1972 - A Story Like the Wind (44 page)

An hour later, François leading the way on his horse, the Monckton party close behind him and the wagons lumbering in the rear, they reached the pan of water François had in mind. As they came to the top of another rise in the road, they looked down on a great clearing in the bush to the west. At the end of the clearing, the pan, bright in the afternoon sun, herons already standing on one foot in the water along the shadow-lined edges, wild duck and geese drifting in state on a surface of silk, and great multitudes of other water birds circling over it on trembling, harp-like wings, was a privileged sight.

Yet Sir James could not find it in himself just then to say more than a rather perfunctory, ‘Yes, I think that might do rather well.’

For some reason, he had no inclination to examine just then why the argument with François earlier on still rankled. He knew that a trivial episode, particularly with someone so young as François, should not have rankled at all, especially as the boy had done nothing but try to help them since their first encounter. But the realization only made him the more irritable.

The wagon master and the rest of the train, however, had no such inhibitions. The moment they set eyes on that pan of water and the trees beyond, they expressed their delight in cries of Halleluyah! Hosannah! and many expressions of pleasure and thanks to François. One young man even started strumming his guitar with sheer joy as he leapt down from his wagon, and as he played, improvised a dance to celebrate the end of the long day behind them, while singing their festive song:

And tonight our folks

Are going to cut the cold
,

Cut the corn!

My beloved clings to the bush
,

Clings to the ipi-hamba bush
.

The wagon master would immediately have led his train to camp right down by the water, but once more François objected. He explained how the air there at night was black and loud with mosquitoes. He told them they could not even spend one night by the water without contracting malaria. So he begged the wagon master to camp on the highest ground, and to water his oxen as soon as possible by the pan, because the hour just before dusk was the moment when lion and leopard were already in position to pounce on the animals who came to water there. In fact this pan was the favourite feeding ground for the beasts of prey for some hundreds of miles around. He went on to impress on those incorrigibly carefree and optimistic people, that all travellers with oxen on that road gathered the animals close to their wagons at night, ringed them with large fires and posted fully armed guards on them all night long.

As the phrase ‘fully armed’ fell from him, he realized that it must have been full of a hurtful irony to their Cape-coloured companions who, as he had been told earlier on, travelled completely without arms. He tried to make immediate amends by asking the wagon master if any of them knew how to shoot.

The wagon master assured him that most of the men did, since they had fought in the war with the Cape-coloured corps in the north of Africa.

François who was carrying Ouwa’s heavy gun with him, at once unslung it from his shoulder with the bandolier full of ammunition, and handed it over to the wagon master saying that he could return it to him when they reached Hunter’s Drift in the morning.

Sir James, who of course was present all the time, listened to Franpois in an even more divided state of judgement. Only half-an-hour before François had manifested a completely irrational approach by all his talk of magic trees. Yet here, just a few miles farther on the same road, he was handing out advice based on good scientific reasoning. He could not help being struck by the paradox. But since nothing appears to offend logic as much as paradox, it did not improve his opinion of Franpois.

One suspects too that with a long distinguished record in the service of a remote European government, the elimination of belief in witchcraft and magic, and the substitution in their place of reason, logic and scientific knowledge on which the European way of life purports to be founded, must have figured prominently in his concept of duty. The discovery of belief in magic in the son of someone who had a formidable reputation as an Educationalist, was not only totally unexpected but struck him as a kind of betrayal of all he thought good in the European approach to Africa.

One must wonder, moreover, whether the causes of his irritation may not have gone deeper. They could also have arisen out of a subliminal sense of guilt. In dismissing all Africa’s claims for superstition and magic as absurd, as they obviously were on a purely rational and scientific level, and by not trying, in fact, to discover what unexplored aspects of reality were keeping the practices alive and vivid in the spirit of natural man, he may have felt a fleeting intimation that he had contributed to western man’s failure in Africa.

Was the cause of all this perhaps aptly summed up in what his own daughter, childlike, had just called anti-magic? The mere thought of it was ridiculous, of course, he reassured himself. And yet…?

These and many other considerations, however, were cancelled by the immediate duty of supervising the organization of the wagoner’s camp for the night. With all that capacity for detail and authority which had made him so eminent a servant of government, he went about the task with great energy.

François, after explaining about the short cut to Hunter’s Drift, was already on his horse, pushing on as fast as he could in order to prepare Ousie-Johanna for the reception of the Monckton party. He could not help being somewhat amused by hearing behind him, now that the mopani beetles, not surprisingly, had finally lost their voices in the late afternoon silence of the bush, the calm, authoritative voice of Sir James giving orders to the wagoners, each command ending with a loud, ‘At the double!’

Perhaps, more important, had he looked back, he might have noticed Luciana perched on a wagon watching him ride away. He could not possibly have known how the light of afternoon, making the dust raised by his horse and Hintza with the smell of home in his nose, leaping to incredible heights, things of beauty and flame, that his going appeared to her to be even more legendary than his coming.

Yet, happily for François, he had no inkling as to the possible outcome of his encounter with Sir James. He himself was not accustomed to being in the right. Being reproved, not only by Ouwa and Lammie but also by Ousie-Johanna, !#grave;Bamuthi and many of his Matabele playmates, had been a constant factor in his life so that the difference of opinion between him and Sir James was easily forgotten.

All he knew was that it was a perfect evening to bring the eventful day behind him to an end. He had seldom seen an evening more tranquil. He had only one profound regret; not so much that Ouwa was dead, but that he could not have died in such surroundings at such an hour. Then he would have had company. The whole transcendent example of the sinking of the sun and the coming of darkness, the emergence of the stars, would have been there to support his own transition from life into death and into whatever might be beyond.

In a mood of sober resolution he arrived, unobserved, just before sundown at Hunter’s Drift. As he dismounted at the entrance to the courtyard, hard by the stables, he could hear from the direction of Ousie-Johanna’s rooms, a sound that suggested that she too must have once more found peace with life and the world. She was singing loudly and at her most cheerful best, one of her favourite hymns, ‘Nearer my God to Thee’.

Far from having any religious reactions to this sound, François rejoiced in it without shame, for Ousie-Johanna’s celebration in song of divine propinquity, gave him a most irreligious lust after food and drink. As he went in to greet her, he thought, ‘We shall eat better than ever tonight if she’s singing like that.’

Ousie-Johanna did not normally take kindly to any interruption of her do-it-yourself concerts, but this occasion was a joyful exception, until François told her about the Moncktons. The news made her panic, not because she did not like the idea of guests but because she feared she had no time to be at her best. Accordingly she reproved François with a heated: ‘You might have let me know before’, then declaiming to Heaven that she had nothing appropriate to wear for such a great occasion, and that there was no decent food that could possibly be prepared at such short notice, she ordered François out of her room.

Knowing her as well as he did, François was convinced that even if no one else did, Ousie-Johanna was going to enjoy the occasion to the full. Quick as he himself was in having a bath and changing into clean clothes, Ousie-Johanna was quicker. He found her in the kitchen in her best starched white linen uniform and apron, edged with Madeira lace. On a side-table lay her best hat, with a great clutch of bright red cherries pinned on its side; and a sulphur yellow handbag with massive metal clasps. Neither of which, of course, she would have any opportunity of using but which she invariably displayed prominently in her kitchen so that any stranger who might be brought in to see her, would recognize these as badges of her exalted place in the hierarchy of the household.

He was certain, therefore, that inwardly she was rejoicing at the sense of importance that arose from the arrival of distinguished guests for a whole night. To François’s amusement this was making her affectionately truculent and peremptory with him, first by reproving him for taking ‘hours’ over his bath, and then asking why he had not yet made a single helpful suggestion as to what they could give their guests to eat, seeing that he had left her no time at all for cooking anything worthy of the name of food.

Happily François had suggestions. He had much experience of the food one longed for at the end of days of travel through so hot and exacting a bushveld. For instance, he himself had been longing all day for some of the wonderful yellow melons they grew so successfully at Hunter’s Drift, a melon called ‘span-spek’ (Span-ham), a name which Ouwa had maintained was a contraction of Spanish-ham, being eaten as an hors-d’oeuvres with ham. At Hunter’s Drift this melon could not be equalled at the end of a long, hot day. François therefore offered to go immediately into the garden and select half a dozen of the finest melons. He wanted to rush out there and then, but Ousie-Johanna had not done with him and scornfully upbraided him, ‘And do you think that those yellow bath sponges full of scented water you call melons will be enough to satisfy a lot of hungry people?’

Like all born cooks she had a tendency to despise anything put on the table which had not gone through heavenly metamorphosis in the temple of her kitchen. François had to contain his impatience and finally it was decided that melon would be followed by one of Ousie-Johanna’s superb beef-marrow soups, accompanied by crusts of warm, fresh bread, spread thick with the marrow from the bones themselves, and spiced with just enough fresh ground black pepper and the merest sprinkling of young limes to discipline the fat. Then she would immediately get one of the Matabele servants to kill some of their finest fat chickens in order to follow the soup with roast chicken, yellow saffron rice and raisins, and round baby marrows, baked in butter and cinnamon in the oven. Finally, provided François would hasten for once in his life to climb the great trees and pick the berries before dark, she would bake a mulberry tart and serve it with a quart of cream.

François was so happy and hungry at the thought of such a menu that he could not resist giving Ousie-Johanna a quick hug, saying, ‘You know, Ousie-Johanna, you ought, if it is at all possible, to sing ‘Nearer my God to Thee’ more often!’

Before she could ask him what on earth he had meant, both he and Hintza were out of the kitchen door and on their way to the garden. By the time he came back he found Ousie-Johanna had all the maids under her command dressed in their best calico clothes and busy opening up the house. Indeed, the great baroque oil lamps, suspended from the ceilings on long, heavy chains like gold in the main rooms and long corridor, were already lit, although the evening still burned like a great bush fire along the horizon and made the wide windows elegiac with light. In the two large so-called spare rooms, which were always kept for unexpected visitors in the tradition of Fran-fois’s people, the windows were open and the beds turned down and, as François found on his quick inspection tour of both rooms, they were equipped with fresh water in thermos containers; tins covered with remnants of some old family chintz and full of rusks standing beside them. Long white candles, made at Hunter’s Drift, stood in enamel holders by the beds and on the dressing tables, a box of matches beside each one. Moreover, Ousie-Johanna had seen to it that in each room there were several of the beautiful, old blue and white porcelain Chinese ginger-jars which the East Indiamen, calling in at the Cape of Good Hope centuries ago, had brought from China. These were full of dahlias, zinnias, geraniums and the scarlet wild aloe flowers which were abundant in the summer in the bush around Hunter’s Drift.

Indeed it all looked as welcoming and as attractive as it would have done if Lammie herself had supervised the organization, so that François felt extraordinarily confident and rather proud when he went to the kitchen to thank Ousie-Johanna for all she had done. But he did not get far with his thanks, for he was abruptly ordered to take his ‘inconsiderate’ self away when she and her helpers had so much serious work to do in so short a time.

There was only one item that worried François and which he took it upon himself to change. He found the table had been set as if Ouwa was there to take his place at its head. This presupposed that either he or Sir James would have to sit in Ouwa’s place. The thought somehow was too much for him. He immediately asked the maid to re-lay the places, knives and forks of old Cape silver, and yellow mats of Amanzim-tetse reeds with !#grave;Bamuthi’s tribal pattern woven into them, at the other end of the table. They had hardly completed the change when he heard the sound of the Moncktons’ truck and caboose coming up the road towards the homestead.