How long they slept he could not tell immediately, though he felt it had not been long, when he was woken by what he thought was a sustained outburst of rifle fire in the direction from which they had come. Although it could not be unexpected, it filled him with a particular acute sense of alarm. Yet since there was nothing he could do about it and he was so tired, he fell asleep again with the greatest ease.
When he woke again, it was dark all round him. At least it appeared to be dark to his eyes as he lay on his side facing the stone, with Hintza snuggled closely up to him. But when, painfully, he forced himself to sit up, feeling the time had come to start back to the cave, he looked around and was startled to see not far away a glow as from firelight beyond the screen of thorns. Watching the glow intently, he heard voices, faint but amazingly clear, considering the barrier of brush and leaves in between. Although he could not distinguish separate words, the tone and deliberation of them indicated that they were not African.
At once he was wide awake. He felt that Hintza’s coat was a-bristle under his hand, and already that supersonic whimper of his was vibrating at his ear.
CHAPTER SIX
The Way of the Wind
“THANK YOU, HIN, I can hear and see them too. Thank you,” François whispered back reassuringly to Hintza, stroking and re-stroking his back to calm him, as he felt the skin under his hand shivering like an ague of fever with the intensity of warning of something outside Hintza’s experience. It was equalled only by the warning conveyed to him so long ago, just before the first light of day broke over Hunter’s Drift to announce the coming of Xhabbo into his life.
Still aching all over with fatigue but wide awake since his own senses were refreshed by his long sleep and raised to their highest pitch of perception by what he had been through, François looked hard in the direction of the glow, faint and yet real among the black leaves, the black thorn, the black trees in their black envelope of night. He hoped that sitting thus he would be able to sieve the mass of sound into grains of separate words, but he failed utterly. All he could tell was that the owners of the voices must believe themselves to be unusually secure to be so relaxed and talking thus.
This conclusion was reinforced by the fact that some of the natural noise of the night had returned to the bush, because down by the stream he heard some of his favourite sounds; the great bullfrogs of Africa booming as if they were the bass section of the classical choir of night, followed by an owl introducing a note of fate into their theme, and the bright cricket sopranos along the banks of the stream high and clear to the stars. From far away there was a crack like a rifle shot, as some old elephant tore a strip of his favourite bark from a tree, and nearby, very nearby, the authentic reveille of courage from the bravest voice of them all: the spotted little bush-buck of Africa, barking his defiance of fear. It was almost as if the bush were demonstrating in its own way what life has always had to do from the beginning. After impediment of tragedy it hastens on round the cataclysm like a stream round a rock, broadening out into a full river impatient to reach the sea. It seemed as though the music were specially contrived for him as an example to follow, so that by taking courage from the singing he would be joining in the rhythm of everything he loved and have a new heart for setting about without delay on his own urgent business.
François allowed himself only moments to give Hintza and himself a little more food and pour some water from his flask into his hat so that Hintza could drink. For the first time, since it was now cool, he too drank long and deep from the flask. Then, almost like a lone survivor fleeing from the burned-out city on the great plain of Troy pouring a libation of wine to the god under whose protection he fled, he decanted water on to the ground at the foot of the boulder, made a little paste of the earth there and once more rubbed it all over his face and hands, so that his skin would not show up unduly in the dark. Gathering his little bundle of baggage and making certain that there was nothing that rattled, and that his rifle was ready for instant fire, he crawled very slowly without a sound, back into the track, not even pausing to warn Hintza of how carefully they would have to go because Hintza, he was certain, was aware of that necessity as much as he.
But once on the faint, rarely used track, clear of that thick circle of thorn, he was amazed how bright and near the glow of firelight was to him, and how much louder the voices sounded. Part of him wanted to ignore the voices and hurry on but part of him, the most insistent part and unfortunately one that filled him with apprehension, was urging him to creep forward and listen in to the voices as he had done so profitably in the pantry of his old home the night before.
Perhaps he would have resisted this half of the urge within him, if it had not been for the fact that somehow its argument seemed to be connected with the shooting that he had heard in the earliest and lightest phase of his sleep by the boulder. This connection made him realise how deep the anxiety caused by that burst of rifle fire had gone into him. For the mere suspicion that it might be the begetter of this dangerous impulse which would send him off in the direction of the glow released it alive and great as ever in his mind. It was as if the impulse had become his own version of the kind of tapping of which Xhabbo had spoken; a tapping so loud and vital that it seemed to come from the accelerating beat of his own heart. He remembered Xhabbo warning him, “Foot of the Day, we Bushmen have always said that only a fool will not listen to the tapping within himself.”
This recollection of the voice of Xhabbo who had saved him and Nonnie from destruction, was decisive and made him lie down flat in the track, put his arm around Hintza and press him close against him to whisper. “Sorry, Hin. Sorry. I must go and see what that fire is about, and you must come and help me, so that I don’t crawl into any of those strangers.”
Just for a moment, before he crawled on, François looked up through the gap which the game track inevitably made in the roof of the bush and examined the stars that were quick, bright and pointed as ever above him, so that he could read them for the time. It was, he noticed, already after nine so that he had not much slack left if he were to reach the cave before sunrise. That made him even more grudging of the time needed for his task, and consequently he had difficulty in being patient enough for safety in his approach. Yet he managed to crawl forward without a rustle or even the faintest intimation of a rattle from his equipment, until he came to rest by a slight outcrop of stone and brush. There he looked ahead into a clearing he remembered well.
It was a recognised resting place just off the Punda-Ma-Tenka road. In the middle of the clearing a spire of flame rose straining from one of the most extravagant fires he had ever seen, utterly disproportionate even in that world of the bush where firewood was plentiful, but where its natural inhabitants would use it only with their native sense of proportion. Beyond the fire he could just make out the dark shapes of a number of trucks. Between the trucks and the fire were huddles of what he took to be sleeping men. Just on the margin where firelight and shadow of the bush met were the silhouettes of two sentries, perched on stones, one at the Mopani camp end of the clearing and the other in the direction of Hunter’s Drift. More important, dangerously close to him and clearly visible in the light of the great fire, were two more men.
They were sitting relaxed, facing each other on two boulders and talking without reserve. One was smoking a pipe and the other a cigarette. It was the cigarette-smoking face, as it showed up like a strange, vivid Goya impression, painted by a brush of flame on one of his blackest canvases, that first caught François’s attention. The face was long, lean, drawn and looked worn not so much physically as in a strange, inward way. Absorbed as François had naturally been in the past of the France from which his own ancestors had come, he recognised in it what he always thought of as basic Gallic features. Only it lacked the animation and quickness of expression which François’s reading had made him assume normally went with such French faces. One particularly bright brush stroke of flame across it revealed a special dominant of exp
erience, utterly beyond François’s own comprehension, which was clamped like a mask on the features. What was more, the firelight glanced so cold and sharp from the eye nearer the flame that it could only be made of glass. Once when the fag-end of the cigarette had to be thrown away, the Frenchman immediately leaned sideways to fumble for a packet of cigarettes in the pocket of his tropical military tunic and took a fresh cigarette from it to put to his lips. The arm that came up to steady the match-box which followed had not a hand but an iron hook to it. Some instinct suggested to François then that the mask clamped on what must have been once a proud and sensitive face, could only be a mask made to measure in a life exclusively of war so that even the pride had super-imposed on it a look of iron resolve.
The other man, also in the same uniform, was smoking a pipe which in-between puffing he held in his hand in front of him and from time to time turned to point the stem at the Frenchman as if it would help to inject his meaning into the resistance he was encountering there. The face behind the pipe was rounder, the nose less prominent and the features more symmetrical, but the head was well made and round and the hair above a wide forehead long, thick and somewhat curled. François regretted that he could not see the eyes, because he suspected that the expression in them would have been even more important than the words; words that were still round, warm and lively, as if the speaker had something of a poet buried in him. Whereas even the voice of the Frenchman sounded tired and not disillusioned so much as unillusioned and out of love with life. The voice, though clear, seemed to come from far away in the spirit of the speaker and it was the same voice of course that François had heard the night before. The other voice was the Scottish voice raised in argument at the same hour at Hunter’s Drift and the one which had called out the guard just before François’s home went up into the air.
Just then the Scottish voice was saying, with a certain sad urgency, “But I tell you, mon, the pity of it, oh the pity of it, is that I don’t believe we’ll ever get these men of ours to stop and think before they shoot. I’m afeered I’ve come a long way since yester’morn and think yon creatures have so great a hatred and a wish of death in them that they’re only interested in killing and more killing, and not in the life of any living thing except their own.”
“You are wrong mon cher,” the French voice replied as if already tired by the obviousness of what he had to say. “I understand why you should be angry but I assure you of it: few of these men are just killers. For example, if they were nothing but the killers you imagine, would I have had the trouble I had to make them do the killing we had to do from morning to dark yesterday? I think not. I saw many of them sick with mal-de-guerre like mal-de-mer afterwards, no? On my rounds after I saw many who could not sleep because of that. It is only the experience they lack. I assure you that in thirty years of war in Africa of the north, the Orient and Europe I have seen material far worse fashioned into as good and disciplined soldiers as any European.”
The unbelief with which the Scot greeted this reply was razor sharp.
“You yourself, my guid officer and gentleman of France, are too used to killing to see what I have seen there. You seem to forget that you ordered your men clearly as I did mine that on no account were they to shoot. Knowing you and your French obsession for saying things clearly, there is no reason for assuming they did not understand your orders. And yet at the moment when they themselves were not threatened, they opened fire on one lone man who came running out of the bush into their midst. They could easily have called him to a halt and held him in a ring of their bayonets so that we had him alive for questioning now. But what did they do? They didn’t even have the excuse, not that I find it excusable, of that lot of mine, who opened fire on a pack of lions we found in our way, because lions after all are dangerous. But this man was not dangerous to anyone and overwhelmed with surprise. Yet the moment your chappies saw him, they fired not just a single shot but, judging by the sound, some fifty bullets into him. And so what do we have as a result? He’s there lying dead in the bush; the men are all back with us, fast asleep and snoring as if they were as innocent as babies. And the two of us are left with a piece of paper in our hands, scribbled all over in a tongue neither of us understands!”
“I am of a complete accord, mon cher Ecossais,” the Frenchman replied, unmoved and in the same colourless tone, without feeling or haste. “It was a gaffe épouvantable. I will beg it of the Chairman myself to make it his affair when he joins us presently, to see it does not happen again. That I assure you of. But . . .”
He was interrupted by the Scot who came to his feet with exasperation, his pipe pointed like a pistol at the Frenchman. “A gaffe? You call that unnecessary piece of killing just a gaffe? It must be the greatest under-statement ever made in all the long and glorious militarydom of France.”
But even the charge of sarcasm with which the phrase “glorious militarydom” was packed made no emotional impact on the Frenchman. He merely shrugged his shoulder with an elegance strange in that place because it pre-supposed a salon rather than the bush, and repeated, “Yes, gaffe, mon cher. These are technical matters that should be approached in a technical spirit and not have emotions unnecessary added to them. I doubt it of myself whether the sound of shooting in this remote place will have done any damage, militarily; that goes without the saying of course. Also we have the note. We know it is from the boy. It will, I am sure of it, tell us all we need. Remark well, mon cher, that boy there for some reason chose a messenger to go to this place we have to attack. Now why? That question there is of a significance formidable, is it not? The letter will tell us all, I do not doubt of it myself. You yourself said it is in the language of the despots of the south we have come to fight. Now come and look, is it not so? Surely we are of an accord in this?”
“Aye mon, aye, because here, staring me in the face is the word Oom.” The pipe stabbed at the space between like a dagger. “And beside it there is another word, liewe. The first one I know well from the colonial history of Britain in which this word has figured prominently, that it is the South African Dutch for uncle. Oom Jannie, that’s what the South African soldiers with whom I fought in the last war called their great General Smuts of whom no doubt you, with your experience of war, have heard. We know that this Oom of the letter can only be that Colonel Théron who is in charge of the camp we have encircled, and are going to attack at first light. And that other word, is the word for beloved. But that mon, can’t you see, is what sticks in my gullet. All day long we’ve been killing men, women and children who are the beloved of other human beings with a right to live just like any of us and no part of the tyranny and injustice we have come to overthrow.”
At this point François knew he had heard all that he needed to know. Kghometsu had been intercepted after leaving him, was dead and his own letter to Mopani describing in detail the hill in which the cave was situated was in the hands of his enemies. He should withdraw at once and hasten back to get them all out of the cave before the enemy could occupy the hill and make it impossible for them to escape. They could no longer contemplate hiding in the cave until the enemy moved, and there was obviously no hope now of Mopani coming to their rescue. And yet he could not get himself to leave. He excused himself by arguing that it would take time still for the “Cape-coloured gentleman” who knew Afrikaans to arrive with his intelligence unit and decipher his letter, so that he could afford to watch and for a while longer listen with profit to the two officers.
There was, however, another and subtler reason, and more important to François’s new self that was so slowly and painfully being born. It was something of which he was unaware in his thinking but nonetheless was a decisive factor as an ingredient of the raw material of greater being which suffering and disaster become when they are accepted and endured without evasion. It was simply that in watching the two officers sitting there portrayed so vividly and timelessly in the paint of that Promethian firelight, they ceased to be the monsters they had be
en in his mind and were becoming only too human.
He was, in fact, beginning to see them in the sense conveyed so simply and meaningfully in the greeting of ’Bamuthi’s people, “I see you! Yes, I see you!” For this greeting acknowledged with even greater implications than can be expressed in words, the primitive awareness of the importance of looking at all men, even the strangest, always as people and saluting their common humanity by an affirmation of seeing. It was not that his bitterness and anger against the men who had massacred the people he loved was not as great as ever. It was merely that the two officers by the fire were slowly moving out of the focus of his anger, which was shifting to the “Chairman” they acknowledged as their superior and to the forces at the back of the Chairman, which was not difficult, since none of them was there to be seen.
Meanwhile, the French officer had ignored the Scot’s reaction. François suspected from what he had heard last night that they had had differences before—differences which the Frenchman, one presupposes, had already disputed within himself over some thirty years or more and of which he was utterly weary. He was answering accordingly as if he had not heard the last part of the Scot’s statement, merely confining himself to military essentials, “And so what reason to disquiet yourself, mon cher Ecossais? The man may be dead. But all that we have to do is to wait until our Chairman and that coloured gentleman from the Cape of Good Esperance join us as they will any minute now, and we will know all.”
A Far Off Place Page 15