1972 - A Story Like the Wind (51 page)

Nonetheless, François could not help reminding Sir James of his existence at least every other day of the week. Every other day, he included in the loads of fresh vegetables and meat sent nightly by mule-wagon to Hunter’s Drift siding, more fresh produce for Sir James and his party. The gifts always drew prompt acknowledgement from Sir James written on the most expensive writing paper in an elegant flowing hand. This puzzled François until he learned one day that even there in the bush Sir James conducted all his correspondence by writing with goose quills which he cut and trimmed himself. This, like shaving meticulously in the morning, having a canvas-bucket bath at the end of the day and changing into fresh, starched clothes laid out for him in his tent by the African valet he had brought with him, it seemed, were all essentials for preserving both letter and spirit of the example that he felt people like himself had been born to set in Africa. The letters always began, ‘Dear François Joubert’. The envelopes were always addressed to Master François Joubert. Despite all the expressions of gratitude, these slight nuances in matters of address continued to form a signal to François that it were better for the moment to keep his distance.

No one, least of all François himself, could have told how long he would have been able to keep his distance. Since the coming of Xhabbo into his life forty-four days before he had had a surfeit of distances, physical, emotional and psychological, imposed upon him. The departure of Ouwa and Lammie, Xhabbo’s going and the death of Ouwa; this last the most difficult distance of all since it was infinite. Now there was this gratuitous distance in ‘feeling’ between new neighbours who could have helped to bridge the widest gap he had ever experienced between himself and the society of people of his own. It was all right during the day when he had lots to do and people like !#grave;Bamuthi and Ousie-Johanna doing all they could to give him a warm feeling of companionship. But at night, alone in his room, he had to admit that much as he loved Ousie-Johanna and !#grave;Bamuthi, they could not help as much as they would have been able to help forty-four days before.

One is compelled to measure this distance in days. In the exacting slide-rule of time built into François the days had become like months, and too approximate to measure the swift swollen current of events in a period of life he could have calculated almost to the minute. More important and subtler still, a new kind of distance, a distance within himself had unfairly been added to the old familiar distances without. A new kind of François had come into being. Looking back, in the darkness of his room, it was astonishing to him how far he had travelled from that other François and how fast he was receding from it, just as a figure on a quay, waving farewell, diminishes in the darkened eyes of the migrant of whom he had read in books and seen in paintings, setting out to sea on a fast ship in search of a new life in a new world. Most painful of all perhaps, was the fact that as fast as he was finding persons who might be companions to his migrating self, like Xhabbo and (the intimation was all the more acute when it came because it took him completely by surprise) even a mere girl like Sir James’s daughter, fate seemed to have no scruple in separating him from them. Rationally, there was no connection to be seen between Xhabbo and Luciana. Not only was one a man and the other ‘just’ a girl, but their origins were apparently irreconcilable; one being, as it were, a product of pure nature; the other of a most refined and sophisticated culture. Yet in his imagination in the dark of night, they were a pair, almost one and indivisible to him in their significance, so much that he was confident he would only have to bring them together for them to mean as much to each other as they already meant to him.

The only thing that troubled him was that, just as Xhabbo had found it necessary to give François a name of his own, so François felt compelled to search his imagination for a name for Luciana. As names went, Luciana was apt enough in its own family context, particularly because it meant ‘Bringer of Light’. Yet the name seemed to him to have a trace of presumption which made it inappropriate. He never thought of her as Luciana but merely as ‘the girl’. Just as !#grave;Bamuthi was unhappy because Sir James’s land had not the magic of a name to protect it, so he felt he would not be content until the girl, too, was encircled in a name of his own. But what name? Surprisingly, he was able to settle on a compromise inspired by Ousie-Johanna.

Ousie-Johanna had taken greatly to Luciana, all the more because she was in the care and protection of Amelia, who in her absence grew to be the absolute of fashion and good form. Ousie-Johanna invariably referred to Luciana as ‘the little Nonnie’. Nonnie was a diminutive of
Nonna
, the polite word for mistress used by the servants in François’s world. The daughters of the houses inevitably became
Nonnie
(little mistress), and Ousie-Johanna’s addition of
little
to Nonnie was an extra endearment. In Francis’s world, unlike the world of Luciana’s Italian godmother, where affection takes the form of exaggerating the stature of its subject, the more one loved a person the smaller one made it in one’s feelings. One elaborates this fact because it was an integral element of François’s character, derived from the Bushman influences of old Koba, since what distinguished the Bushman spirit so singularly from others was its uncompromising rejection of the physically great in favour of the small as if, long before the poet Blake, it had discovered infinity in the grains of sand of the desert that was its last home on earth.

François, indeed, knew that many girls among his own people were christened Nonnie and he felt that by calling Luciana Nonnie he had, as it were, given her a valid passport to the world of his own Africa. In all his conversations with Hintza she was now always referred to by this name and it was significant that Hintza from the start wagged his tail whenever the name was mentioned.

It was astonishing how much easier it was now for François to think of her as a future companion and how urgent became his desire to show her all the thousand and one things he loved and cherished in the bush and had never shared with any living creature except Hintza. Even Sir James’s hurtfully ambiguous attitude rapidly lost importance and it became increasingly difficult for him not to ride over to visit his new neighbours. It became more so when !#grave;Bamuthi and Ousie-Johanna began to reprimand him for not behaving at all like a good neighbour. They reiterated daily that he should have been over long since to see Sir James and find out what they could do to help, apart from sending them, as !#grave;Bamuthi put it, ‘scraps of food’ from the kitchen. That phrase was most unfortunate, because it offended Ousie-Johanna who had put a great deal of imagination into the gifts she included in their parcels to the newcomers.

Fortunately on the thirteenth day after Sir James’s departure, when François’s irresolution was at its greatest, two things happened to decide the issue for him. One was another letter of thanks from Sir James. The contents of the letter itself seemed to François most ominous because, after the usual gracious expressions of thanks and an admission that the sort of things provided by Hunter’s Drift were things that his commissariat could not yet do without, Sir James announced that he could no longer impose on their generosity and would have to insist on paying François for all future supplies.

François had only to communicate this part of the letter to Ousie-Johanna and !#grave;Bamuthi for them both to be as horrified as he was. In fact they were not only horrified but deeply insulted. !#grave;Bamuthi, in particular, thought it a sign that Sir James saw himself as superior. He asked François rhetorically, as if he were asking it of the vanished millions of Bantu men who had created their traditions in these matters, ‘Does he not know then that only a chief of chiefs has the right to make much of such trifles and reward a man for them? Does he not know that to take payment for food from strangers and travellers is to steal?’

Ousie-Johanna was hardly less scathing, declaring, ‘I knew it from the day I first set ‘eyes on him that that great
Rooinek
has not been properly brought up.’

Her remark, if it could have been repeated to Cheam, Rugby, Caius and the other hallowed places of his education, not to mention the wardrooms of His Britannic Majesty’s ships of war in which Sir James had served with gallantry and distinction, as an officer in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, might not have created the alarm and despondency which Ousie-Johanna would have thought appropriate, but certainly would have caused a great deal of amusement at Sir James’s expense. As the person responsible for telling François’s story, one has to hold a balance of just understanding between everyone concerned in it, and recognize that the predictable reaction to Ousie-Johanna’s remark in Sir James’s world reflected more on the limitations of its own values than on those of the big kitchen at Hunter’s Drift.

However François, determined not to accept payment merely for doing a neighbourly duty, knew enough of the sort of world from which Sir James had come to understand why the man could have been genuinely embarrassed by receiving so much from strangers. Whether he would have understood quite so easily if it had not been for a postscript at the foot of Sir James’s letter is another matter. It consisted of a few lines in a roundish, somewhat irregular hand and appeared to François to have been written furtively and in haste immediately below Sir James’s flourishing official signature. It read. ‘Please tell Ousie-Johanna, Amelia finds her bread gorgeous and I think her cakes scrumptious. We all love your fruit and melons. But aren’t we ever to see you again? Darling Hin by this time will have completely forgotten me.’ The lines ended in a large blot and no signature which reinforced François’s impression that they had been added without Sir James’s knowledge.

While Ousie-Johanna and !#grave;Bamuthi continued to indulge in their feelings of outrage, he lost all interest in that aspect of the matter. His only concern from then on was that if Nonnie felt brave enough to go against her father and hint that it was time they saw him again, he would be a coward not to respond.

The second important event was the arrival of Mopani that evening. Since Mopani had promised Lammie, Ouwa and François that he would visit Hunter’s Drift as often as possible, his arrival was not unexpected. What was unexpected was a subtle change in the mood of his coming which had a significant bearing on the future.

As usual, it was Hintza who gave François warning of Mopani’s coming. Hintza had been watching the track where it broke with the bush for some time, as if suspecting that something might be stirring within it, and so he spotted Nandi and !#grave;Swayo the moment they emerged. Nandi and !#grave;Swayo, who regarded Hunter’s Drift as a second home, had long since come to feel free to dismiss themselves from the discipline of the trail which kept them at the side of Mopani’s horse and to race ahead as heralds of their own and their master’s coming. Hintza, too, immediately left François’s side, determined to meet them halfway and leave no doubt as to his warmth of welcome. By the time Mopani appeared in a more leisurely manner François himself was waiting in front of the homestead to meet him.

It was a mark of the strain through which he had been since their last meeting, as well as his need for help in containing the complex of feelings that had swollen into a flood within him, that the moment he set eyes on a person he loved as much as Mopani, he found it suddenly extremely difficult not to burst into tears. Somehow he managed to restrain himself but he did embrace Mopani with such warmth that the wise and sensitive old man was fully aware of the turmoil within François. Therefore, he did not immediately give François the messages received from Lammie on the telephone the night before. He limited himself to returning François’s embrace with equal warmth. Then, with the bridle in his right hand, he kept his left arm firmly round François’s shoulders, thereby conveying the kind of sympathy and reassurance he wanted François to feel. Walking forward slowly, he asked in as normal a tone as possible, ‘Would you mind, Coiske, if we don’t go immediately into the house? I would like to cool down and water Noble myself this evening before we do. I have pushed him very hard today.’

Noble was the favourite among Mopani’s small stable of salted horses. When François heard its name, he realized how absorbed he must have been, because for the first time in his life he had not noticed which horse Mopani was riding. The moment he realized this the reason for Mopani’s request appeared obvious and, as Mopani had hoped, helped to normalize the occasion. Mopani, as a rule, was quite willing to let one of the Matabele stable hands take over horses from him when he arrived. Noble was the one exception. Mopani was so devoted to Noble that he always insisted himself on seeing to the all-important process of cooling down after a long journey. This consisted of walking horses slowly back and forth for about half an hour until their hearts beat normally and the sweat had dried on their coats. François did not need telling how dangerous it was to give horses cold water to drink before they had properly cooled down. They themselves in the past had lost a number of horses because they had been watered too soon by their Mata-bele helpers, who did not have the same instinctive understanding of horses as they had of their native cattle.

What he did not know was that on this occasion Mopani’s concern for Noble was also a means of postponing the moment when they would have to go inside and, inevitably, begin to talk about matters that were bound to increase the emotional strain on François. The longer the moment could be postponed, Mopani felt, the easier it would be for François and himself to talk calmly and fully as they would have to do. So, while Hintza, Nandi and !#grave;Swayo played together, chasing one another in wide circles and then breaking off to rush up to man and boy in order to be patted and fondled, François and Mopani led Noble slowly up and down the wide open space between the homestead and its long line of stables and outhouses.