African Stories

by Doris Lessing

  But he took things as they came. Four Winds, lifted high into the sky among the great windswept sun-quivering mountains, tumbled all over with boulders, offering itself to storms and exposure and invasion by baboons and leopards—this wilderness, this pure, heady isolation, had not affected him after all.

  For when the valley had been divided out among new settlers, and his neighbours were now five miles, and not fifteen, away, he began going to their houses and asking them to his. They were very glad to come, for though he was an eccentric, he was harmless enough. He chose to live alone: that piqued the women. He had become very rich; which pleased everyone. For the rest, he was considered mildly crazy because he would not allow an animal to be touched on his farm; and any native caught setting traps for game would be beaten by George himself and then taken to the police afterwards: George considered the fine that he incurred for beating the native well worth it. His farm was as good as a game reserve; and he had to keep his cattle in what were practically stockades for fear of leopards. But if he lost an occasional beast, he could afford it.

  George used to give swimming parties on Sundays; he kept open house on that day, and everyone was welcome. He was a good host, the house was beautiful, and his servants were the envy of every housewife; perhaps this was what people found it difficult to forgive him, the perfection of his servants. For they never left him to go “home” as other people’s boys did; their home was here, on this farm, under old Smoke, and the compound was a proper native village, and not the usual collection of shambling huts about which no one cared, since no one lived in them long enough to care. For a bachelor to have such well-trained servants was a provocation to the women of the district; and when they teased him about the perfection of his arrangements, their voices had an edge on them. They used to say: “You damned old bachelor, you.” And he would reply, with calm good-humour: “Yes, I must think about getting me a wife.”

  Perhaps he really did feel he ought to marry. He knew it was suspected that this new phase, of entertaining and being entertained, was with a view to finding himself a girl. And the girls, of course, were only too willing. He was nothing, if not a catch; and it was his own fault that he was regarded, coldly, in this light. He would sometimes look at the women sprawled half-naked around the swimming pool under the bamboos—sprawling with deliberate intent, and for his benefit—and his eyes would narrow in a way that was not pleasant. Nor was it even fair, for if a man will not allow himself to be approached by sympathy and kindness, there is only one other approach. But the result of all this was simply that he set that photograph very prominently on the table beside his bed; and when girls remarked on it he replied, letting his eyelids half-close in a way which was of course exasperatingly attractive: “Ah, yes, Betty—now there was a woman for you.”

  At one time it was thought he was “caught” after all. One of his boundaries was shared with a middle-aged woman with two grown daughters; she was neither married, nor unmarried, for her husband seemed not to be able to make up his mind whether to divorce her or not, and the girls were, in their early twenties, horse-riding, whisky-drinking, flat-bodied tomboys who were used to having their own way with the men they fancied. They would make good wives for men like George, people said: they would give back as good as they got. But they continued to be spoken of in the plural, for George flirted with them both, and they were extraordinarily similar. As for the mother, she ran the farm, for her husband was too occupied with a woman in town to do this, and drank a little too much, and could be heard complaining fatalistically: “Christ, why did I have daughters? After all, sons are expected to behave badly.” She used to complain to George, who merely smiled and offered her another drink. “God help you if you marry either of them,” she would say, gloomily. “May I be forgiven for saying it, but they are fit for nothing but enjoying themselves.” “At their age, Mrs. Whately, that seems reasonable enough.” Thus George retreated, into a paternally indulgent attitude that nevertheless had a hint in it of cruel relish for the girls’ discomfiture.

  He used to look for Mrs. Whately when he entered a room, and stay beside her for hours, apparently enjoying her company; and she seemed to enjoy his. She did all the talking, while he stretched himself beside her, his eyes fixed thoughtfully on his glass, which he swung lightly between finger and thumb, occasionally letting out an amused grunt. She spoke chiefly of her husband whom she had turned from a liability into an asset, for the whole room would become silent to hear her humorous, grumbling tales of him. “He came home last week-end,” she would say, fixing wide astonished eyes on George, “and do you know what he said? My God, he said, I don’t know what I’d do without you, old girl. If I can’t get out of town for a spot of fresh air, sometimes, I’d go mad. And there I was, waiting for him with my grievance ready to air. What can one do with a man like that?” “And are you prepared to be a sort of week-end resort?” asked George. “Why, Mr. Chester!” exclaimed Mrs. Whately, widening her eyes to an incredibly foolish astonishment, “after all, he’s my husband, I suppose.” But this handsome, battered matron was no fool, she could not have run the farm so capably if she had been; and on these occasions George would simply laugh and say: “Have another drink.”

  At his own swimming parties Mrs. Whately was the only woman who never showed herself in a swimming suit. “At my age,” she explained, “it is better to leave it to one’s daughters.” And with an exaggerated sigh of envy she gazed across at the girls. George would gaze, too, non-committally; though on the whole it appeared he did not care for the spare and boyish type. He had been known, however, during those long hot days when thirty or forty people lounged for hours in their swimming suits on the edge of the pool, eating, drinking, and teasing each other, to rise abruptly, looking inexplicably irritated, and walk off to the stables. There he saddled his mare—who, one would have thought, should have been allowed her Sunday’s rest, since she was worked so hard the rest of the week—swung himself up, and was off across the hillsides, riding like a maniac. His guests did not take this hardly; it was the sort of thing one expected of him. They laughed—most particularly the women—and waited for him to come back, saying: “Well, old George, you know . . .”

  They used to suggest it would be nice to go riding together, but no one ever succeeded in riding with George. Now that the farms had spread up from the valley over the foothills, George often saw people on horses in the early morning, or at evening; and on these occasions he would signal a hasty greeting with his whip, rise in his stirrups and flash out of sight. This was another of the things people made allowances for: George, that lean, slouching, hard-faced man, riding away along a ridge with his whip raised in perfunctory farewell, was positively as much a feature of the landscape as his own house, raised high on the mountain in a shining white pile, or the ten-foot-high notices all along the boundaries saying: Anyone found shooting game will be severely prosecuted.

  Once, at evening, he came on Mrs. Whately alone, and as instinctively he turned his horse to flee, heard her shout: “I won’t bite.” He grinned unamiably at her expectant face, and shouted back: “I’m no more of a fool than you are, my dear.”

  At the next swimming party she acknowledged this incident by saying to him thoughtfully, her eyes for once direct and cool: “There are many ways of being a fool, Mr. Chester, and you are the sort of man who would starve himself to death because he once overate himself on green apples.”

  George crimsoned with anger. “If you are trying to hint that there are, there really are, some sweet, charming women, if I took the trouble to look, I promise you women have suggested that before.”

  She did not get angry. She merely appeared genuinely surprised. “Worse than I thought,” she commented amicably. And then she began talking about something else in her familiar, rather clowning manner.

  It was at one of these swimming parties that the cat came out of the bag. Its presence had of course been suspected, and accorded the usual tolerance. In fact, the incident was no
t of importance because of his friends’ reactions to it, but because of George’s own reactions.

  It was one very warm December morning, with the rains due to break at any moment. All the farmers had their seed-beds full of tobacco ready to be planted out, and their attention was less on the excellence of the food and drink and the attractions of the women, than on the sky, which was filled with heavy masses of dull cloud. Thunder rolled behind the kopjes, and the air was charged and tense. Under the bamboos round the pool, whose fronds hung without a quiver, people tended to be irritable because of the feeling of waiting; for the last few weeks before the season are a bad time in any country where rain is uncertain.

  George was sitting dressed on a small rock: he always dressed immediately he had finished bathing. The others were still half-naked. They had all lifted their heads and were looking with interested but non-committal expressions past him into the trees when he noticed the direction of their gaze, and turned himself to look. He gave a brief exclamation; then said, very deliberately: “Excuse me,” and rose. Everyone watched him walk across the garden, and through the creeper-draped rocks beyond to where a young native woman stood, hand on hips provocatively, swinging herself a little as if wishing to dance. Her eyes were lowered in the insolently demure manner of the native woman; and she kept them down while George came to a standstill in front of her and began to speak. They could not make out from his gestures, or from his face, what he was saying; but after a little while the girl looked sulky, shrugged, and then moved off again towards the compound, which could be seen through trees and past the shoulder of a big kopje, perhaps a mile away. She walked dragging her feet, and swinging her hands to loosely clutch at the grass-heads: it was a beautiful exhibition of unwilling departure; that was the impression given, that this was not only how she felt, but how she intended to show she felt. The long ambiguous look over her bare shoulder (she wore native-style dress, folded under the armpits) directed at the group of white people, could be interpreted in a variety of ways. No one chose to interpret it. No one spoke; and eyes were turned carefully to sky, trees, water or fingernails, when George returned. He looked at them briefly, without any hint of apology, then sat himself down again and reached for his glass. He took a swallow, and went on speaking where he had left off. They were quick to answer him; and in a moment conversation was general, though it was a conscious and controlled conversation: these people were behaving as if for the benefit of an invisible observer who was standing somewhere at a short distance and chuckling irresistibly as he called out: “Bravo! Well done!”

  What they felt towards George—an irritation which was a reproach for not preserving appearances—was not allowed to appear in their manner. The women, however, were noticeably acid; and George’s acknowledgment of this was a faint smile, so diminishing of their self-respect that by that evening, when the party broke up (it would rain before midnight and they would all have to be up early for a day’s hard planting), relations were as usual. In fact, George would be able to count on their saying, or implying: “Oh, George! Well, it is all very well for him, I suppose.”

  But that did not end the matter for him. He was very angry. He summoned old Smoke to the house when the visitors had gone, and this showed how angry he was, for it was a rule of his never to disturb the labourers on a Sunday.

  The girl was Smoke’s daughter (or grand-daughter, George did not know), and the arrangement—George’s attitude towards the thing forbade any other term—had come about naturally enough. The only time it had ever been mentioned between the two men was when shortly after the girl had set herself in George’s path one evening when he was passing from swimming pool to house, Smoke had remarked, without reproach, but sternly enough, that a half-caste child would not be welcome among his people. George had replied, with equal affability, that he gave his assurance there would be no child. The old man replied, half-sighing, that he understood the white people had means at their disposal. There the thing had ended. The girl came to George’s room when he sent for her, two or three times a week. She used to arrive when George’s dinner was finished, and she left at sun-up, with a handful of small change. George kept a supply of sixpences and threepenny bits under his handkerchiefs, for he had noticed she preferred several small coins to one big one. This discrimination was the measure of his regard for her, of her needs and nature. He liked to please her in these little ways. For instance, recently, when he had gone into town and was down among the kaffir-truck shops buying a supply of aprons for his houseboys, he had made a point of buying her a head-cloth of a colour she particularly liked. And once, she had been ill, and he drove her himself to hospital. She was not afraid to come to him to ask for especial favours to her family. This had been going on for five years.

  Now, when old Smoke came to the house, with the lowered eyes and troubled manner that showed he knew of the incident, George said simply that he wished the girl to be sent away; she was making trouble. Smoke sat cross-legged before George for some minutes before replying, looking at the ground. George had time to notice that he was getting a very old man indeed. He had a shrunken, simian appearance; even the flesh over his skull was crinkled under the dabs of white wool; his face was withered to the bone; and his small eyes peered with difficulty. At last he spoke, and his voice was resigned and trembling: “Perhaps the Little Baas could speak to the girl? She will not do it again.”

  But George was not taking the chance of it happening again.

  “She is my child,” pleaded the old man.

  George, suddenly irritable, said: “I cannot have this sort of thing happening. She is a very foolish girl.”

  “I understand, baas, I understand. She is certainly a foolish girl. But she is also young, and my child.” But even this last appeal, spoken in the old wheezy voice, did not move George.

  It was finally arranged that George should pay the expenses of the girl at mission school, some fifty miles off. He would not see her before she left, though she hung about the back steps for days. She even attempted to get into his bedroom the night before she was to set off, accompanied by one of her brothers for escort, for the long walk to her new home. But George had locked his door. There was nothing to be said. In a way he blamed himself. He felt he might have encouraged the girl: one did not know, for example, how the matter of the head-cloth might rearrange itself in a primitive woman’s mind. He had been responsible, at any rate, for acting in a way that had “put ideas into her head.” That appearance of hers at the swimming pool had been an act of defiance, a deliberate claiming of him, a provocation, whose implications appalled him. They appalled him precisely because the thing could never have happened if he had treated her faultily.

  During the week after she left, one evening, before going to bed, he suddenly caught the picture of the London girl off his dressing-table, and tossed it into a cupboard. He was thinking of old Smoke’s daughter—grand-daughter, perhaps—with an uncomfortable aching of the flesh, for some weeks before another girl presented herself for his notice.

  He had been waiting for this to happen; for he had no intention of incurring old Smoke’s reproach by enticing a woman to him.

  He was sitting on his verandah one night, smoking, his legs propped on the verandah wall, gazing at the great yellow moon that was rising over a long wooded spur to one side of the house, when a furtive, softly-gliding shape entered the corner of his vision. He sat perfectly still, puffing his pipe, while she came up the steps, and across the patch of light from the lamp inside. For a moment he could have sworn it was the same girl, but she was younger, much younger, not more than about sixteen. She was naked above the waist, for his inspection, and she wore a string of blue beads around her neck.

  This time, in order to be sure of starting on the right basis, he pulled out a handful of small coins and laid them on the verandah wall before him. Without raising her eyes, the girl leaned over sideways, picked them up, and caused them to disappear in the folds of her skirt. An hour later she was tu
rned out of the house, and the doors were locked for the night. She wept and pleaded to be allowed to stay till the first light came (as the other girl had always done) for she was afraid to go home by herself through the dark bush that was full of beasts and ghosts and the ancient terrors that were her birthright. George replied simply that if she came at all, she must resign herself to leaving when the business of the occasion was at an end. He remembered the nights with the other one, which had been spent wrapped close in each other’s arms—that was where he had made his mistake, perhaps? In any case, it was not going to be allowed to happen again.

  This girl wept pitifully the first night, and even more violently the second. George suggested that one of her brothers should come for her. She was shocked at the idea, so shocked that he understood things were with her as with him: the thing was permissible provided it was possible decently to ignore it. But she was sent home; and George did not allow himself to picture her gliding through the dark shadows of the moonlit path, and whimpering with fear, as she had done in his arms before leaving him.

  At their next weekly palaver, George waited for Smoke to speak, for he knew that he would. It was with a conscious determination not to show guilt (a reaction which surprised and annoyed him) that George watched the old man dismiss the nephew, wait for him to get well on his way on the path to the compound, and turn back to face him, in appeal. “Little Baas,” he said, “there are things that need not be said between us.” George did not answer. “Little Baas, it is time that you took a wife from your own people.”