1972 - A Story Like the Wind (40 page)

To his amazement he saw through a screen of grass and shrub a group of people enjoying a meal in what, to him, appeared to be elaborate luxury for so unfrequented a place. In fact, he thought it the most luxurious camp he had ever seen in the bush, not excluding Mopani’s great game reserve where elaborate safaris, complete with caviar and champagne and organized for wealthy European and American tourists, were not uncommon.

Here, for example, was an enormous five-ton truck and trailer, flaps down with the interiors exposed to reveal stacks of canvas chairs, tenting, rugs, blankets, a large paraffin refrigerator, household things and packages of all kinds. Beyond the truck, even more imposing, stood another enormous vehicle, a sort of house on wheels, which François knew to be a caboose.

Cabooses had not been seen in the interior for years but they had been sufficiently common in Francis’s childhood for him instantly to recognize this one. They were built complete with sleeping bunks, tables, wash-basins, fresh-water tanks and chairs, and had been provided in the earlier days of the country by the Government for distinguished officials on tour of their far-flung and sparsely inhabited areas. As a child, they had been things of wonder to Fran$ois. So now he was, not unnaturally, inclined to conclude that he had stumbled on a Government Commissioner sent out on some new duty.

The thought was encouraged by the sight of the very tall, imposing-looking man who seemed to be in command of the little group. He was sitting at ease in a canvas chair in the shade of both caboose and the spreading branches of the great wild fig tree that topped it. The man was bare-headed. François indeed saw on the ground by his chair his bush hat, some kingfisher feathers stuck in a glowing leopard’s skin band around its crown, something that both François and Mopani tended to despise as unnecessarily exhibitionist. Moreover, the man had laid his gun on the grass beside his chair, the point of the barrel resting on the rim of the hat in a way which, by François’s exacting standards, was criminally careless. In that position dust and tiny insects could easily get caught in the oiled mechanism, and impair the easy action that one had to take for granted if a gun were to be as accurate as their unpredictable world demanded.

Yet one more look at the man himself gave the lie to any facile interpretation. He had a truly distinguished head with handsome, frank features, as well as an air of natural authority. He was unusually tall, broad-shouldered and a man, François thought of about Ouwa’s age. His hair was dark, turning grey around the ears and temples of a broad forehead. Even at that distance, François noticed that his eyes were alert and surprisingly blue. Also he was clean shaven, the sleeves of his khaki bush shirt neatly rolled up to just above the elbow. The shirt was starched, ironed, and obviously fresh since both it and the khaki shorts underneath appeared uncreased. The khaki stockings were neatly rolled down just below the knees, two bright red flashes showing at the sides of muscular calves. His sand-coloured suede ankle-boots looked worn and yet were without stain.

All these things suggested that he must be some distinguished servant of the Government. But the other members of the group appeared to contradict this impression. First, on the chair beside him, chattering brightly, was a young girl. Next to the girl sat an enormous, fat, half-caste lady, dressed entirely and most incongruously in black satin, which shone like starlings’ feathers in the noonday sunlight. This ample lady wore not a hat on her head but a tiara of white lace, propped up by high combs of amber, implanted firmly on a head crowned with coils of grey-black hair. She looked like a grander Ousie-Johanna, an impression heightened for François because she appeared to be vehemently reproaching the young girl for something. Though François could not yet hear any specific words, the shrill sound made him suspect that they were not English words.

The young girl, who obviously was a girl of spirit, then turned her head and made a face at the vast, bulging lady. She wore an old·fashioned green chintz sun-bonnet, the kind of bonnet Lammie and all the women of the Joubert family throughout their long history in southern Africa had worn as children, and of which two of Lammie’s favourites were still fondly preserved in moth balls and tissue paper in a cupboard at Hunter’s Drift. But as she turned, the light reflected from the quicksilver mirror of that heavy high noon lifted the shadow from her face and François saw one of the loveliest faces that he had ever seen.

This did not mean a great deal because he had had little experience of the faces of young European girls. Yet in fairness to him, one must add that his impression was later confirmed by Lammie, who not only had a far wider standard of comparison in these matters, but could obviously bring to her observation a cooler and more critical, even technical appraisal which women are inclined to make of one another. Unlike her father, as François took the man to be, the girl did not have blue eyes. They were, it is true, large and wide, but they were dark, as dark as the two long plaits of hair which flicked across her shoulders as she quickly turned. In that light the plaits seemed to François to have a kind of undertone of red subtly woven into their blackness. As she turned her head she said something so obviously tart to the monumental lady that François was certain that if it had been said in English he would have recognized it.

He was soon proved right because, having spoken her quick piece to her nanny, the girl turned and was on the point of speaking to her father when something unusual caught her eye, an eye, it was to be proved to François’s discomfort, as quick and bright as her tongue. It remained fixed in a definite stare in the direction of himself and Hintza for what seemed a long, anxious moment before she cried out in English, ‘Why look, Fa, something strange is happening out there in the bush.’

François had a flash of sympathy that one so slight as the girl, with a father so tall and imposing, would be compelled as it were to discipline the disproportion between them by cutting the ‘Father’ down to a mere ‘Fa’. The feeling, however, immediately gave way to alarm, that he and Hintza might have betrayed all their training and done something silly, like allowing the sun to glance off the barrel of his rifle or taking up position so carelessly that the head and ears of Hintza were outlined above the grass—a possibility that seemed more likely because he felt far from his normal self. Yet he was not going to make things worse now by any readjustments and kept rigidly to his position. He was somewhat relieved, therefore, to find it was neither he nor Hintza who had betrayed their position. Apparently it was an unusually large rhinoceros bird, trained by nature in all possible ways of raising alarms for its neurotic one-horned patrons. Perched on a branch above them, instead of looking around it, alert and suspicious as usual, the bird was in the most undesirable and damnable manner looking down as if hypnotized to where he and Hintza lay spread out on the crimson earth.

The man immediately looked in the direction in which the girl was now pointing, but apparently saw nothing unusual because he turned back to her and asked loudly enough for François to hear each word, even recognizing what had once been described to him as an Oxbridge accent, ‘Why, what do you mean Chisai? I don’t see anything at all unusual out there.’

François took that strange word Chisai to be some outlandish girl’s name, but he was soon to discover that it was a term of endearment used by sailors of the British Navy for children—their esoteric equivalent of ‘kid’.

‘You’re not looking properly, Fa,’ the girl protested. ‘Look! That bird, just look at it. It’s seen something or it wouldn’t be sitting like a bit of Mummy’s china on that branch out there.’

‘I believe you’re right. Indeed I do believe you’re right Chisai,’ the man conceded in a slow, deliberate voice and, as he spoke, bent down to pick up his gun and started to rise from his chair.

François thought it time then that Hintza and he made themselves known, more particularly so because, no sooner was the man on his feet than at the far end of the clearing four Africans, who had been sitting and eating apart, had also stood up and were staring with their experienced eyes full of a specialized interest at the bird on the branch above his head. Rather feebly, François quickly called out in English, ‘Hallo there, hallo!’ Then, sheepishly, he stood up from behind his screen of brush and grass and stepped forward slowly towards the group.

One look was enough to reassure the man. Instantly he exclaimed, ‘Why, it’s only a boy!’

The daughter immediately echoed the father’s exclamation except that she dropped the
only
and cried out, ‘Gosh, yes, it is a boy!’

The formidable old nanny also joined in, uttering something quite incomprehensible to François except that he thought it highly emotional and rather over-excited. He was to learn afterwards that it had merely amounted to, ‘We must give him something to drink and eat immediately, poor boy. He looks thirsty and hungry and unhappy.’

Before François could say anything, the girl completely won him over because, seeing Hintza step forward beside him, in that rather overdignified slow-motion way he adopted when facing strangers, his sullen, golden coat aflame in the yellow sunlight, she called out, ‘Oh, what a beautiful dog!’

The incredible Hintza somehow knew that he had just been paid a great compliment. He was so overcome that not only did his tail start to wag but his whole long hunter’s body as well, until he was fawning in the most undignified and obsequious manner as the girl came towards him. François, knowing Hintza so well, was convinced that he was fully aware of the sex of the young person coming towards him and, had he had time, would undoubtedly have teased him as if a revelation of quite a new aspect of Hintza’s character had just come to him, remarking something like, ‘I fear you have the makings of a great womanizer, Hin!’

Shy and sensitive as François was, his lonely upbringing had made him sufficiently self-contained to realize that he ought to retrieve the rather dubious impression they must have made in the camp. So, calling Hintza to order, he told him to ‘shake’ just as the girl was about to touch him. With an effort at smiling, which Hintza always tried in moments of exacting formality, and with what François called his ‘sloppy look’, he held out his right paw. As he did so, François formally introduced them. ‘Hin, Miss Chisai, Miss Chisai, Hin.’

The girl had already taken the paw offered to her, but, on hearing the ‘Miss Chisai’ she dropped it and burst out laughing, rather as Xhabbo had laughed that day in the cave. Like Xhabbo, she was completely taken over by her laughter. Yet she did it in such a natural and appealing way that everybody else in the camp was forced to smile with her, and even François’s own underlying feeling of melancholy lightened.

She might have gone on if her father had not lost patience and told her in the voice of someone used to command, ‘That’s enough Chisai. Stop it at once!’

Even then, as she turned to obey, she stood there doubled over, holding on to her stomach, saying, ‘Help, oh help! Oh dear, ‘Miss Chisai’—Miss ‘Little one’, oh help!’

The cause of her merriment at last translated into English and contained in words, the father stepped forward, held his hand out to François and said, ‘Would you like to join us for lunch? My name’s Monckton, James Monckton.’

François was about to thank him when Hintza, incorrigibly conventional at such moments, intruded again by sitting down between them and holding out his paw to the man so that François had to repeat, ‘Hin, Mr Monckton.’

This started the girl laughing again, but not so much that she could not say, ‘Not
Mr
, boy, but
Sir
. Sir James Archi—’

She got no further. ‘Enough of that,’ her father interrupted, ‘Help Amelia to get some food and a pot of cha for our visitor. At the double, please.’

François, of course, did not know that
cha
was the British Navy’s word for tea, just as ‘at the double’ was the way of carrying out orders in the ships of war in which the father had served with distinction. All that mattered just then was that the promise of anything to drink was most welcome to him, for he had had nothing since dawn. So, accepting Monckton’s offer with gratitude, he asked to be excused first for a moment as he still had one small duty to perform.

With the eyes of everybody in the camp on them, he told Hintza In his clearest Bushman to go back and fetch his horse Hintza, his habits of compliance stimulated by his love of showing off, vanished at speed in the direction from which he and François had come.

As Hintza vanished, François noticed that everybody around him was staring in amazement. The girl exclaimed, ‘What on earth was it that you said to your Hin?’

Only then did he realize that those onomatopoeic Bushman sounds, particularly the clicks, must have sounded most strange to the Monckton party. He hastened to answer somewhat evasively, because he did not want to enter into long explanations, ‘Oh, it’s just a private code Hin and I use between us.’

The irrepressible girl demanded, ‘But what did you say?’

‘Oh, I just told him to go and fetch my horse,’ he replied as casually as he could, but not unpleased by the-obvious interest that he and Hintza had aroused between them.

He had hardly answered when they heard the sound of a horse trotting towards them. Within a few moments, Hintza appeared on the edge of the clearing with the bridle of François’s horse in his mouth, and the horse itself following happily knowing, in the canny way that horses have, that a rest and perhaps food and drink as well, were near.

François had been brought up always to think of the needs of the animals in his charge before he thought of himself. So taking the bridle reins over from Hintza, who was highly pleased at the competent manner in which he had accomplished his mission, he asked, ‘I wonder sir, if you could give me some water please, for my horse? We’ve come a long way since the morning.’

François was immediately asked to bring his pony round to the back of the caboose while his host called to one of the African servants to bring them a bucket. François interrupted to say that he did not need a bucket. With his habit of wearing a hat only in emergencies he had travelled with his khaki bush hat slung by its straps around his neck. Slipping the straps now over his head of thick fair hair, he held it under the tap of the water tank at the rear of the caboose to let his host fill it with a stream of bright water. Once full, he took the hat to his horse who delicately sniffed the water first before drinking it.