African Stories

by Doris Lessing

  He saw many farms before finally choosing Four Winds. The agent was a man who had known his father well: this kind of thing still counts for more than money in places where there is space and time for respect of the past, and George was offered farms at prices which broke the agent’s businessman’s heart. Besides, he was a war hero. But the agent was defeated by George. He had been selling farms long enough to recognise the look that comes into a man’s face when he is standing on land that appeals to him, land which he will shape and knead and alter to the scale of his own understanding—the look of the creator. That look did not appear on George’s face.

  After months of visiting one district after another, the agent took George to a farm so beautiful that it seemed impossible he could refuse to buy it. It was low-lying and thickly covered with trees, and the long fat strip of rich red land was held between two rivers. The house had gardens running away on two sides to vistas of water. Rivers and richness and unspoiled trees and lush grass for cattle—such farms are not to be had for whistling in Africa. But George stood there on a rise between the stretches of water where they ran close to each other, and moved his shoulders restlessly in a way which the agent had grown to understand. “No good?” he said, sounding disgruntled. But by now there was that tolerance in him for George which he was always to make people feel: his standards were different. Incomprehensible they might be; but the agent at last saw that George was not looking for the fat ease promised by this farm. “If you could only tell me what you are looking for,” he suggested, rather irritably.

  “This is a fine farm,” said George, walking away from it, holding his shoulders rigid. The agent grabbed his elbow and made him stop. “Listen to me,” he said. “This must be one of the finest farms in the country.”

  “I know,” said George.

  “If you want me to get you a farm, you’ll have to get your mind clear about what you need.”

  George said: “I’ll know it when I see it.”

  “Have I got to drive you to every free farm in a thousand miles of Africa? God damn it, man,” he expostulated, “be reasonable. This is my job. I am supposed to be earning my living by it.”

  George shrugged. The agent let go his arm, and the two men walked along beside each other, George looking away over the thick dark trees of the river to the slopes on the other side. There were the mountains, range on range of them, rising high and glistening into the fresh blue sky.

  The agent followed that look, and began to think for himself. He peered hard at George. This man, in appearance, was what one might expect after such a childhood, all freedom and sunlight, and after five years of such fighting. He was very lean and brown, with loose broad shoulders and an easy swinging way of moving. His face was lean and angled, his eyes grey and shrewd, his mouth hard but also dissatisfied. He reminded the agent of his father at the same age; George’s father had left everything familiar to him, in an old and comfortable country, to make a new way of living with new people. The agent said tentatively: “Good to get away from people, eh? Too many people crowded together over there in the Old Country?” exactly as he might have done to the older man. George’s face did not change: this idea seemed to mean nothing to him. He merely continued to stare, his eyes tightened, at the mountains. But now the agent knew what he had to do. Next day he drove him to Four Winds, which had just been surveyed for sale. It was five thousand acres of virgin bush, lying irregularly over the lower slopes of a range of kopjes that crossed high over a plain where there were still few farms. Four Winds was all rocky outcrops, scrubby trees and wastes of shimmering grass, backed by mountains. There was no house, no river, not so much as a fence; no one could call it a desirable farm. George’s face cleared to content as he walked over it, and on it came that look for which the agent had been waiting.

  He slouched comfortably all through that day over those bare and bony acres, rather in the way a dog will use to make a new place its own, ranging to pick up a smell here or a memory there, anything that can be formed into a shell of familiarity for comfort against strangeness. But white men coming to Africa take not only what is there, but also impose on it a pattern of their own, from other countries. This accounts for the fine range of variation one can find in a day’s travelling from farm to farm across any district. Each house will be different, suggesting a different country, climate, or way of speech.

  Towards late afternoon, with the blaze of yellow sunlight falling directly across his face and dazzling into his eyes, and glazing the wilderness of rock and grass and tree with the sad glitter of sunset, George stooped suddenly in a place where gullies ran down from all sides into a flat place among bushes. “There should be water here, for a borehole,” he said. And, after a moment: “There was a windmill I caught sight of in Norfolk from a train. I liked the look of it. The shape of it, I mean. It would do well here . . .”

  It was in this way that George said he was buying the farm, and showed his satisfaction at the place. The restless, rather wolfish look had gone from the long bony face.

  “Your nearest neighbour is fifteen miles away,” was the last warning the agent gave.

  George answered indifferently: “This part of the country is opening up, isn’t it?” And the next day he signed the papers.

  He was no recluse after all, or at least, not in the way the agent had suspected.

  He went round to what farms there were, as is the custom, paying his respects, saying he had bought Four Winds, and would be a neighbour, though not a near one. And the house he built for himself was not a shack, the sort of house a man throws together to hold off the weather for a season.

  He intended to live there, though it was not finished. It looked as if it had been finely planned and then cut in half. There were, to begin with, three large rooms, raftered with that timber that sends out a pungent fragrance when the weather changes, and floored with dark red wood. These were furnished properly, there were no makeshifts here, either. And he was seen at the station on mail-days, not often, but often enough, where he was greeted in the way proper not only to his father’s son and to his war record, but because people approved what he was doing. For after both wars there has been a sudden appearance of restless young men whose phrases: “I want to be my own boss,” and “I’m not going to spend my life wearing out the seat of my trousers on a stool,” though cliches, still express the spirit that opened up the country in the first place. Between wars there is a different kind of immigrant, who use their money as spades to dig warm corners to sleep in. Because of these people who have turned an adventurous country into a sluggish one, and because of the memory of something different, restless young men find there is no need to apologize for striking out for themselves. It is as if they are regarded as a sort of flag, or even a conscience. When people heard that George had bought Four Winds, a bare, gusty, rocky stretch of veld on the side of a mountain, they remarked, “Good luck to him,” which is exactly how they speak when a returning traveller says: “There is a man on the shores of Lake Nyasa who has lived alone in a hut by himself for twenty years,” or “I heard of someone who has gone native in the Valley—he goes away into the bush if a white person comes near him.” There is no condemnation, but rather a recognition of something in themselves to which they pay tribute by proxy.

  George’s first worry was whether he would get sufficient native labour; but he had expected an anxious time, and, knowing the ropes, he sat tight, built his house, sank his borehole and studied his land. A few natives did come, but they were casual labourers, and were not what he was waiting for. He was more troubled, perhaps, then he let himself know. It is so easy to get a bad name as an employer. A justly dismissed man can spitefully slash a tree on the boundary of a farm where the migrating natives walk, in such a way that they read in the pattern of the gashes on the bark: This is a bad farm with a bad master. Or there may be a native in the compound who frightens or tyrannises over the others, so that they slowly leave, with excuses, for other farms, while the farmer h
imself never finds out what is wrong. There can be a dozen reasons why a fair man, just to his natives according to the customs of the time, can get a bad name without ever knowing the reason for it.

  George knew this particular trouble was behind him when one day he saw coming up the road to his front door an old native who had worked many years for his own father. He waited on the steps, smoking comfortably, smiling his greeting.

  “Morning,” he said.

  “Morning, baas.”

  “Things go well with you, old Smoke?”

  “Things go well, baas.”

  George tapped out his pipe, and motioned to the old man to seat himself. The band of young men who had followed Smoke along the road, were waiting under some trees at a short distance for the palaver to finish. George could see they had come a long way, for they were dusty, weary with the weight of their big bundles. But they looked a strong lot and good for work, and George settled himself in the big chair he used for audiences with satisfaction growing in him.

  “You have come a long way?” he asked.

  “A long way, baas. I heard the Little Baas had come back from the war and was wanting me. I have come to the Little Baas.”

  George smiled affectionately at old Smoke, who looked not a day older now than he had ten years, or even twenty years back, when he had lifted the small boy for rides on the mealie waggon, or carried him, when he was tired, on his back. He seemed always to have been a very old man, with grizzling hair and filming eyes but as light and strong and erect as a youth.

  “How did you know I had come back?”

  “One of my brothers told me.”

  George smiled again, acknowledging that this was all he would ever be told of the mysterious way the message had travelled from mouth to mouth across hundreds of miles. “You will send messages to all your brothers to work for me? I need a great many boys.”

  “I have brought twenty. Later, others will come. I have other relations coming after the rains from Nyasaland.”

  “You will be my boss-boy, Smoke? I need a boss-boy.”

  “I am too old, much too old, baas.”

  “Do you know how old you are?” asked George, knowing he would get no satisfactory answer, for natives of Smoke’s generation had no way of measuring their age.

  “How should I know, baas? Perhaps fifty. Perhaps a hundred. I remember the days of the fighting well, I was a young man.” He paused, and added carefully, having averted his eyes: “Better we do not remember those days, perhaps.”

  The two men laughed, after a moment during which their great liking for each other had time to take the unpleasantness from the reminder of war. “But I need a boss-boy,” repeated George. “Until I find a younger man as capable as you are, will you help me?”

  “But I am too old,” protested Smoke again, his eyes brightening.

  Thus it was settled, and George knew his labour troubles were over. Smoke’s brothers would soon fill his compound. It must be explained that relationships, among Africans, are not understood as they are among white people. A native can travel a thousand miles in strange country, and find his clan brothers in every village, and be made welcome by them.

  George allowed these people a full week to build themselves a village, and another week as earnest of good feeling. Then he pulled the reins tight and expected hard work. He got it. Smoke was too old to work hard himself; also he was something of an old rascal with his drinking and his women—he had got his name because he smoked dagga, which bleared his eyes and set his hands shaking—but he held the obedience of the younger men, and because of this was worth any amount of money to George.

  Later, a second man was chosen to act as boss-boy under Smoke. He was a nephew, and he supervised the gangs of natives, but it was understood that Smoke was the real chief. When George held his weekly palavers to discuss farm matters, the two men came up from the compound together, and the younger man (who had in fact done the actual hard work) deferred to the older. George brought a chair from the house to the foot of the great flight of stone steps that led up to the living-rooms, and sat there at ease smoking, while Smoke sat cross-legged on the ground before him. The nephew stood behind his uncle, and his standing was not so much an act of deference to George—though of course it was that too—as respect for his tribal superior. (This was in the early ’twenties, when a more gentle, almost feudal relationship was possible between good masters and their servants: there was space, then, for courtesy, bitterness had not yet crowded out affection.)

  During these weekly talks it was not only farm matters that were discussed, but personal ones also. There was always a short pause when crops, weather, plans, had been finished; then Smoke turned to the young man behind him and spoke a few dismissing words. The young man said, “Good night, baas,” to George, and went away.

  George and Smoke were then free to talk about things like the head driver’s quarrels with his new wife, or how Smoke himself was thinking of taking a young wife. George would laugh and say: “You old rascal. What do you want with a wife at your age.” And Smoke would reply that an old man needed a young body for warmth during the cold weather.

  Nor was old Smoke afraid of becoming stern, though reproachful, as if he momentarily regarded himself as George’s father, when he said: “Little Baas, it is time you got married. It is time there was a woman on this farm.” And George would laugh and reply that he certainly agreed he should get married, but that he could find no woman to suit him.

  Once Smoke suggested: “The baas will perhaps fetch himself a wife from England?” And George knew then that it was discussed in the compound how he had a photograph of a girl on his dressing-table: old Smoke’s son was a cookboy in George’s house.

  The girl had been his fiancée for a week or so during the war, but the engagement was broken off after one of those practical dissecting discussions that can dissolve a certain kind of love like mist. She was a London girl, who liked her life, with no desire for anything different. There was no bitterness left after the affair; at least, not against each other. George remained with a small bewildered anger against himself. He was a man, after all, who liked things in their proper place. It was the engagement he could not forgive himself: he had been temporarily mad; it was that he could not bear to think of. But he remembered the girl sometimes with an affectionate sensuality. She had married and was living the kind of life he could not imagine any sane person choosing. Why he kept her picture—which was a very artificial posed affair—he did not ask himself. For he had cared for other women more, in his violent intermittent fashion.

  However, there was her picture in his room, and it was seen not only by the cookboy and the houseboys but by the rare visitors to the house. There was a rumour in the district that George had a broken heart over a woman in England; and this explanation did as well as any other for George’s cheerful but determined self-isolation, for there are some people the word loneliness can never be made to fit. George was alone, and seemed not to know it. What surprised people was that the frame of his life was so much larger than he needed, and for what he was. The three large rooms had been expanded, after a few years, into a dozen. It was the finest house for many miles. Outhouses, storehouses, wash-houses and poultry yards spread about the place, and he had laid out a garden, and paid two boys handsomely to keep it beautiful. He had scooped out the soil between a cluster of boulders, and built a fine natural swimming pool over which bamboos hung, reflecting patterns of green foliage and patches of blue sky. Here he swam every morning at sun-up, summer or winter, and at evening, too, when he came from the day’s work. He built a row of stables, sufficient to house a dozen beasts, but actually kept only two, one of which was ridden by old Smoke (whose legs were now too feeble to carry him far) and one which he used himself. This was a mare of great responsiveness and intelligence but with no beauty, chosen with care after weeks of attending sales and following up advertisements: she was for use, not show. George rode her round the farm, working her hard, du
ring the day, and when he stabled her at night patted her as if he were sorry she could not come into the house with him. After he had come from the pool, he sat in the glow from the rapidly fading sunset, looking out over the wild and beautiful valley, and ceremoniously drinking beside a stinkwood table laden with decanters and syphons. Nothing here of the bachelor’s bottle and glass on a tin tray; and his dinner was served elaborately by two uniformed men, with whom he chatted or kept silence, as he felt inclined. After dinner coffee was brought to him, and having read farming magazines for half an hour or so, he went to bed. He was asleep every night by nine, and up before the sun.

  That was his life. It was his life for years, one of exhausting physical toil, twelve hours a day of sweat and effort in the sun, but surrounded by a space and comfort that seemed to ask for something else. It asked, in short, for a wife. But it is not easy to ask of such a man, living in such a way, what it is he misses, if he misses anything at all.

  To ask would mean entering into what he feels during the long hours riding over the ridges of kopje in the sunshine, with the grass waving about him like blond banners. It would mean understanding what made him one of mankind’s outriders in the first place.

  Even old Smoke himself, ambling beside him on the other horse, would give him a long look on certain occasions, and quietly go off, leaving him by himself.

  Sloping away in front of the house was a three-mile-long expanse of untouched grass, which sprang each year so tall that even from their horses the two men could not see over it. There was a track worn through it to a small knoll, a cluster of rocks merely, with trees breaking from the granite for shade. Here it was that George would dismount and, leaning his arm on the neck of his mare, stand gazing down into the valley which was in itself a system of other hills and valleys, so high did Four Winds stand above the rest of the country. Twenty miles away other mountains stood like blocks of tinted crystal, blocking the view; between there were trees and grass, trees and rocks and grass, with the rivers marked by lines of darker vegetation. Slowly, as the years passed, this enormous reach of pure country became marked by patches of cultivation; and smudges of smoke showed where new houses were going up, with the small glittering of roofs. The valley was being developed. Still George stood and gazed, and it seemed as if these encroaching lives affected him not at all. He would stay there half the morning, with the crooning of the green-throated wood-pigeons in his ears, and when he rode back home for his meal, his eyes were heavy and veiled.