Mr. Macintosh drove the doctor back to his hospital and then came home, and at once went to see Tommy, for he loved Tommy very deeply.
Mrs. Clarke said: “What do you expect, with all these holes everywhere, they’re full of water all the wet season.”
“Well, lassie, I can’t fill in all the holes and shafts, people have been digging up here since the Queen of Sheba.”
“Never mind about the Queen of Sheba. At least you could screen our house properly.”
“I pay your husband fifty pounds a month,” said Mr. Macintosh, conscious of being in the right.
“Fifty pounds and a proper house,” said Annie Clarke.
Mr. Macintosh gave her that quick, narrow look, and then laughed loudly. A week later the house was encased in fine wire mesh all round from roof-edge to verandah-edge, so that it looked like a new meat safe, and Mrs. Clarke went over to Mr. Macintosh’s house and gave it a grand cleaning, and when she left she said: “You’re nothing but a pig, you’re as rich as the Oppenheimers, why don’t you buy yourself some new vests at least. And you’ll be getting malaria, too, the way you go traipsing about at nights.”
She returned to Tommy, who was seated on the verandah behind the grey-glistening wire-netting, in a big deck-chair. He was very thin and white after the fever. He was a long child, bony, and his eyes were big and black, and his mouth full and pouting from the petulances of the illness. He had a mass of richly-brown hair, like caramels, on his head. His mother looked at this pale child of hers, who was yet so brightly coloured and full of vitality, and her tired will-power revived enough to determine a new régime for him. He was never to be out after six at night, when the mosquitoes were abroad. He was never to be out before the sun rose.
“You can get up,” she said, and he got up, thankfully throwing aside his covers.
“I’ll go over to the compound,” he said at once.
She hesitated, and then said: “You mustn’t play there any more.”
“Why not?” he asked, already fidgeting on the steps outside the wire-netting cage.
Ah, how she hated these Whys, and Why nots! They tired her utterly. “Because I say so,” she snapped.
But he persisted: “I always play there.”
“You’re getting too big now, and you’ll be going to school soon.”
Tommy sank on to the steps and remained there, looking away over the great pit to the busy, sunlit compound. He had known this moment was coming, of course. It was a knowledge that was part of the silence. And yet he had not known it. He said: “Why, why, why, why?” singing it out in a persistent wail.
“Because I say so.” Then, in tired desperation: “You get sick from the Africans, too.”
At this, he switched his large black eyes from the scenery to his mother, and she flushed a little. For they were derisively scornful. Yet she half-believed it herself, or rather, must believe it, for all through the wet season the bush would lie waterlogged and festering with mosquitoes, and nothing could be done about it, and one has to put the blame on something.
She said: “Don’t argue. You’re not to play with them. You’re too big now to play with a lot of dirty kaffirs. When you were little it was different, but now you’re a big boy.”
Tommy sat on the steps in the sweltering afternoon sun that came thick and yellow through the haze of dust and smoke over the mountains, and he said nothing. He made no attempt to go near the compound, now that his growing to manhood depended on his not playing with the black people. So he had been made to feel. Yet he did not believe a word of it, not really.
Some days later, he was kicking a football by himself around the back of the house when a group of black children called to him from the bush, and he turned away as if he had not seen them. They called again and then ran away. And Tommy wept bitterly, for now he was alone.
He went to the edge of the big pit and lay on his stomach looking down. The sun blazed through him so that his bones ached, and he shook his mass of hair forward over his eyes to shield them. Below, the great pit was so deep that the men working on the bottom of it were like ants. The trucks that climbed up the almost vertical sides were like matchboxes. The system of ladders and steps cut in the earth, which the workers used to climb up and down, seemed so flimsy across the gulf that a stone might dislodge it. Indeed, falling stones often did. Tommy sprawled, gripping the earth tight with tense belly and flung limbs, and stared down. They were all like ants and flies. Mr. Macintosh, too, when he went down, which he did often, for no one could say he was a coward. And his father, and Tommy himself, they were all no bigger than little insects.
It was like an enormous ant-working, as brightly tinted as a fresh antheap. The levels of earth around the mouth of the pit were reddish, then lower down grey and gravelly, and lower still, clear yellow. Heaps of the inert, heavy yellow soil, brought up from the bottom, lay all around him. He stretched out his hand and took some of it. It was unresponsive, lying lifeless and dense on his fingers, a little damp from the rain. He clenched his fist, and loosened it, and now the mass of yellow earth lay shaped on his palm, showing the marks of his fingers. A shape like—what? A bit of root? A fragment of rock rotted by water? He rolled his palms vigorously around it, and it became smooth like a water-ground stone. Then he sat up and took more earth, and formed a pit, and up the sides flying ladders with bits of stick, and little kips of wetted earth for the trucks. Soon the sun dried it, and it all cracked and fell apart. Tommy gave the model a kick and went moodily back to the house. The sun was going down. It seemed that he had left a golden age of freedom behind, and now there was a new country of restrictions and time-tables.
His mother saw how he suffered, but thought: Soon hell go to school and find companions.
But he was only just seven, and very young to go all the way to the city to boarding-school. She sent for school-books, and taught him to read. Yet this was for only two or three hours in the day, and for the rest he mooned about, as she complained, gazing away over the gulf to the compound, from where he could hear the noise of the playing children. He was stoical about it, or so it seemed, but underneath he was suffering badly from this new knowledge, which was much more vital than anything he had learned from the school-books. He knew the word loneliness, and lying at the edge of the pit he formed the yellow clay into little figures which he called Betty and Freddy and Dirk. Playmates. Dirk was the name of the boy he liked best among the children in the compound over the gulf.
One day his mother called him to the back door. There stood Dirk, and he was holding between his hands a tiny duiker, the size of a thin cat. Tommy ran forward, and was about to exclaim with Dirk over the little animal, when he remembered his new status. He stopped, stiffened himself, and said: “How much?”
Dirk, keeping his eyes evasive, said: “One shilling, baas.”
Tommy glanced at his mother and then said, proudly, his voice high: “Damned cheek, too much.”
Annie Clarke flushed. She was ashamed and flustered. She came forward and said quickly: “It’s all right, Tommy, I’11 give you the shilling.” She took the coin from the pocket of her apron and gave it to Tommy, who handed it at once to Dirk. Tommy took the little animal gently in his hands, and his tenderness for this frightened and lonely creature rushed up to his eyes and he turned away so that Dirk couldn’t see—he would have been bitterly ashamed to show softness in front of Dirk, who was so tough and fearless.
Dirk stood back, watching, unwilling to see the last of the buck. Then he said: “It’s just born, it can die.”
Mrs. Clarke said, dismissingly: “Yes, Tommy will look after it.” Dirk walked away slowly, fingering the shilling in his pocket, but looking back at where Tommy and his mother were making a nest for the little buck in a packing-case. Mrs. Clarke made a feeding-bottle with some linen stuffed into the neck of a tomato sauce bottle and filled it with milk and water and sugar. Tommy knelt by the buck and tried to drip the milk into its mouth.
It lay trembling lifting i
ts delicate head from the crumpled, huddled limbs, too weak to move, the big eyes dark and forlorn. Then the trembling became a spasm of weakness and the head collapsed with a soft thud against the side of the box, and then slowly, and with a trembling effort, the neck lifted the head again. Tommy tried to push the wad of linen into the soft mouth, and the milk wetted the fur and ran down over the buck’s chest, and he wanted to cry.
“But it’ll die, Mother, it’ll die,” he shouted, angrily.
“You mustn’t force it,’ said Annie Clarke, and she went away to her household duties. Tommy knelt there with the bottle, stroking the trembling little buck and suffering every time the thin neck collapsed with weakness, and tried again and again to interest it in the milk. But the buck wouldn’t drink at all.
“Why?” shouted Tommy, in the anger of his misery. “Why won’t it drink? Why? Why?”
“But it’s only just born,” said Mrs. Clarke. The cord was still on the creature’s navel, like a shrivelling, dark stick.
That night Tommy took the little buck into his room, and secretly in the dark lifted it, folded in a blanket, into his bed. He could feel it trembling fitfully against his chest, and he cried into the dark because he knew it was going to die.
In the morning when he woke, the buck could not lift its head at all, and it was a weak, collapsed weight on Tommy’s chest, a chilly weight. The blanket in which it lay was messed with yellow stuff like a scrambled egg. Tommy washed the buck gently, and wrapped it again in new coverings, and laid it on the verandah where the sun could warm it.
Mrs. Clarke gently forced the jaws open and poured down milk until the buck choked. Tommy knelt beside it all morning, suffering as he had never suffered before. The tears ran steadily down his face and he wished he could die too, and Mrs. Clarke wished very much she could catch Dirk and give him a good beating, which would be unjust, but might do something to relieve her feelings. “Besides,” she said to her husband, “it’s nothing but cruelty, taking a tiny thing like that from its mother.”
Late that afternoon the buck died, and Mr. Clarke, who had not seen his son’s misery over it, casually threw the tiny, stiff corpse to the cookboy and told him to go and bury it. Tommy stood on the verandah, his face tight and angry, and watched the cookboy shovel his little buck hastily under some bushes, and return whistling.
Then he went into the room where his mother and father were sitting and said: “Why is Dirk yellow and not dark brown like the other kaffirs?”
Silence. Mr. Clarke and Anne Clarke looked at each other. Then Mr. Clarke said: “They come different colours.”
Tommy looked forcefully at his mother, who said: “He’s a half-caste.”
“What’s a half-caste?”
“You’ll understand when you grow up.”
Tommy looked from his father, who was filling his pipe, his eyes lowered to the work, then at his mother, whose cheekbones held that proud, bright flush.
“I understand now,” he said, defiantly.
“Then why do you ask?” said Mrs. Clarke, with anger. Why, she was saying, do you infringe the rule of silence?
Tommy went out, and to the brink of the great pit. There he lay, wondering why he had said he understood when he did not. Though in a sense he did. He was remembering, though he had not noticed it before, that among the gang of children in the compound were two yellow children. Dirk was one, and Dirk’s sister another. She was a tiny child, who came toddling on the fringe of the older children’s games. But Dirk’s mother was black, or rather, dark-brown like the others. And Dirk was not really yellow, but light copper-colour. The colour of this earth, were it a little darker. Tommy’s fingers were fiddling with the damp clay. He looked at the little figures he had made, Betty and Freddy. Idly, he smashed them. Then he picked up Dirk and flung him down. But he must have flung him down too carefully, for he did not break, and so he set the figure against the stalk of a weed. He took a lump of clay, and as his fingers experimentally pushed and kneaded it, the shape grew into the shape of a little duiker. But not a sick duiker, which had died because it had been taken from its mother. Not at all, it was a fine strong duiker, standing with one hoof raised and its head listening, ears pricked forward.
Tommy knelt on the verge of the great pit, absorbed, while the duiker grew into its proper form. He became dissatisfied—it was too small. He impatiently smashed what he had done, and taking a big heap of the yellowish, dense soil, shook water on it from an old rusty railway sleeper that had collected rainwater, and made the mass soft and workable. Then he began again. The duiker would be half life-size.
And so his hands worked and his mind worried along its path of questions: Why? Why? Why? And finally: If Dirk is half black, or rather half white and half dark-brown, then who is his father?
For a long time his mind hovered on the edge of the answer, but did not finally reach it. But from time to time he looked across the gulf to where Mr. Macintosh was strolling, swinging his big cudgel, and he thought: There are only two white men on this mine.
The buck was now finished, and he wetted his fingers in rusty rainwater, and smoothed down the soft clay to make it glisten like the surfaces of fur, but at once it dried and dulled, and as he knelt there he thought how the sun would crack and it would fall to pieces, and an angry dissatisfaction filled him and he hung his head and wanted very much to cry. And just as the first tears were coming he heard a soft whistle from behind him, and turned, and there was Dirk, kneeling behind a bush and looking out through the parted leaves.
“Is the buck all right?” asked Dirk.
Tommy said: “It’s dead,” and he kicked his foot at his model duiker so that the thick clay fell apart in lumps.
Dirk said: “Don’t do that, it’s nice,” and he sprang forward and tried to fit the pieces together.
“It’s no good, the sun’ll crack it,” said Tommy, and he began to cry, although he was so ashamed to cry in front of Dirk. “The buck’s dead,” he wept, “it’s dead.”
“I can get you another,” said Dirk, looking at Tommy rather surprised. “I killed its mother with a stone. It’s easy.”
Dirk was seven, like Tommy. He was tall and strong, like Tommy. His eyes were dark and full, but his mouth was not full and soft, but long and narrow, clenched in the middle. His hair was very black and soft and long, falling uncut around his face, and his skin was a smooth, yellowish copper. Tommy stopped crying and looked at Dirk. He said: “It’s cruel to kill a buck’s mother with a stone.” Dirk’s mouth parted in surprised laughter over his big white teeth. Tommy watched him laugh, and he thought: Well, now I know who his father is.
He looked away to his home, which was two hundred yards off, exposed to the sun’s glare among low bushes of hibiscus and poinsettia. He looked at Mr. Macintosh’s house, which was a few hundred yards farther off. Then he looked at Dirk. He was full of anger, which he did not understand, but he did understand that he was also defiant, and this was a moment of decision. After a long time he said: “They can see us from here,” and the decision was made.
They got up, but as Dirk rose he saw the little clay figure laid against a stem, and he picked it up. “This is me,” he said at once. For crude as the thing was, it was unmistakably Dirk, who smiled with pleasure. “Can I have it?” he asked, and Tommy nodded, equally proud and pleased.
They went off into the bush between the two houses, and then on for perhaps half a mile. This was the deserted part of the hollow in the mountains, no one came here, all the bustle and noise was on the other side. In front of them rose a sharp peak, and low at its foot was a high anthill, draped with Christmas fern and thick with shrub.
The two boys went inside the curtains of fern and sat down. No one could see them here. Dirk carefully put the little clay figure of himself inside a hole in the roots of a tree. Then he said: “Make the buck again.” Tommy took his knife and knelt beside a fallen tree, and tried to carve the buck from it. The wood was soft and rotten, and Was easily carved, and by night th
ere was the clumsy shape of the buck coming out of the trunk. Dirk said: “Now we’ve both got something.”
The next day the two boys made their way separately to the ant-heap and played there together, and so it was every day.
Then one evening Mrs. Clark said to Tommy just as he was going to bed: “I thought I told you not to play with the kaffirs?”
Tommy stood very still. Then he lifted his head and said to her, with a strong look across at his father: “Why shouldn’t I play with Mr. Macintosh’s son?”
Mrs. Clarke stopped breathing for a moment, and closed her eyes. She opened them in appeal at her husband. But Mr. Clarke was filling his pipe. Tommy waited and then said good night and went to his room.
There he undressed slowly and climbed into the narrow iron bed and lay quietly, listening to the thud, thud, gold, gold, thud, thud, of the mine-stamps. Over in the compound they were dancing, and the tom-toms were beating fast, like the quick beat of the buck’s heart that night as it lay on his chest. They were yelling like the wind coming through gaps in a mountain and through the window he could see the high, flaring light of the fires, and the black figures of the dancing people were wild and active against it.
Mrs. Clarke came quickly in. She was crying. “Tommy,” she said, sitting on the edge of his bed in the dark.
“Yes?” he said, cautiously.
“You mustn’t say that again. Not ever.”
He said nothing. His mother’s hand was urgently pressing his arm. “Your father might lose his job,” said Mrs. Clarke, wildly. “We’d never get this money anywhere else. Never. You must understand, Tommy.”
“I do understand,” said Tommy, stiffly, very sorry for his mother, but hating her at the same time. “Just don’t say it, Tommy, don’t ever say it.” Then she kissed him in a way that was both fond and appealing, and went out, shutting the door. To her husband she said it was time Tommy went to school, and next day she wrote to make the arrangements.
African Stories Page 46