African Stories

by Doris Lessing

  Alec did not yet know the names of the rocks and minerals, and he was troubled by his ignorance. He sent for books; and in the meantime he moved like an explorer over the farm he imagined he knew as well as it could be known, learning to see it in a new way. That rugged jut of reef, for instance, which intersected the big vlei like the wall of a natural dam—what was the nature of that hard and determined rock, and what happened to it beneath the ground? Why was the soil dark and red at one end of the big field and a sullen orange at the other? He looked at this field when it was bared ready for the planters, and saw how the soil shaded and modulated from acre to acre, according to the varieties of rock from which it had been formed, and he no longer saw the field, he saw the reefs and shales and silts and rivers of the underworld. He lifted his eyes from this vision and saw the kopjes six miles away; hard granite, they were; and the foothills, tumbled outposts of granite boulders almost to his own boundary—rock from another era, mountains erupted from an older time. On another horizon could be seen the long mountain where chrome was mined and exported to the countries which used it for war. Along the flanks of the mountain showed the scars and levels of the workings—it was another knowledge, another language of labour. He felt as if he had been blind half his life and only just discovered it. And on the slopes of his own farm were the sharp quartz reefs that the prospector told him were promise of gold. Quartz, that most lovely of rocks, coloured and weathered to a thousand shapes and tints, sometimes standing cold and glittering, like miniature snow mountains; sometimes milky, like slabs of opal, or delicate pink and amber with a smoky flush in its depths, as if a fire burnt there invisibly; marbled black, or mottled blue—there was no end to the strangeness and variety of those quartz reefs which for years he had been cursing because they made whole acres of his land unfit for the plough. Now he wandered there with a prospector’s hammer, watching the fragments of rock fly off like chips of ice, or like shattering jewels. When he panned these pieces they showed traces of gold. But not enough: he had already learned how to measure the richness of a sample.

  He sent for a geological map and tacked it to the wall of his farm office. Maggie found it and stood in front of it, studying it when he couldn’t see her. Here was Africa, but in a new aspect. Instead of the shaded greens and browns and blues of the map she was accustomed to see, the colours of earth and growth, the colours of leaf and soil and grass and moving water, now they were harsh colours, like the metallic hues of rock. An arsenic green showed the copper deposits of Northern Rhodesia, a cold yellow the gold of the Transvaal—but not only the Transvaal. She had had no idea how much gold there was, worked everywhere; the patches of yellow mottled the sub-continent. But Maggie had no feeling for gold; her sound instincts were against the useless stuff. She looked with interest at the black of the coalfields—one of the richest in the world, Alec said, and hardly touched; at the dull grey of the chrome deposits, whole mountains of it, lying unused; at the glittering light green of the asbestos, at the iron and the manganese and—but most of these names she had never heard, could not even pronounce.

  When Alec’s books came, she would turn over the pages curiously, gaining not so much a knowledge as an intimation of the wonderful future of this continent. Perhaps Alec should have been a scientist, she thought, and not a farmer at all? Perhaps, with this capacity of his for completely losing himself (as he had become lost) he might have been a great man? For this was how the vision narrowed down in her; all the rich potentialities of Africa she saw through her son, who might one day work with coal, or with copper; or through Alec, the man, who “might have done well for himself” if he had had a different education. Education, that was the point. And she turned her thoughts steadily towards her son. All her interests had narrowed to him. She set her will hard, like a prayer, towards him, as if her damned forces could work on him a hundred miles away at school in the city.

  When he came home from school he found his father using a new vocabulary. Alec was still attending to the farm with half his attention, but his passion was directed into this business of gold-finding. He had taken half a dozen labourers from the fields and they were digging trenches along the quartz reef on the ridge. Maggie made no direct comment, but Paul could feel her disapproval. The child was torn between loyalty to his mother and fascination for this new interest, and the trenches won. For some days Maggie hardly saw him, he was with his father, or over at the mine on the ridge.

  “Perhaps well have a mine on our farm, too,” said Paul to Maggie; and then, scornfully: “But we won’t have a silly mine like that one, well have a big one, like Johannesburg.” And Maggie’s heart sank, listening to him. Now was the time, she thought, to mould him, and she showed him the coloured map on the office wall and tried to make it come alive for him, as it had for her. She spoke of the need for engineers and experts, but he looked and listened without kindling. “But my bairn,” said Maggie reproachfully, using the old endearment which was falling out of use now, with her other Scots ways of speech, “my bairn, it’s time you were making your mind to what you want. You must know what you want to be.” He looked sulky and said if they found “a big mine, like Johannesburg,” he would be a gold-miner. “Oh, no,” said Maggie indignantly. “That’s just luck. Anyone can have a stroke of luck. It takes a clever man to be educated and know about things.” So Paul evaded this and said all right then, he’d be a tobacco farmer. “Oh, no,” said Maggie again; and wondered herself at the passion she put into it. Why should he not be a tobacco farmer? But it wasn’t what she dreamed of for him. He would become a rich tobacco farmer? He would make his thousands and study the international money-juggling and buy more farms and more farms and have assistants until he sat in an office and directed others, just as if he were a businessman? For with tobacco there seemed to be no halfway place, the tobacco farmers drove themselves through night-work and long hours on the fields, as if an invisible whip threatened them, and then they failed, or they succeeded suddenly, and paid others to do the slaving . . . it was no sort of a life, or at least, not for her son. “What’s the matter with having money?” asked Paul at last, in hostility. “Don’t you see,” said Maggie, desperately, trying to convey something of her solid and honest values; “anyone can be lucky, anyone can do it. Young men come out from England, with a bit of money behind them, and they needn’t be anything, just fools maybe, and then the weather’s with them, and the prices are good, and they’re rich men—but there’s nothing in that, you want to try something more worthwhile than that, don’t you?” Paul swung the dark and stubborn eyes on her and asked, dourly: “What do you think of my father, then?” She caught her breath, looked at him in amazement—surely he couldn’t be criticising his father! But he was; already his eyes were half-ashamed, however, and he said quickly, “I’ll think about it,” and made his escape. He went straight off to the diggings, and seemed to avoid his mother for a time. As for Alec, Maggie thought he’d lost his senses. He came rushing in and out of the house with bits of rock and announcements of imminent riches so that Paul became as bad, and spent half his day crushing stones and watching his father panning. Soon he learned to use the pan himself. Maggie watched the intent child at work beside the water-tanks, while the expensive water went sloshing over to the dry ground, so that there were always puddles, in spite of the strong heat. The tanks ran dry and Alec had to give orders for the water-carts to make an extra journey. Yes, thought Maggie, bitterly, all these years I’ve been saving water and now, over this foolishness, the water-carts can make two or three extra trips a week. Because of this, Alec began talking of sinking a new well; and Maggie grew more bitter still, for she had often asked for a well to be sunk close at the back of the house, and there had never been time or money to see to it. But now, it seemed, Alec found it justified.

  People who live on the veld for a long time acquire an instinct for the places where one must sink for water. An old-timer will go snuffing and feeling over the land like a dog, marking the fall of the earth,
the lie of a reef, the position of an anthill, and say at last: Here is the place. Likely enough he will be right, and often enough of course, quite wrong.

  Alec went through just such a morning of scenting and testing, through the bush at the back of the house, where the hillock erupted its boulders. If the underground forces had broken here, then there might be fissures where water could push its way; water was often to be found near a place of reefs and rocks. And there were antheaps; and ant galleries mostly ended, perhaps a hundred feet down, in an underground river. And there was a certain promising type of tree—yes, said Alec, this would be a good place for a well. And he had already marked the place and taken two labourers from the farm to do the digging when there appeared yet another of those dangerous visitors; another vagrant old man, just as stained and weather-worn as the last; with just such a craziness about him, only this time even worse, for he claimed he was a water-diviner and would find Alec Barnes a well for the sum of one pound sterling.

  That night Paul was exposed until dawn to the snares of magical possibilities. He could not be made to go to bed. The old man had many tales of travel and danger; for he had spent his youth as a big-game hunter, and later, when he was too old for that, became a prospector; and later still, by chance, found that the forked twig of a tree had strength in his hands. Chance!—it was always chance, thought Maggie, listening dubiously. These men lived from one stroke of luck to the next. It was bad luck that the elephant charged and left the old man lame for life, with the tusk-scars showing white from angle to groin. It was good luck that he “fell in” with old Thompson, who had happened to “make a break” with diamonds in the Free State. It was bad luck that malaria and then blackwater got him, so that he could no longer sleep in the bush at nights. It was good luck that made him try his chances with the twig, so that now he might move from farm to farm, with an assured welcome for a night behind mosquito netting . . . What an influence for Paul!

  Paul sat quietly beside her and missed not a word. He blinked slow attention through those dark and watchful eyes; and he was critical, too. He rejected the old man’s boasting, his insistence on the scientific certainties of the magic wand, all the talk of wells and watercourses, of which he spoke as if they were a species of underground animal that could be stalked and trapped. Paul was fixed by something else, by what kept his father still and alert all night, his eyes fixed on his guest. That something else—how well Maggie knew it! and how she distrusted it, and how she grieved for Paul, whose heart was beating (she could positively hear it) to the pulse of that dangerous something else. It was not the elephants and the lions and the narrow escapes; not the gold; not underground rivers; none of these things in themselves, and perhaps not even the pursuit of them. It was that oblique, unnamable quality in life which Maggie, trying to pin it down safely in homely words, finally dismissed in the sour and nagging phrase: Getting something for nothing. That’s all they wanted, she said to herself, sadly; and when she kissed Paul and put him to bed she said, in her sensible voice: “There isn’t anything to be proud of in getting something for nothing.” She saw that he did not know what she meant; and so she left him.

  Next morning, when they all went off to the projected well, Maggie remained a little way off, her apron lifted over her head against the sun, arms folded on her breast, in that ancient attitude of a patient and ironic woman; and she shook her head when the diviner offered her the twig and suggested she should try. But Paul tried, standing on his two planted feet, elbows tight to his sides, as he was shown, with the angles of the fork between palm and thumb. The twig turned over for him and he cried, delightedly: “I’m a diviner, I’m a diviner,” and the old man agreed that he had the gift.

  Alec indicated the place, and the old man walked across and around it with the twig, and at last he gave his sanction to dig—the twig turned down, infallibly, at just that spot. Alec paid him twenty shillings, and the old man wandered off to the next farm. Maggie said: “In a country the like of this, where everyone is parched for water, a man who could tell for sure where the water is would be nothing but a millionaire. And look at this one, his coat all patches and his boots going.” She knew she might as well save her breath, for she found two pairs of dark and critical eyes fixed on her, and it was as good as if they said: Well, woman, and what has the condition of his boots got to do with it?

  Late that evening she saw her husband go secretly along the path to the hillock with a twig, and later still he came back with an excited face, and she knew that he, too, “had the gift.”

  It was that term that Maggie got a letter from Paul’s headmaster saying that Paul was not fitted for a practical education, nor yet did he have any especial facility for examinations. If he applied himself, he might win a scholarship, however, and become academically educated . . . and so on. It was a tactful letter, and its real sense Maggie preferred not to examine, for it was too wounding to her maternal pride. Its surface sense was clear: it meant that Paul was going to cost them a good deal of money. She wrote to say that he must be given special coaching, and went off to confront Alec. He was rather irritable with her, for his mind was on the slow descent of the well. He spent most of his time watching the work. And what for? Wells were a routine. One set a couple of men to dig, and if there was no water by a certain depth, one pulled them out and tried again elsewhere. No need to stand over the thing like a harassed mother hen. So thought Maggie as she watched her husband walking in his contemplative way around the well with his twig in his hands. At thirty feet they came on water. It was not a very good stream, and might even fail in the dry season, but Alec was delighted. “And if that silly old man hadnae come at all, the well would have been sunk just that place, and no fiddle-faddle with the divining rod,” Maggie pointed out. Alec gave her a short answer and went off to the mine on the ridge, taking his twig with him. The miner said, tolerantly, that he could divine a well if he liked. Alec chose a place, and came home to tell Maggie he would earn a guinea if there turned out to be water. “But man,” said Maggie in amazement, “you aren’t going to keep the family in shoe-leather on guineas earned that way!” She asked again about the money for Paul’s coaching, and Alec said: “What’s the matter with the boy, he’s doing all right.” She persisted, and he gave in; but he seemed to resent it, this fierce determination of hers that her son must be something special in the world. But when it came to the point, Alec could not find the money, it was just not in the bank. Maggie roused herself and sold eggs and poultry to the store at the station, to earn the extra few pounds that were needed. And she went on scraping shillings together and hoarding them in a drawer, though money from chickens and vegetables would not send Paul through university.

  She said to Alec: “The wages of the trench-boys would save up for Paul’s education.” She did not say, since she could not think of herself as a nagging woman: And if you put your mind to it there’d be more money at the end of a season. But although she did not say it, Alec heard it, and replied with an aggrieved look and dogged silence. Later he said: “If I find another Rand here the boy can go to Oxford, if you want that.” There was not a grain of humour in it, he was quite in earnest.

  He spent all his time at the mine while the well was being sunk. They found water and he earned his guinea, which he put carefully with the silver for paying the labourers. What Maggie did not know was that during that time he had been walking around the mine-shaft with his divining rod. It was known how the reefs lay underground, and how much gold they carried.

  He remarked, thoughtfully: “Lucky the mine is just over the way for testing. The trouble with this business is it’s difficult to check theories.”

  Maggie did not at first understand; for she was thinking of water. She began: “But the well on the mine is just the same as this one . . .” She stopped, and her face changed as the outrageous suspicion filled her. “But Alec,” she began, indignantly; and saw him turning away, shutting out her carping and doubt. “But Alec,” she insisted, furiously,
“surely you aren’t thinking of . . .”

  “People have been divining for water for centuries,” he said simply, “so why not gold?” She saw that it was all quite clear to him, like a religious faith, and that nothing she could say would reach him at all. She remained silent; and it was at that moment the last shreds of her faith in him dissolved; and she was filled with the bitterness of a woman who has no life of her own outside husband and children, and must see everything that she could be destroyed. For herself she did not mind; it was Paul—he would have to pay for this lunacy. And she must accept that too; she had married Alec, and that was the end of it; for the thought of leaving him did not enter her mind: Maggie was too old-fashioned for divorce. There was nothing she could do; one could not argue with a possessed person, and Alec was possessed. And in this acceptance, which was like a slow shrug of the shoulders, was something deeper, as if she felt that the visionary moon-chasing quality in Alec—even though it was ridiculous—was something necessary, and that there must always be a moment when the practical-minded must pay tribute to it. From that day, Alec found Maggie willing to listen, though ironically; she might even enquire spontaneously after his “experiments.” Well, why not? she would catch herself thinking; perhaps he may discover something new after all. Then she pulled herself up, rather angrily; she was becoming infected by the lunacy. In her mind she was lowering the standards she had for Paul.