wooden image of Dirk in a passion of curiosity, just as if the boy did not live on the same square mile of soil with him, fully available to his scrutiny at most hours of the day.

  If one imagines a Judgment Day with the graves giving up their dead impartially, black, white, bronze, and yellow, to a happy reunion, one of the pleasures of that reunion might well be that people who have lived on the same acre or street all their lives will look at each other with incredulous recognition. ‘So that is what you were like,’ might be the gathering murmur around God’s heaven. For the glass wall between colour and colour is not only a barrier against touch, but has become thick and distorted, so that black men, white men, see each other through it, but see – what? Mr Macintosh examined the image of Dirk as if searching for some final revelation, but the thought that came persistently to his mind was that the statue might be of himself as a lad of twelve. So after a few moments he rolled it again in the cloth and tossed it back into the corner of a drawer, out of sight, and with it the unwelcome and tormenting knowledge.

  Late that afternoon he left his house again and made his way towards the hut on the antheap. It was empty, and he walked through the knee-high grass and bushes till he could climb up the hard, slippery walls of the antheap and so into the hut.

  First he looked at the books in the case. The longer he looked the faster faded that picture of Dirk as an oiled and mincing clerk, which he had been clinging to ever since he threw the other image into the back of a drawer. Respect for Dirk was reborn. Complicated mathematics, much more advanced than he had ever done. Geography. History. The Development of the Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century. The Growth of Parliamentary Institutions in Great Britain. This title made Mr Macintosh smile – the freebooting buccaneer examining a coastguard’s notice perhaps. Mr Macintosh lifted down one book after another and smiled. Then, beside these books, he saw a pile of slight, blue pamphlets, and he examined them.The Natives Employment Act. The Natives Juvenile Employment Act. The Natives Passes Act. And Mr Macintosh flipped over the leaves and laughed, and had Dirk heard that laugh it would have been worse to him than any whip.

  For as he patiently explained these laws and others like them to his bitter allies in the hut at night, it seemed to him that every word he spoke was like a stone thrown at Mr Macintosh, his father. Yet Mr Macintosh laughed, since he despised these laws, although in a different way, as much as Dirk did. When Mr Macintosh, on his rare trips to the city, happened to drive past the House of Parliament, he turned on it a tolerant and appreciative gaze. ‘Well, why not?’ he seemed to be saying, ‘It’s an occupation, like any other.’

  So to Dirk’s desperate act of retaliation he responded with a smile, and tossed back the books and pamphlets on the shelf. And then he turned to look at the other things in the shed, and for the first time he saw the high shelf where the statuettes were arranged. He looked, and felt his face swelling with that fatal rage. There was Dirk’s mother, peering at him in bashful sensuality from over the baby’s head, there the little girl, his daughter, squatting on spindly le
gs and staring. And there, on the edge of the shelf, a small, worn shape of clay which still held the vigorous strength of Dirk. Mr Macintosh, breathing heavily, holding down his anger, stepped back to gain a clearer view of those figures, and his heel slipped on a slanting piece of wood. He turned to look, and there was the picture Tommy had carved and coloured of his mine. Mr Macintosh saw the great pit, the black little figures tumbling and sprawling over into the flames, and saw himself, stick in hand, astride on his two legs at the edge of the pit, his hat on the back of his head.

  And now Mr Macintosh was so disturbed and angry that he was driven out of the hut and into the clearing, where he walked back and forth through the grass, looking at the hut while his anger growled and moved inside him. After some time he came close to the hut again and peered in. Yes, there was Dirk’s mother, peering bashfully from her shelf, as if to say: Yes, it’s me, remember? And there on the floor was the square tinted piece of wood which said what Tommy thought of him and his life. Mr Macintosh took a box of matches from his pocket. He lit a match. He understood he was standing in the hut with a lit match in his hand to no purpose. He dropped the match and ground it out with his foot. Then he put a pipe in his mouth, filled it and lit it, gazing all the time at the shelf and at the square carving. The second match fell to the floor and lay spurting a small white flame. He ground his heel hard on it. Anger heaved up in him beyond all sanity, and he lit another match, pushed it into the thatch of the hut, and walked out of it and so into the clearing and away into the bush. Without looking behind him he walked back to his house where his supper of boiled beef and carrots was waiting for him. He was amazed, angry, resentful. Finally he felt aggrieved, and wanted to explain to someone what a monstrous injustice was Tommy’s view of him. But there was no one to explain it to; and he slowly quietened to a steady dulled sadness, and for some days remained so, until time restored him to normal. From this condition he looked back at his behaviour and did not like it. Not that he regretted burning the hut, it seemed to him unimportant. He was angry at himself for allowing his anger to dictate his actions. Also he knew that such an act brings its own results.