This Was the Old Chief's Country (60 page)

He ate boiled beef and carrots and greasy potatoes with one of the richest men in the sub-continent, and thought how well and intelligently he would use such money if he had it – which is the only consolation left to the cultivated man of moderate income. After lunch, Mr Macintosh said: ‘And now, let's get it over.'

Mr Tomlinson expressed his willingness, and smiling to himself, followed Mr Macintosh off into the bush on a kaffir path. He did not know what he was going to see. Mr Macintosh had said: ‘Can you tell if a youngster has got any talent just by looking at a piece of wood he has carved?'

Mr Tomlinson said he would do his best.

Then they were beside a fallen tree trunk, and in the grass knelt a big lad, with untidy brown hair failing over his face, labouring at the wood with a large chisel.

‘This is a friend of mine,' said Mr Macintosh to Tommy, who got to his feet and stood uncomfortably, wondering what was happening. ‘Do you mind if Mr Tomlinson sees what you are doing?'

Tommy made a shrugging movement and felt that things were going beyond his control. He looked in awed amazement at Mr Tomlinson, who seemed to him rather like a teacher or
professor, and certainly not at all what he imagined an artist to be.

‘Well?' said Mr Macintosh to Mr Tomlinson, after a space of half a minute.

Mr Tomlinson laughed in a way which said: ‘Now don't be in such a hurry.' He walked around the carved tree root, looking at the figure of Dirk from this angle and that.

Then he asked Tommy: ‘Why do you make these carvings?'

Tommy very uncomfortably shrugged, as if to say: What a silly question; and Mr Macintosh hastily said: ‘He gets high marks for Art at school.'

Mr Tomlinson smiled again and walked around to the other side of the trunk. From here he could see Dirk's face, flattened back on the neck, eyes half-closed and strained, the muscles of the neck shaped from natural veins of the wood.

‘Is this someone you know?' he asked Tommy in an easy, intimate way, one artist to another.

‘Yes,' said Tommy, briefly; he resented the question.

Mr Tomlinson looked at the face and then at Mr Macintosh. ‘It has a look of you,' he observed dispassionately, and coloured himself as he saw Mr Macintosh grow angry. He walked well away from the group, to give Mr Macintosh space to hide his embarrassment. When he returned, he asked Tommy: ‘And so you want to be a sculptor?'

‘I don't know,' said Tommy, defiantly.

Mr Tomlinson shrugged rather impatiently, and with a nod at Mr Macintosh suggested it was enough. He said good-bye to Tommy, and went back to the house with Mr Macintosh.

There he was offered tea and biscuits, and Mr Macintosh asked: ‘Well, what do you think?'

But by now Mr Tomlinson was certainly offended at this casual cash-on-delivery approach to art, and he said: ‘Well, that rather depends, doesn't it?'

‘On what?' demanded Mr Macintosh.

‘He seems to have talent,' conceded Mr Tomlinson.

‘That's all I want to know,' said Mr Macintosh, and suggested that now he could run Mr Tomlinson back to town.

But Mr Tomlinson did not feel it was enough, and he said: ‘It's quite interesting, that statue. I suppose he's seen pictures in magazines. It has quite a modern feeling.'

‘Modern?' said Mr Macintosh. ‘What do you mean?'

Mr Tomlinson shrugged again, giving it up. ‘Well,' he said, practically, ‘what do you mean to do?'

‘If you say he has talent, I'll send him to the university and he can study Art.'

After a long pause, Mr Tomlinson murmured: ‘What a fortunate boy he is.' He meant to convey depths of disillusionment and irony, but Mr Macintosh said: ‘I always did have a fancy for him.'

He took Mr Tomlinson back to the city, and as he dropped him on his veranda, presented him with a cheque for fifty pounds, which Mr Tomlinson most indignantly returned. ‘Oh, give it to charity,' said Mr Macintosh impatiently, and went to his car, leaving Mr Tomlinson to heal his susceptibilities in any way he chose.

When Mr Macintosh reached his mine again it was midnight, and there were no lights in the Clarkes' house, and so his need to be generous must be stifled until the morning.

Then he went to Annie Clarke and told her he would send Tommy to university, where he could be an artist, and Mrs Clarke wept gratitude, and said that Mr Macintosh was much kinder than Tommy deserved, and perhaps he would learn sense yet and go back to his books.

As far as Mr Macintosh was concerned it was all settled.

He set off through the trees to find Tommy and announce his future to him.

But when he arrived at seeing distance there were two figures, Dirk and Tommy, seated on the trunk talking, and Mr Macintosh stopped among the trees, filled with such bitter anger at this fresh check to his plans that he could not trust himself to go on. So he returned to his house, and brooded angrily – he knew exactly what was going to happen when he spoke to Tommy, and now he must make up his mind, there was no escape from a decision.

And while Mr Macintosh mused bitterly in his house, Tommy and Dirk waited for him; it was now all as clear to them as it was to him.

Dirk had come out of the trees to Tommy the moment the two men left the day before. Tommy was standing by the fanged root, looking at the shape of Dirk in it, trying to understand what was going to be demanded of him. The word ‘artist' was on his tongue, and he tasted it, trying to make the strangeness of it fit that powerful shape struggling out of the wood. He did not like it. He did not want – but what did he want? He felt pressure on himself, the faint beginnings of something that would one day be like a tunnel of birth from which he must fight to emerge; he felt the obligations working within himself like a goad which would one day be a whip perpetually falling behind him so that he must perpetually move onwards.

His sense of fetters and debts was confirmed when Dirk came to stand by him. First he asked: ‘What did they want?'

‘They want me to be an artist, they always want me to be something,' said Tommy sullenly. He began throwing stones at the tree and shying them off along the tops of the grass. Then one hit the figure of Dirk, and he stopped.

Dirk was looking at himself. ‘Why do you make me like that?' he asked. The narrow, strong face expressed nothing but that familiar, sardonic antagonism, as if he said: ‘You, too – just like the rest!'

‘Why, what's the matter with it?' challenged Tommy at once.

Dirk walked around it, then back. ‘You're just like all the rest,' he said.

‘Why? Why don't you like it?' Tommy was really distressed. Also, his feeling was: What's it got to do with him? Slowly he understood that his emotion was that belief in his right to freedom which Dirk always felt immediately, and he said in a different voice: ‘Tell me what's wrong with it?'

‘Why do I have to come out of the wood? Why haven't I any hands or feet?'

‘You have, but don't you see …' But Tommy looked at Dirk standing in front of him and suddenly gave an impatient movement: ‘Well, it doesn't matter, it's only a statue.'

He sat on the trunk and Dirk beside him. After a while he said: ‘How should you be, then?'

‘If you made yourself, would you be half wood?'

Tommy made an effort to feel this, but failed. ‘But it's not me, it's you.' He spoke with difficulty, and thought: But it's important, I shall have to think about it later. He almost groaned with the knowledge that here it was, the first debt, presented for payment.

Dirk said suddenly: ‘Surely it needn't be wood? You could do the same thing if you put handcuffs on my wrists.' Tommy lifted his head and gave a short, astonished laugh. ‘Well, what's funny?' said Dirk, aggressively. ‘You can't do it the easy way, you have to make me half wood, as if I was more a tree than a human being.'

Tommy laughed again, but unhappily. ‘Oh, I'll do it again,' he acknowledged at last. ‘Don't fuss about that one, it's finished. I'll do another.'

There was a silence.

Dirk said: ‘What did that man say about you?'

‘How do I know?'

‘Does he know about art?'

‘I suppose so.'

‘Perhaps you'll be famous,' said Dirk at last. ‘In that book you gave me, it said about painters. Perhaps you'll be like that.'

‘Oh, shut up,' said Tommy, roughly. ‘You're just as bad as
he
is.'

‘Well, what's the matter with it?'

‘Why have I got to
be
something? First it was a sailor, and then it was a scholar, and now it's an artist.'

‘They wouldn't
have
 to make me be anything,' said Dirk sarcastically.

‘I know,' admitted Tommy grudgingly. And then, passionately: ‘I shan't go to university unless he sends you too.'

‘I know,' said Dirk at once, ‘I know you won't.'

They smiled at each other, that small, shy, revealed smile, which was so hard for them because it pledged them to such a struggle in the future.

Then Tommy asked: ‘Why didn't you come near me all this time?'

‘I get sick of you,' said Dirk. ‘I sometimes feel I don't want to see a white face again, not ever. I feel that I hate you all, every one.'

‘I know,' said Tommy, grinning. Then they laughed, and the last strain of dislike between them vanished.

They began to talk, for the first time, of what their lives would be.

Tommy said: ‘But when you've finished training to be an engineer, what will you do? They don't let coloured people be engineers.'

‘Things aren't always going to be like that,' said Dirk.

‘It's going to be very hard,' said Tommy, looking at him questioningly, and was at once reassured when Dirk said, sarcastically: ‘Hard, it's going to be hard? Isn't it hard now, white boy?'

Later that day Mr Macintosh came towards them from his house.

He stood in front of them, that big, shrewd, rich man, with his small, clever grey eyes, and his narrow, loveless mouth; and he said aggressively to Tommy: ‘Do you want to go to the university and be an artist?'

‘If Dirk comes too,' said Tommy immediately.

‘What do you want to study?' Mr Macintosh asked Dirk, direct.

‘I want to be an engineer,' said Dirk at once.

‘If I pay your way through the university then at the end of it I'm finished with you. I never want to hear from you and you are never to come back to this mine once you leave it.'

Dirk and Tommy both nodded, and the instinctive agreement between them fed Mr Macintosh's bitter unwillingness in the choice, so that he ground out viciously: ‘Do you think you two can be together in the university? You don't understand. You'll be living separate, and you can't go around together just as you like.'

The boys looked at each other, and then as if some sort of pact had been made between them, simply nodded.

‘You can't go to university anyway, Tommy, until you've done a bit better at school. If you go back for another year and work you can pass your matric. and go to university, but you can't go now, right at the bottom of the class.'

Tommy said: ‘I'll work.' He added at once: ‘Dirk'll need more books to study here till we can go.'

The anger was beginning to swell Mr Macintosh's face, but Tommy said: ‘It's only fair. You burnt them, and now he hasn't any at all.'

‘Well,' said Mr Macintosh heavily. ‘Well, so that's how it is!'

He looked at the two boys, seated together on the tree trunk. Tommy was leaning forward, eyes lowered, a troubled but determined look on his face. Dirk was sitting erect, looking straight at his father with eyes filled with hate.

‘Well,' said Mr Macintosh, with an effort at raillery which sounded harsh to them all: ‘Well, I send you both to university and you don't give me so much as a thank you!'

At this, both faced towards him, with such bitter astonishment, that he flushed.

‘Well, well,' he said. ‘Well, well …' And then he turned to leave the clearing, and cried out as he went, so as to give the appearance of dominance: ‘Remember, laddie, I'm not sending you unless you do well at school this year …'

And so he left them and went back to his house, an angry old man, defeated by something he did not begin to understand.

As for the boys, they were silent when he had gone.

The victory was entirely theirs, but now they had to begin again, in the long and difficult struggle to understand what they had won and how they would use it.

I once knew a man, a black man, who told me he had been brought up in a village so far from the nearest town he had to walk a day to reach it. Later he knew this ‘town' was itself a village, having in it a post office, a shop, and a butcher. He had still to experience the white men's towns, which he had heard about. This was in the southern part of Africa. The villagers were subsistence farmers, and grew maize, millet, pumpkins, chickens. They lived as people have done for thousands of years except for one thing. Every few days a little glittering airplane appeared in the sky among the clouds and the circling hawks. He did not know what it was, where it came from, or where it went. Remote, unreachable, a marvel, it appeared over the forest where the sun rose, and disappeared where it went down. He watched for it. He thought about it. His dreams filled with shining and fragile emanences that could sit on a branch and sing or that ran from his father and the other hunting men like a duiker or a hare, but that always escaped their spears. He told me that when he remembered his childhood that airplane was in the sky. It connected not with what he was now, a sober modern man living in a large town, but with the tales and songs of his people, for it was not real, not something to be brought down to earth and touched.

When he was about nine his family went to live with relatives near a village that was larger than either the handful of huts in the bush or the ‘town' where they had sometimes bought a little sugar or tea or a piece of cloth. There the black people worked in a small gold mine. He learned that twice a week an airplane landed in the bush on a strip of cleared land, unloaded parcels, mail, and sometimes a person, and then flew off. He was by now going to a mission school. He walked there with his elder
brother and his younger sister every morning; leaving at six to get there at eight, then walked back in the afternoon. Later, when he measured distances not by the time it took to cover them, but by the miles, yards, and feet he learned in school, he knew he walked eight miles to school and eight back.