This Was the Old Chief's Country

by Doris Lessing

  So he waited, and thought mainly of the cruelty of fate in denying a son who might carry on his work – for he certainly thought of his work as something to be continued. He thought sadly of Tommy, who denied him. And so, his affection for Tommy was sprung again by thinking of him, and he waited, thinking of reproachful things to say to him.

  When Tommy returned from school he went straight to the clearing and found a mound of ash on the antheap that was already sifted and swept by the wind. He found Dirk, sitting on a tree trunk in the bush waiting for him.

  ‘What happened?’ asked Tommy. And then, at once: ‘Did you save your books?’

  Dirk said: ‘He burnt it.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I know.’

  Tommy nodded. ‘All your books have gone,’ he said, very grieved, and as guilty as if he had burnt them himself.

  ‘Your carvings and your statues are burnt too.’

  But at this Tommy shrugged, since he could not care about his things once they were finished. ‘Shall we build the hut again now?’ he suggested.

  ‘My books are burnt,’ said Dirk, in a low voice, and Tommy, looking at him, saw how his hands were clenched. He instinctively moved a little aside to give his friend’s anger space.

  ‘When I grow up I’ll clear you all out, all of you, there won’t be one white man left in Africa, not one.’

  Tommy’s face had a small half-scared smile on it. The hatred Dirk was directing against him was so strong he nearly went away. He sat beside Dirk on the tree trunk and said: ‘I’ll try and get you more books.’

  ‘And then he’ll burn them again.’

  ‘But you’ve already got what was in them inside your head,’ said Tommy, consolingly. Dirk said nothing, but sat like a clenched fist, and so they remained on the tree trunk in the quiet bush while the doves cooed and the mine-stamps thudded, all that hot morning. When they had to separate at midday to return to their different worlds, it was with deep sadness, knowing that their childhood was finished, and their playing, and something new was ahead.

  And at that meal Tommy’s mother and father had his school report on the table, and they were reproachful. Tommy was at the foot of his class, and he would not matriculate that year. Or any year if he went on like this.

  ‘You used to be such a clever boy,’ mourned his mother, ‘and now what’s happened to you?’

  Tommy, sitting silent at the table, moved his shoulders in a hunched, irritable way, as if to say: Leave me alone. Nor did he feel himself to be stupid and lazy, as the report said he was.

  In his room were drawing blocks and pencils and hammers and chisels. He had never said to himself he had exchanged one purpose for another, for he had no purpose. How could he, when he had never been offered a future he could accept? Now, at this time, in his fifteenth year, with his reproachful parents deepening their reproach, and the knowledge that Mr Macintosh would soon see that report, all he felt was a locked stubbornness, and a deep strength.

  In the afternoon he went back to the clearing, and he took his chisels with him. On the old, soft, rotted tree trunk that he had sat on that morning, he sat again, waiting for Dirk. But Dirk did not come. Putting himself in his friend’s place he understood that Dirk could not endure to be with a white-skinned person – a white face, even that of his oldest friend, was too much the enemy. But he waited, sitting on the tree trunk all through the afternoon, with his chisels and hammers in a little box at his feet in the grass, and he fingered the soft, warm wood he sat on, letting the shape and texture of it come into the knowledge of his fingers.

  Next day, there was still no Dirk.

  Tommy began walking around the fallen tree, studying it. It was very thick, and its roots twisted and slanted into the air to the height of his shoulder. He began to carve the root. It would be Dirk again.

  That night Mr Macintosh came to the Clarkes’ house and read the report. He went back to his own, and sat wondering why Tommy was set so bitterly against him. The next day he went to the Clarkes’ house again to find Tommy, but the boy was not there.

  He therefore walked through the thick bush to the antheap, and found Tommy kneeling in the grass working on the tree root.

  Tommy said: ‘Good morning,’ and went on working, and Mr Macintosh sat on the trunk and watched.

  ‘What are you making?’ asked Mr Macintosh.

  ‘Dirk,’ said Tommy, and Mr Macintosh went purple and almost sprang up and away from the tree trunk. But Tommy was not looking at him. So Mr Macintosh remained, in silence. And then the useless vigour of Tommy’s concentration on that rotting bit of root goaded him, and his mind moved naturally to a new decision.

  ‘Would you like to be an artist?’ he suggested.

  Tommy allowed his chisel to rest, and looked at Mr Macintosh as if this were a trap. He shrugged, and with the appearance of anger, went on with his work.

  ‘If you’ve a real gift, you can earn money by that sort of thing. I had a cousin back in Scotland who did it. He made souvenirs, you know, for travellers.’ He spoke in a soothing and jolly way.

  Tommy let the souvenirs slide by him, as another of these impositions on his independence. He said: ‘Why did you burn Dirk’s books?’

  But Mr Macintosh laughed in relief. ‘Why should I burn his books?’ It seemed ridiculous to him, his rage had been against Tommy’s work, not Dirk’s.

  ‘I know you did,’ said Tommy. ‘I know it. And Dirk does too.’

  Mr Macintosh lit his pipe in good humour. For now things seemed much easier. Tommy did not know why he had set fire to the hut, and that was the main thing. He puffed smoke for a few moments and said: ‘Why should you think I don’t want Dirk to study? It’s a good thing, a bit of education.’

  Tommy stared disbelievingly at him.

  ‘I asked Dirk to use his education, I asked him to teach some of the others. But he wouldn’t have any of it. Is that my fault?’

  Now Tommy’s face was completely incredulous. Then he went scarlet, which Mr Macintosh did not understand. Why should the boy be looking so foolish? But Tommy was thinking: We were on the wrong track … And then he imagined what his offer must have done to Dirk’s angry, rebellious pride, and he suddenly understood. His face still crimson, he laughed. It was a bitter, ironical laugh, and Mr Macintosh was upset – it was not a boy’s laugh at all.

  Tommy’s face slowly faded from crimson, and he went back to work with his chisel. He said, after a pause: ‘Why don’t you send Dirk to college instead of me? He’s much more clever than me. I’m not clever, look at my report.’

  ‘Well, laddie …’ began Mr Macintosh reproachfully – he had been going to say: ‘Are you being lazy at school simply to force my hand over Dirk?’ He wondered at his own impulse to say it; and slid off into the familiar obliqueness which Tommy ignored: ‘But you know how things are, or you ought to by now. You talk as if you didn’t understand.’

  But Tommy was kneeling with his back to Mr Macintosh, working at the root, so Mr Macintosh continued to smoke. Next day he returned and sat on the tree trunk and watched.

  Tommy looked at him as if he considered his presence an unwelcome gift, but he did not say anything.

  Slowly, the big fanged root which rose from the trunk was taking Dirk’s shape. Mr Macintosh watched with uneasy loathing. He did not like it, but he could not stop watching. Once he said: ‘But if there’s a veld fire, it’ll get burnt. And the ants’ll eat it in any case.’ Tommy shrugged. It was the making of it that mattered, not what happened to it afterwards, and this attitude was so foreign to Mr Macintosh’s accumulating nature that it seemed to him that Tommy was touched in the head. He said: ‘Why don’t you work on something that’ll last? Or even if you studied like Dirk it would be better.’

  Tommy said: ‘I like doing it.’

  ‘But look, the ants are already at the trunk – by the time you get back from your school next time there’ll be nothing of it.’

  ‘Or someone might set fire to it,’ suggested
Tommy. He looked steadily at Mr Macintosh’s reddening face with triumph. Mr Macintosh found the words too near the truth. For certainly, as the days passed, he was looking at the new work with hatred and fear and dislike. It was nearly finished. Even if nothing more were done to it, it could stand as it was, complete.

  Dirk’s long, powerful body came writhing out of the wood like something struggling free. The head was clenched back, in the agony of the birth, eyes narrowed and desperate, the mouth – Mr Macintosh’s mouth – tightened in obstinate purpose. The shoulders were free, but the hands were held; they could not pull themselves out of the dense wood, they were imprisoned. His body was free to the knees, but below them the human limbs were uncreated, the natural shapes of the wood swelled to the perfect muscled knees.

  Mr Macintosh did not like it. He did not know what art was, but he knew he did not like this at all, it disturbed him deeply, so that when he looked at it he wanted to take an axe and cut it to pieces. Or burn it, perhaps …

  As for Tommy, the uneasiness of this elderly man who watched him all day was a deep triumph. Slowly, and for the first time, he saw that perhaps this was not a sort of game that he played, it might be something else. A weapon – he watched Mr Macintosh’s reluctant face, and a new respect for himself and what he was doing grew in him.

  At night, Mr Macintosh sat in his candle-lit room and he thought or rather felt, his way to a decision.

  There was no denying the power of Tommy’s gift. Therefore, it was a question of finding the way to turn it into money. He knew nothing about these matters, however, and it was Tommy himself who directed him, for towards the end of the holidays he said: ‘When you’re so rich you can do anything. You could send Dirk to college and not even notice it.’

  Mr Macintosh, in the reasonable and persuasive voice he now always used, said, ‘But you know these coloured people have nowhere to go.’

  Tommy said: ‘You could send him to the Cape. There are coloured people in the university there. Or Johannesburg.’ And he insisted against Mr Macintosh’s silence: ‘You’re so rich you can do anything you like.’

  But Mr Macintosh, like most rich people, thought not of money as things to buy, things to do, but rather how it was tied up in buildings and land.

  ‘It would cost thousands,’ he said. ‘Thousands for a coloured boy.’

  But Tommy’s scornful look silenced him, and he said hastily: ‘I’ll think about it.’ But he was thinking not of Dirk, but of Tommy. Sitting alone in his room he told himself it was simply a question of paying for knowledge.

  So next morning he made his preparations for a trip to town. He shaved, and over his cotton singlet he put a striped jacket, which half concealed his long, stained khaki trousers. This was as far as he ever went in concessions to the city life he despised. He got into his big American car and set off.

  In the city he took the simplest route to knowledge.

  He went to the Education Department, and said he wanted to see the Minister of Education. ‘I’m Macintosh,’ he said, with perfect confidence; and the pretty secretary who had been patronizing his clothes, went at once to the Minister and said: ‘There is a Mr Macintosh to see you.’ She described him as an old, fat, dirty man with a large stomach, and soon the doors opened and Mr Macintosh was with the spring of knowledge.

  He emerged five minutes later with what he wanted, the name of a certain expert. He drove through the deep green avenues of the city to the house he had been told to go to, which was a large and well-kept one, and comforted Mr Macintosh in his faith that art properly used could make money. He parked his car in the road and walked in.

  On the veranda, behind a table heaped with books, sat a middle-aged man with spectacles. Mr Tomlinson was essentially a scholar with working hours he respected, and he lifted his eyes to see a big, dirty man with black hair showing above the dirty whiteness of his vest, and he said sharply: ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Wait a minute, laddie,’ said Mr Macintosh easily, and he held out a note from the Minister of Education, and Mr Tomlinson took it and read it, feeling reassured. It was worded in such a way that his seeing Mr Macintosh could be felt as a favour he was personally doing the Minister.

  ‘I’ll make it worth your while,’ said Mr Macintosh, and at once distaste flooded Mr Tomlinson, and he went pink, and said: ‘I’m afraid I haven’t the time.’

  ‘Damn it, man, it’s your job, isn’t it? Or so Wentworth said.’

  ‘No,’ said Mr Tomlinson, making each word clear, ‘I advise on ancient monuments.’

  Mr Macintosh stared, then laughed, and said: ‘Wentworth said you’d do, but it doesn’t matter, I’ll get someone else.’ And he left.

  Mr Tomlinson watched this hobo go off the veranda and into a magnificent car, and his thought was: ‘He must have stolen it.’ Then puzzled and upset, he went to the telephone. But in a few moments he was smiling. Finally he laughed. Mr Macintosh was the Mr Macintosh, a genuine specimen of the old-timer. It was the phrase ‘old-timer’ that made it possible for Mr Tomlinson to relent. He therefore rang the hotel at which Mr Macintosh, as a rich man, would be bound to be staying, and he said he had made an error, he would be free the following day to accompany Mr Macintosh.

  And so next morning Mr Macintosh, not at all surprised that the expert was at his service after all, with Mr Tomlinson, who preserved a tolerant smile, drove out to the mine.

  They drove very fast in the powerful car, and Mr Tomlinson held himself steady while they jolted and bounced, and listened to Mr Macintosh’s tales of Australia and New Zealand, and thought of him rather as he would of an ancient monument.

  At last the long plain ended, and the foothills of greenish scrub heaped themselves around the car, and then high mountains piled with granite boulders, and the heat came in thick, slow waves into the car, and Mr Tomlinson thought: I’ll be glad when we’re through the mountains into the plain. But instead they turned into a high, enclosed place with mountains all around, and suddenly there was an enormous gulf in the ground, and on one side of it were two tiny tin-roofed houses, and on the other acres of kaffir huts. The mine-stamps thudded regularly, like a pulse of the heart, and Mr Tomlinson wondered how anybody, white or black, could bear to live in such a place.

  He ate boiled beef and carrots and greasy potatoes with one of the richest men in the sub-continent, and thought how well and intelligently he would use such money if he had it – which is the only consolation left to the cultivated man of moderate income. After lunch, Mr Macintosh said: ‘And now, let’s get it over.’

  Mr Tomlinson expressed his willingness, and smiling to himself, followed Mr Macintosh off into the bush on a kaffir path. He did not know what he was going to see. Mr Macintosh had said: ‘Can you tell if a youngster has got any talent just by looking at a piece of wood he has carved?’

  Mr Tomlinson said he would do his best.

  Then they were beside a fallen tree trunk, and in the grass knelt a big lad, with untidy brown hair failing over his face, labouring at the wood with a large chisel.

  ‘This is a friend of mine,’ said Mr Macintosh to Tommy, who got to his feet and stood uncomfortably, wondering what was happening. ‘Do you mind if Mr Tomlinson sees what you are doing?’

  Tommy made a shrugging movement and felt that things were going beyond his control. He looked in awed amazement at Mr Tomlinson, who seemed to him rather like a teacher or professor, and certainly not at all what he imagined an artist to be.

  ‘Well?’ said Mr Macintosh to Mr Tomlinson, after a space of half a minute.

  Mr Tomlinson laughed in a way which said: ‘Now don’t be in such a hurry.’ He walked around the carved tree root, looking at the figure of Dirk from this angle and that.

  Then he asked Tommy: ‘Why do you make these carvings?’

  Tommy very uncomfortably shrugged, as if to say: What a silly question; and Mr Macintosh hastily said: ‘He gets high marks for Art at school.’

  Mr Tomlinson smiled again and walked around to th
e other side of the trunk. From here he could see Dirk’s face, flattened back on the neck, eyes half-closed and strained, the muscles of the neck shaped from natural veins of the wood.

  ‘Is this someone you know?’ he asked Tommy in an easy, intimate way, one artist to another.

  ‘Yes,’ said Tommy, briefly; he resented the question.

  Mr Tomlinson looked at the face and then at Mr Macintosh. ‘It has a look of you,’ he observed dispassionately, and coloured himself as he saw Mr Macintosh grow angry. He walked well away from the group, to give Mr Macintosh space to hide his embarrassment. When he returned, he asked Tommy: ‘And so you want to be a sculptor?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Tommy, defiantly.

  Mr Tomlinson shrugged rather impatiently, and with a nod at Mr Macintosh suggested it was enough. He said good-bye to Tommy, and went back to the house with Mr Macintosh.

  There he was offered tea and biscuits, and Mr Macintosh asked: ‘Well, what do you think?’

  But by now Mr Tomlinson was certainly offended at this casual cash-on-delivery approach to art, and he said: ‘Well, that rather depends, doesn’t it?’

  ‘On what?’ demanded Mr Macintosh.

  ‘He seems to have talent,’ conceded Mr Tomlinson.

  ‘That’s all I want to know,’ said Mr Macintosh, and suggested that now he could run Mr Tomlinson back to town.

  But Mr Tomlinson did not feel it was enough, and he said: ‘It’s quite interesting, that statue. I suppose he’s seen pictures in magazines. It has quite a modern feeling.’

  ‘Modern?’ said Mr Macintosh. ‘What do you mean?’