African Stories

by Doris Lessing

  The kopje in front of him was silent, dead silent. Not a bird stirred, and only the insects kept up their small shrilling. George moved into the shadows with a sharp tug of the heart, holding his fear in him cold and alive, like a weapon. But his rifle he handled carelessly.

  With cautious, directed glances he moved along and up the path as it rose through the boulders on the side of the kopje. As he went he prayed. He was praying that the enemy might present itself and be slain. It was when he was on the height of the path so that half a mile behind showed the lit verandah of his house, and half a mile in front the illuminated shapes of the huts in the compound, that he stopped and waited. He remained quite still, and allowed his fear to grow inside him, a controlled fear, so that while his skin crept and his scalp tingled, yet his hands remained steady on the rifle. To one side of him was a large rock, leaning forward and over him in a black shelf. On the other was a rock-encumbered space, girt by a tangle of branches and foliage. There were, in fact, trees and rocks all about him; the thing might come from any side. But this was the place; he knew it by instinct. And he kept perfectly still for fear that his enemy might be scared away. He did not have to wait long. Before the melancholy howling of the moonstruck dogs in the compound had had time to set the rhythm of his nerves, before his neck had time to ache with the continual alert movements of his head from side to side, he saw one of the shadows a dozen paces from him lengthen gradually, and at last separate itself from the rock. The low, ground-creeping thing showed a green glitter of eyes, and a sheen of moonlight shifted with the moving muscles of the flank. When the shape stilled and flattened itself for a spring, George lifted his rifle and fired. There was a coughing noise, and the shape lay still. George lowered the rifle and looked at it, almost puzzled, and stood still. There lay the enemy, dead, not a couple of paces from him. Sprawled almost at his feet was the leopard, its body still tensing and convulsing in death. Anger sprang up again in George: it had all been so easy, so easy! Again he looked in wonder at his rifle; then he kicked the unresisting flesh of the leopard, first with a kind of curiosity, then brutally. Finally he smashed the butt of the rifle, again and again, in hard, thudding blows, against the head. There was no resistance, no sound, nothing.

  Finally, as the smell of blood and flesh began to fill him, he desisted, weak and helpless. He was let down. He had not been given what he had come for. When he finally left the beast lying there, and walked home again, his legs were weak under him and his breath was coming in sobs; he was crying the peevish, frustrated tears of a disappointed man.

  The houseboys went out, without complaint, into the temporarily safe night to drag the body into the homestead. They began skinning the beast by lamplight. George slept heavily; and in the morning found the skin pegged in the sunshine, flesh side uppermost, and the fine papery inner skin was already blistering and puffing in the heat. George went to the kopje, and after a morning’s search among thorn and blackjack and stinging-nettle, found the mouth of a cave. There were fresh human bones lying there, and the bones of cattle, and smaller bones, probably of buck and hare.

  But the thing had been killed; and George was still left empty, a hungry man without possibility of food. He did not know what satisfaction it was he needed.

  The farm boys came to him for instructions; and he told them, impatiently, not to bother him, but to go to old Smoke.

  In a few days old Smoke himself came to see him, an evasive, sorrowful, dignified figure, to say he was going home: he was too old now to work for the Old Baas’s son.

  A few days later his compound was half empty. It was the urgent necessity of attracting new labour that pulled George together. He knew that an era was finished, for him. While not all old Smoke’s kinsmen had left, there was now no focus, no authority, in his compound. He himself, now, would have to provide that focus, with his own will, his own authority; and he knew very well the perpetual strain and worry he must face. He was in the position of his neighbours.

  He patched things up, as he could; and, while he was re-ordering his life, found that he was behaving towards himself as he might to a convalescent. For there was a hurt place in him, and a hungry anger that no work could assuage.

  For a while he did nothing. Then he suddenly filled his stables with horses; and his home became a centre for the horse-loving people about him. He ran a pack of dogs, too, trained by himself; and took down those notices along his boundaries. For “Leopard” George had been born. For him, now, the landscape was simply a home for leopards. Every week-end his big house was filled with people, young, old, male and female, who came for various reasons; some for the hospitality, some for love of George, some, indeed, for the fun of the Sunday’s hunting, which was always followed by a gigantic feast of food and drink.

  Quite soon George married Mrs. Whately, a woman who had the intelligence to understand what she could and could not do if she wished to remain the mistress of Four Winds.

  Winter in July

  THE three of them were sitting at their evening meal on the verandah. From behind, the living-room shed light on to the table, where their moving hands, the cutlery, the food, showed dimly, but clear enough for efficiency. Julia liked the half-tones. A lamp or candles would close them into a soft illuminated space, but obliterate the sky, which now bent towards them through the pillars of the verandah, a full deep sky, holding a yellowy bloom from an invisible moon that absorbed the stars into a faint far glitter.

  Sometimes Tom said, grumbling humorously: “Romantic, that’s what she is”; and Kenneth would answer, but with an abrupt, rather grudging laugh: “I like to see what I am eating.” Kenneth was altogether an abrupt person. That quick, quickly-checked laugh, the swift critical look he gave her (which she met with her own eyes, as critical as his) were part of the long dialogue between them. For Kenneth did not accept her. He resisted her. Tom accepted her, as he accepted everything. For Julia it was not a question of preference: the two men supported her in their different manners. And the things they said, the three of them, seemed hardly to matter. The real thing was the soft elastic tension that bound them close.

  Her liking for the evening hour, before moving indoors to the brightly-lit room, was expression of her feeling for them. The mingling lights, half from the night-sky, half from the lamp, softened their faces and subdued their voices, and she was free to feel what they were, rather than rouse herself by listening. This state was a continuation of her day, spent by herself (for the men were most of the time on the lands) in an almost trance-like condition where the soft flowing of the hours was marked by no necessities of action strong enough to wake her. As for them, she knew that returning to her was an entrance into that condition. Their day was hard and vigorous, full of practical details and planning. At sundown they entered her country, and the evening meal, where the outlines of fact were blurred by her passivity no less than by the illusion of indistinctness created by sitting under a roof which projected shadow-like into the African night, was the gateway to it.

  They used to say to her sometimes: “What do you do with yourself all day? Aren’t you bored?” She could not explain how it was she could never become bored. All restlessness had died in her. She was content to do nothing for hours at a time; but it depended on her feeling of being held loosely in the tension between the two men. Tom liked to think of her content and peaceful in his life; Kenneth was irritated.

  This particular evening, halfway through the meal, Kenneth rose suddenly and said: “I must fetch my coat.” Dismay chilled Julia as she realized that she, too, was cold. She had been cold for several nights, but had put off the hour of recognising the fact. Her thoughts were confirmed by Tom’s remark: “It’s getting too cold to eat outside now, Julia.”

  “What month is it?”

  He laughed indulgently. “We are reaping.”

  Kenneth came back, shrugging himself quickly into the coat. He was a small, quick-moving, vital man; dark, dark-eyed, impatient; he did everything as if he resented the
time he had to spend on it. Tom was large, fair, handsome, in every way Kenneth’s opposite. He said with gentle persistence to Julia, knowing that she needed prodding; “Better tell the boys to move the table inside tomorrow.”

  “Oh, I suppose so,” she grumbled. Her summer was over: the long luminous warm nights, broken by swift showers, or obscured suddenly by heavy driving clouds—the tumultuous magical nights—were gone and finished for this year. Now, for the three months of winter, they would eat indoors, with the hot lamp over the table, the cold shivering about their legs, and outside a parched country, roofed by dusty freezing stars.

  Kenneth said briskly: “Winter, Julia, you’ll have to face it.”

  “Well,” she smiled, “tomorrow you’ll be able to see what you are eating.”

  There was a slight pause; then Kenneth said: “I shan’t be here tomorrow night. I’m taking the car into town in the morning.”

  Julia did not reply. She had not heard. That is to say, she felt dismay deepening in her at the sound of his voice; then she wondered at her own forebodings, and then the words: “Town. In the morning,” presented themselves to her.

  They very seldom went into the city, which was fifty miles away. A trip was always planned in advance, for it would be a matter of buying things that were not available at the local store. The three of them had made the journey only last week. Julia’s mind was now confronting and absorbing the fact that on that day Kenneth had abruptly excused himself and gone off on some business of his own. She remembered teasing him, a little, in her fashion. To herself she would have said (disliking the knowledge) that she controlled jealousy, like many jealous women, by becoming an accomplice, as it were, in Kenneth’s adventures: the tormenting curiosity was eased when she knew what he had been doing. Last week he had disliked her teasing.

  Now she looked over at Tom for reassurance, and saw that his eyes were expressing disquiet as great as her own. Doubly deserted, she gazed clearly and deliberately at both men; and because Kenneth’s bald statement of his intentions seemed to her so gross a betrayal of their real relations, chose to say nothing, but in a manner of waiting for an explanation. None was offered, though Kenneth appeared uneasy. They finished their meal in silence and went indoors, passing through the stripped dining-room, which tomorrow would appear in its winter guise of arranged furniture and candles and bowls of fruit, into the living-room.

  The house was built for heat. In the winter cold struck up from the floor and out of the walls. This room was very bare, very high, of dull red brick, flagged with stone. Tomorrow she would put down rugs. There was a large stone fireplace, in which stood an earthenware jar filled with Christ-thorn. Julia unconsciously crossed to it, knelt, and bent to the little glowing red flowers, holding out her hands as if to the comfort of fire. Realizing what she was doing, she lifted her head, smiled wrily at the two men, who were watching her with the same small smile, and said: “I’ll get a fire put in.” Shaking herself into a knowledge of what she did by action, she walked purposefully to the door, and called to the servants. Soon the houseboy entered with logs and kindling materials, and the three stood drinking their coffee, watching him as he knelt to make the fire. They were silent, not because of any scruples against letting their lives appear falsely to servants, but because they knew speech was necessary, and that what must be said would break their life together. Julia was trembling; it was as if a support had been cut away beneath her. Held as she was by these men, her life made for her by them, her instincts were free to come straight and present themselves to her without the necessity for disapproval or approval. Now she found herself glancing alternatively from Tom, that large gentle man, her husband, whose very presence comforted her into peace, to Kenneth, who was frowning down at his coffee cup, so as not to meet her eyes. If he had simply laughed and said what was needed!—he did not. He drank what remained in the cup with two large gulps, seemed to feel the need of something to do, and then went over to the fireplace. The native still knelt there, his bare legs projecting loosely behind him, his hands hanging loose, his body free and loose save for head and shoulders, into which all his energy was concentrated for the purpose of blowing up the fire, which he did with steady, bellow-like breathing. “Here,” said Kenneth, “I’ll do that.” The servant glanced at him, accepted the white man’s whim, and silently left the room, leaving the feeling behind him that he had said: “White men can’t make fires”; just as Julia could feel her cook saying, when she was giving orders in the kitchen: “I can make better pastry than you.”

  Kenneth knelt where the servant had knelt and began fiddling with the logs. But he was good with his hands, and in a moment the sparse beginnings of a fire flowered in the wall; while the crock of prickly red thorn blossoms, Julia’s summer fire, was set to one side.

  “Now,” said Kenneth, rather offhand, rather too loudly: “You can warm your hands, Julia.” He gave his quick, grudging laugh. Julia found it offensive; and met his eyes. They were hostile. She flushed, walked slowly over to the fireplace, and sat down. The two men followed her example. For a while they did nothing; that un-offered explanation hung in the air between them. After a while Kenneth reached for a magazine and began to read. Julia looked over at her husband, whose kind blue eyes had always accepted everything she was, and raised her brows humorously. He did not respond, for he had turned again to Kenneth’s now purposely bent head.

  The fact that Kenneth had not spoken, that Tom was troubled, made Julia, thrown back on herself, ask: “Why should you be so resentful? Surely he has a right to do as he pleases?” No, she answered herself. Not in this way. He shouldn’t suddenly withdraw, shutting us out. Either one thing or the other. Doing it this way means that all our years together have been a lie; he simply repudiates them. But that was Kenneth, this continuous alternation between giving and withdrawal. Julia felt tears welling up inside her from a place that for a long time had remained dry. They were the tears of trembling insecurity. The thin, cold air in the great stone room, just beginning to be warmed by the small fire, was full of menace for Julia. But Kenneth did not speak: he was reading as if his future depended on the advertisements for tractors; and Tom soon began to read too, ignoring Julia.

  She pulled herself together, and lay back in her chair, making herself think. She was thinking consciously of her life and what she was. There had been no need for her to consider herself for so long, and she hated having to do it.

  She was the daughter of a small-town doctor in the North of England. To say that she had been ambitious would be false: the word ambition implies purpose; she was rather critical and curious, and her rebellion against the small-town atmosphere, and the prospect of marrying into it was no more conscious than the rebellion of most young people who think vaguely: Surely life can be better than this?

  Yet she escaped. She was clever: at the end of her schooling she was better educated than most. She learned French and German because languages came easily to her, but mostly because at eighteen she fell in love with a French student, and at twenty became secretary to a man who had business connections in Germany, and she liked to please men. She was an excellent secretary, not merely because she was competent, but because of her peculiar fluid sympathy for the men she worked with. Her employers found that she quickly, intuitively, fitted herself in with what they wanted: it was a sort of directed passivity, a receptiveness towards people. So she earned well, and soon had the opportunity of leaving her home town and going to London.

  Looking back now from the age she had reached (which was nearly forty) on the life she had lived (which had been varied and apparently adventurous) she could not put her finger on any point in her youth when she had said to herself: “I want to travel; I want to be free.” Yet she had travelled widely, moving from one country to the next, from one job to the next; and all her relations with people, whether men or women, had been coloured by the brilliance of impermanence. When she left England she had not known it would be final. It was on a business trip wit
h her employer, and her relations with him were almost those of a wife with a husband, excepting for sex: she could not work with a man unless she offered a friendly, delicate sympathy.

  In France she fell in love, and stayed there for a year. When that came to an end, the mood took her to go to Italy—no, that is the wrong way of putting it. When she described it like that to herself, she scrupulously said: That’s not the truth. The fact was that she had been very seriously in love; and yet could not bring herself to marry. Going to Italy (she had not wanted to go in the least) had been a desperate but final way of ending the affair. She simply could not face the idea of marriage. In Italy she worked in a travel agency; and there she met a man whom she grew to love. It was not the desperate passion of a year before, but serious enough to marry. Later, she moved to America. Why America? Why not?—she was offered a good job there at the time she was looking for some place to go.

  She stayed there two years, and had, as they say, a wonderful time. She was now a little bit more cautious about falling in love; but nevertheless, there was a man who almost persuaded her to stay in New York. At the last moment a wild, trapped feeling came over her: what have I got to do with this country? she asked herself. This time, leaving the man was a destroying effort; she did not want to leave him. But she went south to the Argentine, and her state of mind was not a pleasant one.

  Also, she found she was not as efficient as she had been. This was because she had become more wary, less adaptable. Afraid of falling in love, she was conscious of pulling away from the people she worked for; she gave only what she was paid to give, and this did not satisfy her. What, then, was going to satisfy her? After all, she could not spend all her life moving from continent to continent; yet there seemed no reason why she should settle in one place rather than another, even why it should be one man rather than another. She was tired. She was very tired. The springs of her feeling had run dry. This particular malaise is not so easily cured.