African Stories

by Doris Lessing

  Alec grew even vaguer as time went by. He used to stand at the edge of a field, gazing dimly across it at a ridge of bush which rose sharp to the great blue sky; or at the end of the big vlei, which cut across the farm in a shallow, golden swathe of rustling grasses, with a sluggish watercourse showing green down its centre. He would stand on a moonlight night staring across the fields which now appeared like a diffusing green sea, the white crests of the maize shifting like foam; or at midday, looking over the stretching acres of brown and heaving clods, warm and rich with sunlight; or at sunset, when the miles of bush flared gold and red. Distance—that was what he needed. It was what he had left England to find.

  He cleared new ground every year. When he first came it was mostly bush, with a few cleared patches. The house was bedded in trees. Now one walked from the house through Maggie’s pretty garden, and the mealies stood like a green wall on three sides of the homestead. From a little hillock behind the house, the swaying green showed solid and unbroken, hundreds of acres of it, beautiful to look at until one remembered that the experts were warning against this kind of planting. Better small fields with trees to guard them from wind; better girdles of grass, so that the precious soil might be held by the roots and not wash away with the flooding storm-waters. But Alec’s instinct was for space, and soon half the surface of the farm was exposed, and the ploughs drove a straight line from boundary to boundary, and the labourers worked in a straight line, like an advancing army, their hoes rising and falling and flashing like spears in the sun. The vivid green of the leaves rippled and glittered, or shone soft with moonlight; or at reaping time the land lay bare and hard, and over it the tarnished litter of the fallen husks; or at planting, a wide sweep of dark-brown clods which turned to harsh red under the rain. Beautiful it was, and Maggie could understand Alec’s satisfaction in it; but it was disturbing when the rains drove the soil along the gulleys; when the experts came from town and told Alec he was ruining his farm; when at the season’s end the yield rose hardly at all, in spite of the constantly increased acreage. But Alec set that obstinate face of his against the experts and the evidence of the books, and cut more trees, exposing the new soil which fed fine, strong plants, showing the richness of their growth in the heavy cobs. One could mark the newly-cleared area in the great field every year; the maize stood a couple of feet shorter on the old soil. Alec sent gangs of workers into the trees, and through the dry season the dull thud-thud of axes sounded across the wide, clean air, and the trees crashed one after another into the wreckage of their branches. Always a new field, or rather, the old one extended; always fine new soil ready for the planting. But there came a time when it was not possible to cut more trees, for where would the cattle graze? There must be sufficient veld left to feed them, for without them the ploughs and waggons could not move, and there wasn’t sufficient capital for a tractor. So Alec rested on his laurels for a couple of years, working the great field, and Maggie sent her son off to school in town a hundred miles away. He would return only for the holidays—would return, she hoped, brisker, with purpose, the languor of the farm driven out of him. She missed him badly, but it was a relief that he was with other children, and this relief made up for the loss. As for Alec, Paul’s going made him uneasy. Now he was actually at school, he must face his responsibility for the child’s future. He wandered over his farm rather less vaguely and wondered how Paul thought of the town. For that was how he saw it; not that he was at school, but in town; and it was the reason why he had been so reluctant for him to go. He did not want him to grow into an office-worker, a pen-user, a city-cypher, the sort of person he had been himself and now disowned. But what if Paul did not feel as he did? Alec would stand looking at a tree, or a stretch of water, thinking: What does this mean to Paul, what does he think when he swims here?—in the secretive, nostalgic way of parents trying to guess at their children’s souls. What sort of a creature was Paul? When he came to it, he had no idea at all, although the child was so like him, a long, lean, dark, silent boy, with contemplative dark eyes and a slow way of speaking. And here was Maggie, with such plans for him, determined that he must be an engineer, a scientist, a doctor, and nothing less than famous. The fame could be discounted, tolerantly, with her maternal pride and possessiveness, but scientists of any kind are not produced on the sort of profits he was making.

  He thought worriedly about the farm. Perhaps he could lease adjoining land and graze his beasts there, and leave his own good land free for cutting? But all the land was taken up. He knew quite well, too, that the problem was deeper. He should change his way of farming. There were all sorts of things he could do—should do, at once; but at the idea of them a lassitude crept over him and he thought, obstinately: Why should I, why fuss and worry, when I’m free of all that, free of the competition in the Old Country? I didn’t come here to fight myself into a shadow over getting rich. . . . But the truth was, though he did not admit it to himself, not for a second, he was very bored. He had come to the limits of his old way, and now, to succeed, it would be going over the same ground, but in a different way—nothing new; that was the point. Rather guiltily he found himself daydreaming about pulling up his roots here and going off somewhere else—South America, China—why not? Then he pulled himself together. To postpone the problem he cut another small area of trees, and the cutting of them exposed all the ground to where the ridge lifted itself; they could see clear from the house across the vlei and up the other side; all mealies, all a shimmering mass of green; and on the ridge was the boundary of the next farm, a low, barbed-wire fence, and against the fence was a small mine. It was nothing very grand, just a two-stamp affair, run by a single man who got what gold he could from a poor but steady seam. The mine had been there for years. The mine-stamp thudded day and night, coming loud or soft, according to the direction of the wind. But to Alec there was something new and even terrible about seeing the black dump of the mine buildings, seeing the black smoke drifting up into the blue, fresh sky. His deep and thoughtful eyes would often turn that way. How strange that from that cluster of black ugliness, under the hanging smoke, gold should come from the earth. It was unpleasant, too. This was farming land. It was outrageous that the good soil should be covered, even for a mere five acres or so, by buildings and iron gear and the sordid mine compound.

  Alec felt as he did when people urged him to grow tobacco. It would be a betrayal, though what he would be betraying he could not say. And this mine was a betrayal of everything decent. They fetched up the ore, they washed the gold out, melted it to conveniently-handled shapes, thousands of workers spent their lives on it when they might be doing something useful on the land; and ultimately the gold was shipped off to America. He often made the old joke, these days, about digging up gold from one hole in the ground and sending it to America to be buried in another. Maggie listened and wondered at him. What a queer man he was! He noticed nothing until he was faced with it. For years she had been talking about Paul’s future; and only when she packed him off to school did Alec begin to talk, just as if he had only that moment come to consider it, of how he should be educated. For years he had been living a couple of miles from a mine, with the sound of it always in his ears, but it was not until he could see it clear on the next ridge that he seemed to notice it. And yet for years the old miner had been dropping in of an evening. Alec would make a polite inquiry or two and then start farm-talk, which could not possibly interest him. “Poor body,” Maggie had been used to say, half-scornfully, “what’s the use of talking seasons and prices to him?” For she shared Alec’s feeling that mining was not a serious way of living—not this sort of mining, scratching in the dirt for a little gold. That was how she thought of it. But at least she had thought of it; and here was Alec like a man with a discovery.

  When Paul came home for his holiday and saw the mine lifted black before him on the long, green ridge, he was excited, and made his longest journey afield. He spent a day at the mine and came home chattering about pennywei
ghts and ounces of gold; about reefs and seams and veins; about ore and slimes and cyanide—a whole new language. Maggie poured brisk scorn on the glamour of gold; but she was secretly pleased at this practical new interest. He was at least talking about things, he wasn’t mooning about the farm like a waif returned from exile. She dreamed of him becoming a mining engineer or a geologist. She sent to town for books about famous men of science and left them lying about. Paul hardly glanced at them. His practical experience of handling things, watching growth, seeing iron for implements shaped in a fire, made it so that his knowledge must come first-hand, and afterwards he confirmed by reading. And he was roused to quite different thoughts. He would kick at an exposed rock, so that the sparks fell dull red under his boot-soles, and say: “Daddy, perhaps this is gold rock?” Or he would come running with bits of decomposed stone that showed dull gleams of metal and say: “Look, this is gold, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe,” said Alec, reluctantly. “This is all gold country. The prospectors used to come through here. There is a big reef running across that ridge which is exactly the same formation as one of the big reefs on the Rand; once they thought they’d find a mine as big as that one, here. But it didn’t come to anything.”

  “Perhaps we’ll find it,” said Paul, obstinately.

  “Perhaps,” said Alec, indulgently. But he was stirred, whether he liked it or not. He thought of the old prospectors wandering over the country with their meagre equipment, panning gold from the sand of river-beds, crushing bits of rock, washing the grit for those tiny grains that might proclaim a new Rand. Sometimes, when he came on a projecting ledge of rock, instead of cursing it for being on farmland at all, he would surreptitiously examine it, thinking: That bit there looks as if it had been broken off—perhaps one of the old hands used his hammer here twenty years ago. Or he might find an old digging, half-filled in by the rains, where someone had tried his luck; and he stood looking down at the way the rock lay in folds under the earth, sometimes flat, packed tidily one above the other, sometimes slanting in a crazy plunge where the subterranean forces had pushed and squeezed. And then he would shake himself and turn back to the business of farming, to the visible surfaces, the tame and orderly top-soil that was a shallow and understandable layer responsive to light and air and wetness, where the worms and air-bringing roots worked their miracles of decomposition and growth. He put his thoughts back to this malleable surface of the globe, the soil—or imagined that he did; and suppressed his furtive speculation about the fascinating underground structures—but not altogether. There was slowly growing in him another vision, another need; and he listened to the regular thud-thud of the mine-stamps from the opposite ridge as if they were drums beating from a country whose frontier he was forbidden to cross.

  One evening an old weather-stained man appeared at the door and unslung from his back a great bundle of equipment and came in for the night, assuming the traveller’s privilege of hospitality. He was, in fact, one of the vanishing race of wandering prospectors; and for most of the night he talked about his life on the veld. It was like a story from a child’s adventure book in its simplicities of luck and bad fortune and persistent courage rewarded only by the knowledge of right-doing. For this old man spoke of the search for gold as a scientist might of discovery, or an artist of his art. Twice he had found gold and sold his riches trustingly, so that he was tricked by unscrupulous men who were now rich, while he was as poor as he had been forty years before. He spoke of this angrily, it is true, but it was that kind of anger we maintain from choice, like a relation whose unpleasantness has become, through the years, almost a necessity. There had been one brief period of months when he was very rich indeed, and squandered he did not know how much money in the luxury hotels of the golden city. He spoke of this indifferently, as of a thing which had chosen to visit him, and then as arbitrarily chosen to withdraw. Maggie, listening, was thankful that Paul was not there. And yet this was a tale any child might remember all his life, grateful for a glimpse of one of the old kind of adventurer, bred when there were still parts of the world unknown to map-makers and instrument-users. This was a character bound to fire any boy; but Maggie thought, stubbornly: There is enough nonsense as it is. And by this she meant, making no bones about it: Alec is enough of a bad influence. For she had come to understand that if Paul was to have that purpose she wanted in him, she must plant it and nurture it herself. She did not like the way Alec listened to this old man, who might be a grand body in his way, but not in her way. He was listening to a siren song, she could see that in his face. And later he began talking again about that nuisance of a great-uncle of his who, in some queer way, he appeared to link with the prospector. What more did the man want? Most sensible people would think that gallivanting off to farm in Africa was adventure enough, twice as adventurous as being a mere waster and ruffian, deceiving honest girls and taking honest people’s goods, and ending as a common criminal!

  Maggie, that eminently sensible woman, wept a little that night when Alec was asleep, and perhaps her courage went a little numb. Or rather, it changed its character, becoming more like a shield than a spear, a defensive, not an attacking thing. For when she thought of Alec she felt helpless; and the old man asleep in the next room made her angry. Why did he have to come to this farm, why not take his dangerous gleam elsewhere? Long afterwards, she remembered that night and said, tartly, to Alec: “Yes, that was when the trouble started, when that old nuisance came lolloping along here with his long tongue wagging . . .” But “the trouble” started long before; who could say when? With the war, that so unsettled men and sent them flying off to new countries, new women? With whatever forces they were that bred men’s silly wars? Something in Alec himself: his long-dead ancestor stirring in him and whispering along his veins of wildness and adventure? Well, she would leave all that to Alec and see that her son became a respectable lawyer, or a bridge-builder. That was enough adventure for her.

  When the old man left next day, trudging off through the mealie fields with his pack over his shoulder, Alec watched him from the verandah. And that evening he climbed the hillock behind the house, and saw the small red glow of a fire down in the vlei. There he was, after his day of rock-searching, rock-chipping. He would be cooking his supper, or perhaps already lying wrapped in his blanket beside the embers, a fold of it across his face so that the moon would not trouble his eyelids with its shifting, cold gleams. The old man was alone; he did not even take an African with him to interpret the veld; he no longer needed this intermediary; he understood the country as well as the black men who lived on it. Alec went slowly to bed, thinking of the old prospector who was free, bound to no one, owning nothing but a blanket and a frying-pan and his clothes.

  Not long afterwards a package arrived from the station and Maggie watched Alec open it. It was a gold pan. Alec held it clumsily between his palms, as he had seen the prospector do. He had not yet got the feel of the thing. It was like a deep frying-pan, without a handle, of heavy black metal, with a fine groove round the inside of the rim. This groove was to catch the runnels of silt that should hold grains of gold, if there was any gold. Alec brought back fragments of rock from the lands and crushed them in a mortar and stood beside the water tanks swirling the muddy mixture around and around endlessly, swearing with frustration, because he was still so clumsy and could not get the movements right. Each sample took a long time, and he could not be sure, when he had finished, if it had been properly done. First the handfuls of crushed rock, as fine as face-powder, must be placed in the pan and then the water run in. Afterwards it must be shaken so that the heavy metals should sink, and then with a strong sideways movement the lighter grit and dust must be flung out, with the water. Then more water added and the shaking repeated. Finally, there should be nothing but a wash of clean water, and the loose grit and bits of metal sliding along the groove: the dull, soft black of iron, a harder shine for chrome, the false glitter of pyrites, that might be taken for gold by a greenhorn, and
finally, and in almost every sample, dragging slow and heavy behind the rest, would be the few dully-shining grains of true gold. But the movements had to be learned. The secret was a subtle little sideways jerk at the end, which separated the metals from the remnants of lighter rock. So stood Alec, methodically practising, with the heavy pan between his palms, the packets of crushed rock on the ground beside him, and on the other side the dripping water-taps. He was squandering the precious water that had to be brought from the well three times a week in the water-cart. The household was always expected to be niggardly with water, and now here was Alec swilling away gallons of it every day. An aggrieved Maggie watched him through the kitchen window.

  But it was still a hobby. Alec worked as usual on the farm, picking up interesting bits of rock if he came across them, and panned them at evening, or early in the morning before breakfast. The house was littered with lumps of rocks, and Maggie handled them wonderingly when she was alone, for she did not intend to encourage Alec in “this nonsense.” She was fascinated by the rocks, and she did not want to be fascinated. There were round stones, worn smooth by the wash of water; red stones, marbled with black; green stones, dull like rough jade; blue stones, with a fire of metal when they were shifted against a light. They were beautiful enough to be cut and worn as jewels. Then there were lumps of rough substance, halfway between soil and rock, the colour of ox-blood; and some so rich with metal that they weighed the hand low. Most promising were the decomposing rocks, where the soft parts had been rotted out by wind and water, leaving a crumbling, veiny substance, like a skeleton of the soil, and in some of these the gold could be seen lying thick and close, like dirt along the seams of a garment.