African Stories

by Doris Lessing

  George replied: “The girl came to me, of her own accord.”

  Smoke said, as if it were an insult that he was forced to say such an obvious thing: “If you had a wife, she would not have come.” The old man was deeply troubled; far more so than George had expected. For a while he did not answer. Then he said: “I shall pay her well.” It seemed to him that he was speaking in that spirit of honesty that was in everything he said, or did, with this man who had been the friend of his father, and was his own good friend. He could not have said anything he did not feel. “I’m paying her well; and will see that she is looked after. I am paying well for the other one.”

  “Aie, aie,” sighed the old man, openly reproachful now, “this is not good for our women, baas. Who will want to marry her?”

  George moved uncomfortably in his chair. “They both came to me, didn’t they? I didn’t go running after them.” But he stopped. Smoke so clearly considered this argument irrelevant that he could not pursue it, even though he himself considered it valid. If he had gone searching for a woman among those at the compound, he would have felt himself responsible. That old Smoke did not see things in this light made him angry.

  “Young girls,” said Smoke reproachfully, “you know how they are.” Again there was more than reproach. In the feeble ancient eyes there was a deeper trouble. He could not look straight at George. His gaze wavered this way and that, over George’s face, away to the mountains, down to the valley, and his hands were plucking at his garments.

  George smiled, with determined cheerfulness: “And young men, don’t you make allowances for them?”

  Smoke suddenly flashed into anger: “Young men, little boys, one expects nonsense from them. But you, baas, you—you should be married, baas. You should have grown children of your own, not spoiling mine . . .” The tears were running down his face. He scrambled to his feet with difficulty, and said, very dignified: “I do not wish to quarrel with the son of my old friend, the Old Baas. I ask you to think, only, Little Baas. These girls, what happens to them? You have sent the other one to the mission school, but how long will she stay? She has been used to your money and to . . . she has been used to her own way. She will go into the town and become one of the loose women. No decent man will have her. She will get herself a town husband, and then another, and another. And now there is this one . . .” He was now grumbling, querulous, pathetic. His dignity could not withstand the weight of his grief. “And now this one, this one! You, Little Baas, that you should take this woman . . .” A very old, tottering, scarecrow man, he swayed off down the path.

  For a moment George was impelled to call him back, for it was the first time one of their palavers had ended in unkindness, without courteous exchange in the old manner. But he watched the old man move uncertainly past the swimming pool through the garden, along the rockeries, and out of sight.

  He was feeling uncomfortable and irritated, but at the same time he was puzzled. There was a discrepancy between what had happened and what he had expected that he felt now as a sharp intrusion—turning over the scene in his mind, he knew there was something that did not fit. It was the old man’s emotion. Over the first girl reproach could be gathered from his manner but a reproach that was fatalistic, and related not to George himself but rather to circumstances, some view of life George could not be expected to share. It had been an impersonal grief, a grief against life. This was different; Smoke had been accusing him, George, directly. It had been like an accusation of disloyalty. Reconstructing what had been said, George fastened upon the recurring words: “wife” and “husband”; and suddenly an idea entered George’s head that was intolerable. It was so ugly that he rejected it, and cast about for something else. But he could not refuse it for long; it crept back, and took possession of him, for it made sense of everything that had happened: a few months before old Smoke had taken to himself a new young wife.

  After a space of agitated reflection George raised his voice and called loudly for his houseboy. This was a young man brought to the house by old Smoke himself, years before. His relations with George were formal, but warmed slightly by the fact that he knew of George’s practical arrangements and treated them with an exquisite discretion. All this George now chose to throw aside. He asked directly: “Did you see the girl who was here last night?”

  “Yes, baas.”

  “Is she old Smoke’s new wife?”

  His eyes directed to the ground, the youth replied: “Yes, baas.”

  George smothered an impulse to appeal: “I didn’t know she was,” an impulse which shocked him, and said: “Very well, you can go.” He was getting more and more angry; the situation infuriated him; by no fault of his own he was in a cruel position.

  That night he was in his room reading when the girl entered smiling faintly. She was a beautiful young creature, but for George this fact had ceased to exist.

  “Why did you not tell me you were Smoke’s new wife?” he asked.

  She was not disconcerted. Standing just inside the door, still in that pose of shrinking modesty, she said: “I thought the baas knew.” It was possible that she had thought so; but George insisted: “Why did you come when you knew I didn’t know.”

  She changed her tone, and pleaded: “He is an old man, baas,” seeming to shudder with repugnance.

  George said: “You must not come here again.”

  She ran across the room to him, flung herself down, and embraced his legs.

  “Baas, baas,” she murmured, “don’t send me away.”

  George’s violent anger, that had been diffused within him, now focussed itself sharply, and he threw her away from him, and got to his feet. “Get out,” he said. She slowly got to her feet, and stood as before, though now sullenness was mingled with her shrinking humility. She did not say a word. “You are not to come back,” he ordered; and when she did not move, he took her arm with the extreme gentleness that is the result of controlled dislike, and pushed her out of the front door. He locked it, and went to bed.

  He always slept alone in the house, for the cookboy and the houseboys went back to the compound every night after finishing the washing-up, but one of the garden boys slept in a shed at the back with the dogs, as a guard against thieves. George’s garden boys, unlike his personal servants, were not permanent, but came and went at short intervals of a few months. The present one had been with him for only a few weeks, and he had not troubled to make a friend of him.

  Towards midnight there was a knock at the back door, and when George opened it he found this garden boy standing there, and there was a grin on his face that George had never seen on the face of a native before—at least, not directed at himself. He indicated a shadowy human shape that stood under a large tree which rose huge and glittering in the strong moonlight, and said intimately: “She’s there, baas, waiting for you.” George promptly cuffed him, in order to correct his expression, and then strode out into the moonlight. The girl neither moved nor looked at him. A statue of grief, she stood waiting, with her hands hanging at her sides. Those hands—the helplessness of them—particularly infuriated George. “I told you to get back to where you belong,” he said, in a low angry voice. “But, baas, I am afraid.” She began to cry again.

  “What are you afraid of?”

  The girl, her eyeballs glinting in the gleams of moonlight that fell strong through the boughs overhead, looked along to the compound. It was a mile of bush, with kopjes rising on either side of the path, big rocks throwing deep shadows all the way. Somewhere a dog was howling at the moon; all the sounds of night rose from the bush, bird noises, insect noises, animal noises that could not be named: here was a vast protean life, and a cruel one. George, looking towards the compound, which in this unreal glinting light had shrunk back, absorbed, into the background of tree and rock, without even a glow of fire to indicate its presence, felt as he always did: it was the feeling which had brought him here so many years before. It was as if, while he looked, he was flowing softly outwards, diff
used into the bush and the moonlight. He knew no terror; he could not understand fear; he contained that cruelty within himself, shut safe in some deep place. And this girl, who was bred of the bush and of the wildness, had no right to tremble with fright. That, obscurely, was what he felt.

  With the moonlight pouring over him, showing how his lips were momentarily curled back from his teeth, he pulled the girl roughly towards him out of the shade, turned her round so that she faced the compound, and said: “Go, now.”

  She was trembling, in sharp spasms, from head to foot. He could feel her convulse against him, as if in the convulsions of love, and he pushed her away so that she staggered. “Go,” he ordered, again. She was now sobbing wildly, with her arm across her eyes. George called to the garden boy who was standing near the house watching the scene, his face expressing an emotion George did not choose to recognise. “Take this woman back to the compound.”

  For the first time in his life George was disobeyed by a native. The youth simply shook his head, and said with a directness that was not intended to be rude, but was rather a rebuke for asking something that could not be asked: “No, baas.” George understood he could not press the point. Impatiently he turned back to the girl and dismissed the matter by saying: “I’m not going to argue with you.”

  He went indoors, and to bed. There he listened futilely for sounds of conversation: he was hoping that the two people outside might come to some arrangement. After a few moments he heard the scraping of chains along earth, and the barking of dogs; then a door shut. The garden boy had gone back to his shed. George repressed a desire to go to the window and see if the girl was still there. He imagined that she might perhaps steal into one of the outhouses for shelter. Not all of them were locked.

  It was hours before he slept. It was the first night in years that he had difficulty in sleeping. He was still angry, yes; he was uncomfortable because of his false relationship to old Smoke, because he had betrayed the old man; but beyond these emotions was another; again he felt that discrepancy, something discordant which expressed itself through him in a violent irritation; it was as if a fermenting chemical had been poured into a still liquid. He was intolerably restless, and his limbs twitched. It seemed as if something large and challenging were outside himself saying: And how are you going to include me? It was only by turning his back on that challenge that he eventually managed to sleep.

  Before sunrise next day, before the smoke began to curl up from the huts in the compound, George called the garden boy, who emerged sleepy and red-eyed from the shed, the dogs at his heels, and told him to fetch old Smoke. George felt he had to apologize to him; he must put himself right with that human being to whom he felt closer than he had ever felt to anyone since his parents died.

  He dressed while waiting. The house was quite empty, as the servants had not yet come from the compound. He was in a fever of unrest for the atonement it was necessary for him to make. But the old man delayed his coming. The sun was blazing over the kopjes, and the smells of coffee and hot fat were pervading the house from the kitchen when George, waiting impatiently on the verandah, saw a group of natives coming through the trees. Old Smoke was wrapped in a blanket, and supported on each side by a young man; and he moved as if each step were an effort to him. By the time the three natives had reached the steps, George was feeling like an accused person. Nor did any of his accusers look at him directly.

  He said at once: “Smoke, I am very sorry. I did not know she was your wife.” Still they did not look at him. Already irritation was growing inside him, because they did not accept his contrition. He repeated sternly: “How was I to know? How could I?”

  Instead of answering directly, Smoke said in the feeble and querulous tones of a very old man: “Where is she?”

  This George had not foreseen. Irritation surged through him with surprising violence. “I sent her home,” he said angrily. It was the strength of his own anger that quieted him. He did not know himself what was happening within him.

  The group in front of him remained silent. The two younger men, each supporting Smoke with an arm under his shoulders, kept their eyes down. Smoke was looking vaguely beyond the trees and over the slopes of grass to the valley; he was looking for something, but looking without hope. He was defeated.

  With a conscious effort at controlling his voice, George said: “Till last night I did not know she was your wife.” He paused, swallowed, and continued, dealing with the point which he understood now was where he stood accused: “She came to me last night, and I told her to go home. She came late. Has she not returned to you?”

  Smoke did not answer: his eyes were ranging over the kopjes tumbled all about them. “She did not come home,” said one of the young men at last.

  “She has not perhaps gone to the hut of a friend?” suggested George futilely.

  “She is not in the compound,” said the same young man, speaking for Smoke.

  After a delay, the old man looked straight at George for the first time, but it was as if George were an object, a thing, which had nothing to do with him. Then he moved himself against the arms of the young man in an effort towards independence; and, seeing what he wanted, his escort turned gently round with him, and the three moved slowly off again to the compound.

  George was quite lost; he did not know what to do. He stood on the steps, smoking, looking vaguely about him at the scenery, the familiar wild scenery, and down to the valley. But it was necessary to do something. Finally he again raised his voice for the servant. When he came, orders were given that the garden boy should be questioned. The houseboy returned with a reflection of the garden boy’s insolent grin on his face, and said: “The garden boy says he does not know what happened, baas. He went to bed, leaving the girl outside—just as the baas did himself.” This final phrase showed itself as a direct repetition of the insolent accusation the garden boy had made. But George did not act as he would have done even the day before. He ignored the insolence.

  “Where is she?” he asked the houseboy at last.

  The houseboy seemed surprised; it was a question he thought foolish, and he did not answer it. But he raised his eyes, as Smoke had done, to the kopjes, in a questing hopeless way; and George was made to admit something to his mind he had been careful not to admit.

  In that moment, while he stood following the direction of his servant’s eyes with his own, a change took place in him; he was gazing at a towering tumbling heap of boulders that stood sharp and black against a high fresh blue, the young blue of an African morning, and it was as if that familiar and loved shape moved back from him, reared menacingly like an animal and admitted danger—a sharp danger, capable of striking from a dark place that was a place of fear. Fear moved in George; it was something he had not before known; it crept along his flesh with a chilling touch, and he shivered. It was so new to him that he could not speak. With the care that one uses for a fragile, easily destroyable thing he took himself inside for breakfast, and went through the meal conscious of being sustained by the ceremony he always insisted on. Inside him a purpose was growing, and he was shielding it tenderly; for he did not know what it was. All he knew was, when he had laid down his coffee cup, and rung the bell for the servants, and gone outside to the verandah, that there the familiar landscape was outside of him, and that something within him was pointing a finger at it. In the now strong sunlight he shivered again; and crossed his arms so that his hands cupped his shoulders: they felt oddly frail. Till lately they had included the pushing strength of mountains; till this morning his arms had been branches and the birds sang in them; within him had been that terror which now waited outside, and which he must fight.

  He spent that day doing nothing, sitting on his verandah with his pipe. His servants avoided the front part of the house.

  Towards sundown he fetched his rifle which he used only on the rare occasions when there was a snake that must be killed, for he had never shot a bird or a beast with it, and cleaned it, very carefully. He o
rdered his dinner for an hour earlier than usual, and several times during that meal went outside to look at the sky. It was clear from horizon to horizon, and a luminous glow was spreading over the rocks. When a heavy yellow moon was separated from the highest boulder of the mountain by a hairline, he said to the boys that he was going out with his gun. This they accepted as a thing he must do; nor did they make any move to leave the house for the compound: they were waiting for him to return.

  George passed the ruffling surface of the swimming pool, picked his way through the rock garden, and came to where his garden merged imperceptibly, in the reaching tendrils of the creepers, with the bush. For a few yards the path passed through short and trodden grass, and then it forked, one branch leading off to the business part of the farm, the other leading straight on through a grove of trees. Through the dense shadows George moved steadily; for the grass was still short, and the tree trunks glimmered low to the ground. Between the edge of this belt of trees and the half mile of path that wound in and around the big boulders of the kopje was a space filled with low jagged rocks, that seemed higher and sharper than they were because of the shadows of the moon. Here it was clear moving. The moon poured down its yellow flood; and his shadow moved beside him, lengthening and shortening with the unevenness of the ground. Behind him were the trees in their gulf of black, before him the kopjes, the surfaces of granite showing white and glittering, like plates of crusted salt. Between, the broken shadows, of a dim purple colour, dappled with moonlight. To the left of him the rocks swept up sharply to another kopje; on the other side the ground fell away into a gulley which in its turn widened into the long grass slope, which, moving gently in the breeze, presented a gently gleaming surface, flattening and lifting so that there was a perpetual sweeping movement of light across miles of descending country. Far below, was the valley, where the lights of homesteads gleamed steadily.