African Stories

by Doris Lessing

  Some days later she said, tartly, to Paul: “If you’re not going back to school, then you might as well put your mind to the farm-work.” He replied that he was trying to; to her impatience he answered with an appeal: “It’s difficult, Mother. Everything’s in such a mess. I don’t know where to start. I haven’t the experience.” Maggie tried hard to control that demon of disappointment and anger in her that made her hard, unsympathetic; but her voice was dry: “You’ll get experience by working.”

  And so Paul went to his father. He suggested, practically, that Alec should spend a month (“only a month, Dad, it’s not so long”) showing him the important things. Alec agreed, but Paul could see that as they went from plough to waggon, field to grazing land, that Alec’s thoughts were not with him. He would ask a question, and Alec did not hear. And at the end of three days he gave it up. The boy was seething with frustration and misery. “What do they expect me to do?” he kept muttering to himself; “what do they want?” His mother was like a cold wall; she would not love him unless he became a college boy; his father was amiably uninterested. He took himself off to neighbouring farmers. They were kind, for everyone was sorry for him. But after a week or so of listening to advice, he was more dismayed than before. “You’d better do something about your soil, lad,” they said. “Your dad’s worked it out.” Or: “The first thing is to plant trees, the wind’ll blow what soil there is away unless you do something quickly.” Or: “That big vlei of yours: do you know it was dry a month before the rains last year? Your father has ploughed up the catchment area; you’d better sink some wells quickly.” It meant a complete reorganisation. He could do it, of course, but . . . the truth was he had not the heart to do it, when no one was interested in him. They just don’t care, he said to himself; and after a few weeks of desultory work he took himself off to James, his adopted father. Part of the day he would spend on the lands, just to keep things going, and then he drifted over to the mine.

  James was a big, gaunt man, with a broad and bony face. Small grey eyes looked steadily from deep sockets, his mouth was hard. He stood loosely, bending from the shoulders, and his hands swung loose beside him so that there was something of a gorilla-look about him. Strength—that was the impression he gave, and that was what Paul found in him. And yet there was also a hesitancy, a moment of indecision before he moved or spoke, and a sardonic note in his drawl—it was strength on the defensive, a watchful and precarious strength. He smoked heavily, rough cigarettes he rolled for himself between yellow-stained fingers; and regularly drank just a little too much. He would get really drunk several times a year, but between these indulgences kept to his three whiskies at sundown. He would toss these back, standing, one after another, when he came in from work; and then give the bottle a long look, a malevolent look, and put it away where he could not see it. Then he took his dinner, without pleasure, to feed the drink; and immediately went to bed. Once Paul found him at a week-end lying sodden and asleep sprawled over the table, and he was sickened; but afterwards James was simple and kindly as always; nor did he apologise, but took it as a matter of course that man needed to drink himself blind from time to time. This, oddly enough, reassured the boy. His own father never drank, and Maggie had a puritan horror of it; though she would offer visitors a drink from politeness. It was a problem that had never touched him; and now it was presented crudely to him and seemed no problem at all.

  He asked questions about James’s life. James would give him that shrewd, slow look, hesitate a little, and then in a rather tired voice, as if talking were disagreeable, answer the boy’s clumsy questions. He was always very patient with Paul; but behind the good-natured patience was another emotion, like a restrained cruelty; it was not a personal cruelty, directed against Paul, but the self-punishment of fatalism, in which Paul was included.

  James’s mother was Afrikaans and his father English. He had the practicality, the humour, the good sense of his mother’s people, and the inverted and tongue-tied poetry of the English, which expressed itself in just that angry fatalism and perhaps also in the drink. He had been raised in a suburb of Johannesburg, and went early to the mines. He spoke of that city with a mixture of loathing and fascination, so that to Paul it became an epitome of all the great and glamorous cities of the world. But even while Paul was dreaming of its delights he would hear James drawl: “I got out of it in time, I had that much sense.” And though he did not want to have his dream darkened, he had to listen: “When you first go down, you get paid like a prince and the world’s your oyster. Then you get married and tie yourself up with a houseful of furniture on the hire-purchase and a house under a mortgage. Your car’s your own, and you exchange it for a new one every year. It’s a hell of a life, money pouring in and money pouring out, and your wife loves you, and everything’s fine; parties and a good time for one and all. And then your best friend finds his chest is giving him trouble and he goes to the doctor, and then suddenly you find he’s dropped out of the crowd; he’s on half the money and all the bills to pay. His wife finds it no fun and off she goes with someone else. Then you discover it’s not just one of your friends, but half the men you know are in just that position, crocks at thirty and owning nothing but the car, and they soon sell that to pay alimony. You find you drink too much—there’s something on your mind, as you might say. Then, if you’ve got sense, you walk out while the going’s good. If not, you think: It can’t happen to me, and you stay on.” He allowed a minute to pass while he looked at the boy to see how much had sunk in. Then he repeated, firmly: “That’s not just my story, son, take it from me. It’s happened to hundreds.”

  Paul thought it over and said: “But you didn’t have a wife?”

  “Oh, yes, I had a wife all right,” said James, grim and humorous. “I had a fine wife, but only while I was underground raking in the shekels. When I decided it wasn’t good enough and I wanted to save my lungs, and I went on surface work at less money, she transferred to one of the can’t-happen-to-me boys. She left him when the doctor told him he was fit for the scrap-heap, and then she used her brains and married a man on the stock exchange.”

  Paul was silent, because this bitter note against women was not confirmed by what he felt about his mother. “Do you ever want to go back?” he asked.

  “Sometimes,” conceded James, grudgingly. “Johannesburg’s a mad-house, but it’s got something—but when I get the hankering I remember I’m still alive and kicking when my crowd’s mostly dead or put out to grass.” He was speaking of the city as men do of the sea, or travel, or of drugs; and it gripped Paul’s imagination. But James looked sharply at him and said: “Hey, sonnie, if you’ve got any ideas about going south to the golden city, then think again. You don’t want to get any ideas about getting rich quick. If you want to mix yourself up in that racket, then you buy yourself an education and stay on the surface bossing the others, and not underground being bossed. You take it from me, son.”

  And Paul took it from him, though he did not want to. The golden city was shimmering in his head like a mirage. But what was the alternative? To stay on this shabby little farm? In comparison, James’s life seemed daring and wonderful and dangerous. It seemed to him that James was telling him everything but what was essential; he was leaving something out—and soon he came back again for another dose of the astringent common sense that left him unfed, acknowledging it with his mind but not his imagination.

  He found James sitting on a heap of shale at the shaft-head, rolling cigarettes, his back to the evening sun. Paul stepped over the long, black shadow and seated himself on the shale. It was loose and shifted under him to form a warm and comfortable hollow. He asked for a cigarette and James good-humouredly gave him one. “Are you glad you became a small-worker?” he asked at once.

  There was a shrewd look and the slow reply: “No complaints, there’s a living as long as the seam lasts—looks as if it won’t last much longer at that.” Paul ignored that last remark and persisted: “If you had your life agai
n, how would you change it?”

  James grimaced and asked: “Who’s offering me my life again?”

  The boy’s face was stained with disappointment. “I want to know,” he said, stubbornly, like a child.

  “Listen, sonnie,” said James, quietly, “I’m no person to ask for advice. I’ve nothing much to show. All I’ve got to pat myself on the back for is I had the sense to pull out of the big money in time to save my lungs.” Paul let these words go past him and he looked up at the big man, who seemed so kindly and solid and sensible, and asked: “Are you happy?”

  At last the question was out. James positively started: then he gave that small, humorous grimace and put back his head and laughed. It was painful. Then he slapped Paul’s knee and said, tolerantly, still laughing: “Sonnie, you’re a nice kid, don’t let any of them get you down.”

  Paul sat there, shamefaced, trying to smile, feeling badly let down. He felt as if James, too, had rejected him. But he clung to the man, since there was no one else; he came over in the evenings to talk, while he decided to put his mind to the farm. There was nothing else to do.

  Yet while he worked he was daydreaming. He imagined himself travelling south, to the Rand, and working as James had done, saving unheard-of sums of money and then leaving, a rich man, in time to save his health. Or did not leave, but was carried out on a stretcher, with his mother and James as sorrowing witnesses of this victim of the gold industry. Or he saw himself as the greatest mine expert of the continent, strolling casually among the mine-dumps and headgear of the Reef, calmly shedding his pearls of wisdom before awed financiers. Or he bought a large tobacco farm, made fifty thousand the first season and settled vast sums on James and his parents.

  Then he took himself in hand, refusing himself even the relief of daydreams, and forced himself to concentrate on the work. He would come back full of hopeful enthusiasm to Maggie, telling her that he was dividing the big field for a proper rotation of crops and that soon it would show strips of colour, from the rich, dark green of maize to the blazing yellow of the sunflower. She listened kindly, but without responding as he wanted. So he ceased to tell her what he was doing—particularly as half the time he felt uneasily that it was wrong, he simply did not know. He set his teeth over his anger and went to Alec and said: “Now listen, you’ve got to answer a question.” Alec, divining rod in hand, turned and said: “What now?” “I want to know, should I harrow the field now or wait until the rains?” Alec hesitated and said: “What do you think?” Paul shouted: “I want to know what you think—you’ve had the experience, haven’t you?” And then Alec lost his temper and said: “Can’t you see I’m working this thing out? Go and ask—well go and ask one of the neighbours.”

  Paul would not give in. He waited until Alec had finished, and then said: “Now come on, Father, you’re coming with me to the field. I want to know.” Reluctantly, Alec went. Day after day, Paul fought with his father; he learned not to ask for general advice, he presented Alec with a definite problem and insisted until he got an answer. He was beginning to find his way among the complexities of the place, when Maggie appealed to him: “Paul, I know you’ll think I’m hard, but I want you to leave your father alone.”

  The boy said, in amazement: “What do you mean? I don’t ask him things oftener than once or twice a day. He’s got all the rest of the time to play with his toys.”

  Maggie said: “He should be left. I know you won’t understand, but I’m right, Paul.” For several days she had been watching Alec; she could see that cloud of fear in his eyes that she had seen before. When he was forced to look outside him and his private world, when he was made to look at the havoc he had created by his negligence, then he could not bear it. He lay tossing at night, complaining endlessly: “What does he want? What more can I do? He goes on and on, and he knows I’m on to the big thing. I’ll have it soon, Maggie, I know I will. This new reef’ll be full of gold, I am sure . . .” It made her heart ache with pity for him. She had decided, firmly, to support her husband against her son. After all, Paul was young, he’d his life in front of him. She said, quietly: “Leave him, Paul. You don’t understand. When a person’s a failure, it’s cruel to make them see it.”

  “I’m not making him see anything,” said Paul, bitterly. “I’m only asking for advice, that’s all, that’s all!” And the big boy of sixteen burst into tears of rage; and, after a helpless, wild look at his mother, ran off into the bush, stumbling as he ran. He was saying to himself: I’ve had enough, I’m going to run away. I’m going south . . . But after a while he quietened and went back to work. He left Alec alone. But it was not so easy. Again he said to Maggie: “He’s dug a trench right across my new contour ridges; he didn’t even ask me . . .” And later: “He’s put a shaft clean in the middle of the sunflowers, he’s ruined half an acre—can’t you talk to him, Mother?” Maggie promised to talk to her husband, and when it came to the point, lost her courage. Alec was like a child, what was the use of talking?

  Later still, Paul came and said: “Do you realize what he’s spent this last year on his nonsense?”

  “Yes, I know,” sighed Maggie.

  “Well, he can’t spend so much, and that’s all there is to it.”

  “What are you going to do?” said Maggie. And then quickly: “Be gentle with him, Paul. Please . . .”

  Paul insisted one evening that Alec “should listen to him for a moment.” He made his father sit at one end of the table while he placed books of accounts before him and stood over him while he looked through them. “You can’t do it, Father,” said Paul, reasonably, patiently; “you’ve got to cut it down a bit.”

  It hurt Maggie to see them. It hurt Paul, too—it was like pensioning off his own father. For he was simply making conditions, and Alec had to accept them. He was like a petitioner, saying: “You’re not going to take it all away from me, are you? You can’t do that?” His face was sagging with disappointment, and in the end it brightened pathetically at the concession that he might keep four labourers for his own use and spend fifty pounds a year. “Not a penny more,” said Paul. “And you’ve got to fill in all the abandoned diggings and shafts. You can’t walk a step over the farm now without risking your neck.”

  Maggie was tender with Alec afterwards, when he came to her and said: “That young know-all, turning everything upside down, all theories and not experience!” Then he went off to fill in the trenches and shafts, and afterwards to a distant part of the farm where he had found a new reef.

  But now he tended to make sarcastic remarks to Paul; and Maggie had to be careful to keep the peace between them, feeling a traitor to both, for she would agree first with one man, then with the other—Paul was a man now, and it hurt her to see it. Sixteen, thin as a plank, sunburn dark on a strained face, much too patient with her. For Paul would look at the tired old woman who was his mother and think that by rights she should still be a young one, and he shut his teeth over the reproaches he wanted to make: Why do you support him in this craziness; why do you agree to everything he says? And so he worried through that first season; and there came the time to balance the farm books; and there happened something that no one expected.

  When all the figuring and accounting was over, Alec, who had apparently not even noticed the work, went into the office and spent an evening with the books. He came out with a triumphant smile and said to Paul: “Well, you haven’t done much better than I did, in spite of all your talk.”

  Paul glanced at his mother, who was making urgent signals at him to keep his temper. He kept it. He was white, but he was making an effort to smile. But Alec continued: “You go on at me, both of you, but when it comes to the point you haven’t made any profit either.” It was so unfair that Paul could no longer remain silent. “You let the farm go to pieces,” he said, bitterly, “you won’t even give me advice when I ask for it, and then you accuse me . . .”

  “Paul,” said Maggie, urgently.

  “And when I find a gold mine,” said Alec,
magnificently, “and it won’t be long now, you’ll come running to me, you’ll be sorry then! You can’t run a farm, and you haven’t got the sense to learn elementary geology from me. You’ve been with me all these years and you don’t even know one sort of reef from another. You’re too damned lazy to live.” And with this he walked out of the room.