1972 - A Story Like the Wind (46 page)

It was this remark by her father that sparked off in Luciana a fresh act of rebellion. She rushed back into the room and begged: ‘Oh Fa, please may I come too? I’d just love to see what it looks like outside on a night like this.’

Despite the objections indignantly raised in profuse Portuguese by Amelia, Sir James, perhaps because he had just had an unexpectedly good dinner or perhaps, more naturally, because despite his air of resolute authority, he could not help spoiling a daughter who, since his wife’s death, was the only feminine influence in his life, set about placating Amelia in what appeared to be to François a quite unexpected and diplomatic manner.

As a result, the three of them, with, of course, Hintza, went outside on to the broad stoep, standing still and silent at the sudden transition from the light of lamps into a night without moon. François, who could never get used to the authority of such nights, stood as if to attention before it for a while. He was carrying, as he always did on these occasions, an ancient and beautiful old gun which Mopani had given him. He could never explain why he always carried this particular gun when he went on a night patrol. Yet one suspects that the cause lay far back in his imagination, where an awareness of the antiquity of night, pressing down there at Hunter’s Drift, sagging with the weight of stars, suggested that only the oldest in the instincts of the observer matched by what was oldest in his defence against anything that might abuse and exploit the power conferred on it by such darkness, could be appropriate. So they stood there, all four of them, on the edge of the stoep, silent, humbled and solemn in the manner of persons experiencing, after a brief reprieve in the tight ring of artificial light in the dining-room a second before, this impact of African night which one still believes to be the greatest of all the many forms darkness can assume on this insignificant planet.

François was full of gratitude that it was a particularly clear and beautiful night, as though the universe itself were collaborating with his longing for his home and surroundings to be at their best for his visitors. A low exclamation of delight broke from Luciana and moved him to speak to her in whispers. He felt he could never speak otherwise when faced with the night. He pointed out all the main constellations which were so defined and precise on this occasion that one could readily perceive how the Greeks and Romans had imposed particular patterns on them and why they made such singular personifications of their combinations of stars.

For instance, the Milky Way was more even than a way of foam and star-spume. It was a broad river of divine milk. Almost immediately ahead, Orion was a belted, sworded and knightly hunter. The Heavenly Twins were as bright as if, indeed, they were holding up jewelled cups to be filled not with wine so much as the oldest and rarest vintage of light for the gods benighted on Olympus. Sirius, the great Dog star, was at least two double handfuls of silver-green light. Moreover, not only the classical patterns but the patterns of others who had followed in their wake, were just as clear and understandable.

The Southern Cross in particular needed no pointing out to Luciana. Being half Portuguese already her recognition had seized on it. She knew, of course, how it had received its name from the great Portuguese navigators without whom their presence there, in the heart of Africa centuries later, would not have been possible. She appeared to have such strong feelings about it that she did not take kindly to Francis’s predilection for the name the people of Africa gave to it. He explained that they combined it with other stars in the vicinity to call their pattern The Giraffe.

When she asked rather tartly, ‘Why Giraffe?’ he said it was because the giraffe had the longest neck and perhaps the largest and most glowing eyes of all animals of the bush. As a result it was able to look over the tallest trees to see things that no other animal could see. It was also supposed to possess an insatiable curiosity. This combination of qualities made the Bushmen and others impose on the Southern Cross and its bright fellow-travellers, the image of a giraffe, standing with its feet on the horizon, its long neck stretched high into the sky to look right over the trees of the night so that it could report back on whatever it saw coming up from beyond the dark.

The final explanation, François was happy to note, did something to mollify Luciana’s initial objections. But he thought it as well to end his Africanization of the stars and to lead the way all round the house and outhouses. They seemed to find it as natural as he did to pause at the stable doors, listening to the lovely sound of horses crunching their dinner of straw and oats at their manger. They stopped to pat the mongrel watch-dogs who came rushing up to them in what Hintza clearly thought their usual ill-bred manner. They joined François in saying ‘good evening’ respectfully to the old Matabele watchman who met them at the far corner of the outhouses, just where the great garden and orchards began. He got up from his that of straw where he sat all night with his back to the wall, a great knob-kerrie and long assegai, a large jug of water and a loaf of bread beside him and a long, self-made wooden pipe in his hand. So accustomed had their eyes become to the darkness that all these and many other details were visible and lovingly noted by François as he took them on past Ousie-Johanna’s beloved hen run, where they heard the birds clucking spasmodically over dream eggs hatched in their sleep. At last they finished up once more at the front stoep.

They were just about to go up the steps when down beyond the river a lion roared. It was an exceptionally deep, loud and bass roar. So imperative and powerful was the sound that it startled Luciana, who clutched François’s arm asking, ‘Oh dear Heaven, what on earth could that be?’

‘Oh, that,’ François answered nonchalantly. ‘That’s only old Chaliapin having a good yawn before going to sleep for the night. The old boy has obviously had too good a dinner for once.’

Sir James and his daughter exclaimed in one voice, ‘Chaliapin?’

‘Yes,’ François replied. ‘That’s our name for him. You see, he has the most musical roar of all our lions.’

‘
Our
lions?’ Luciana exclaimed.

‘Yes,’ François replied. ‘They’re all part of our old faithfuls. They live round about in the bush and have done so for years, so we can tell them by the sounds they make. They’re good lions too, because they never give us any trouble. The dangerous ones, our real enemies, and there are hundreds of them, never utter a sound.’

Just then old Chaliapin was answered, as lions often are, by another lion farther down the river. To François it was a younger, and far less impressive sound, for he commented immediately, ‘Oh I might have known he would join in too. That’s just Caruso trying to show off as usual and pretending that he’s in better voice than Chaliapin.’

‘Are all your lions named after musicians?’ Sir James asked in some amusement.

‘Not all,’ François told him. ‘Only some of them. We have other names for them as well. Some Matabele, some European and even some Bushman.’

He went on to explain, stressing how wrong was the common assumption that all lions were alike. They were highly individualistic animals. No two ever looked or behaved alike and they never did the same things twice. He had hardly finished explaining when another lion roared nearer to the house, as if to illustrate François’s theme.

‘Now just listen to that,’ he exclaimed delighted. ‘Did you hear how different that sounded? That was a lioness calling. That was our Garbo answering the men on the other side of the river.’

‘Garbo?’ Luciana demanded, more interested than ever.

François answered seriously, ‘Yes. My parents christened her Garbo because, according to the Matabele, she is the one great exception to the lioness’s rule. She always wants to be alone. She was just telling those two fellows you heard across the river that she wants none of their company.’

‘She sounds rather anti-social to me,’ the girl remarked, then yawned and added, ‘I think, if you don’t mind Fa, I will now go to bed.’

‘Don’t mind?’ Sir James exclaimed, as if outraged by the implication that his daughter’s presence there was of his contriving, and convinced that it was just another example of the irrational and unpredictable in women, even in one so young as his daughter. ‘If I had had my way you would have been in your bunk hours ago. Off you go miss, at once, and at the double!’

The Birds Change Their Tune

T
hat night François indeed might have overslept if it had not been for Hintza calling him out of his sleep and drawing his attention to some unusual sounds disturbing what should have been complete silence in that far wing of the house. François was out of bed at once. Opening his door he looked down the corridor and saw Amelia trying in vain to keep her voice down to a whisper as she held on with one hand to the sleeve of Luciana’s pyjama jacket, who appeared to be determined to tear herself away.

François discreetly pulled back into his room, shut the door quietly and dressed as fast as he could. Yet, when he and Hintza re-emerged in the corridor, he found it empty and silent and assumed that Amelia had won her battle. But he soon discovered that he had underrated Luciana because, as his hand touched the knob of the heavy kitchen door, he heard her voice joining Ousie-Johanna’s in what struck him as a spirited and joyful exchange of sounds, despite the fact that neither of them spoke a common language.

François had a knack of moving quietly; at times people had found it disconcerting. It was perhaps a compliment to Mopani who had impressed upon him the necessity of silent movement for the successful hunter, and had taught him respect for silence to such an extent that he had developed an extreme dislike of unnecessary noise of any kind. As a result, he appeared in the kitchen unnoticed and was able, for a moment, to observe a scene which he found was as stimulating as it was funny.

The great Amelia, with a look of sullen defeat on her face, was sitting in Ousie-Johanna’s own chair. In front of her a lovely heavy silver-backed hair-brush, an ivory comb and a rather forlorn little pile of dark blue ribbons, unwanted, lay on the table. While she pretended not to notice, Luciana was helping Ousie-Johanna with almost embarrassing zeal to prepare the trays for the coffee pots, plates, cups, jugs of hot milk and the Delft porcelain bowls of nut-brown rusks for the household.

She was still in her pyjamas, her dark hair, unplaited, came down nearly to her waist. As she darted about from one end of the kitchen to the other, trying to anticipate what Ousie-Johanna needed next, her hair whisked about in such an unruly manner that she seemed to him to be constantly brushing it away from her eyes as well.

François had no desire to interrupt the scene but Hintza had his own ideas on the matter. He dashed towards Luciana, jumped up behind her and placed an affectionate paw on her shoulders, as he normally would have done only to Franjois.

Luciana immediately knew the significance of Hintza’s greeting. She turned round. Her face, despite the zeal of her aid to Ousie-Johanna, was still remote with the distance of the wide world of sleep which she had not long left. But her eyes were eloquent with disappointment as she exclaimed: ‘Oh, what a pity!’

Amelia who was, of course, also alerted by Hintza, immediately heaved herself out of her comfortable chair with a speed which surprised François, bore down on Luciana like a windjammer under full sail, and began upbraiding her. Judging by the way Luciana suddenly looked down to examine herself from toes to shoulders, François took Amelia’s words to be a vigorous expression of her feelings that no female, however young, should ever appear in front of any member of the male sex in a state of undress. It was François’s first glimpse into Amelia’s almost medieval concept of what was proper in feminine behaviour, and his reading of the situation was immediately confirmed by Luciana, who appeared quite undismayed and unrepentant over Amelia’s reproaches.

She turned and said to him, ‘Amelia thinks it is very wrong of me to be here in front of you in pyjamas. She thinks that either you or I should leave the kitchen at once—preferably me.’

She had only just finished speaking, when Amelia interposed herself as a solid screen between Luciana and François. In fact Luciana had been compelled to finish her last sentence looking round the side of Amelia’s great frame, with only her face, bright with revolt, just visible.

François said at once, ‘Tell her my mother and father and I, whenever we had time, always met for morning coffee and rusks in our pyjamas.’

‘I’m afraid that’s a bit different,’ she gasped, as Amelia pulled her out of François’s sight.

Far more than the question of the propriety of Luciana’s appearance, François was concerned over the look of disappointment with which Luciana had greeted him and the exclamation, ‘Oh, what a pity’, which he took to refer to himself. Indeed it rankled so much that he was on the point of leaving the kitchen to the incomprehensible women when Ousie-Johanna broke in to ask him in his own language what on earth was wrong. Why, all that nice little Nonna, young lady, had been doing was of the utmost help to her so that she herself could take the trays of coffee to her father and François.

Only then did François realize that the ‘Oh, what a pity’ perhaps had referred to the fact that Luciana had intended to surprise him and her father in what might have appeared to her a rather mature feminine role, and which his unexpected appearance had cancelled.

He tried to pretend, therefore, that nothing unusual had occurred and politely asked Luciana, and through her Amelia, if they had spent a good night. His inquiries remained unanswered. For once Amelia was determined, apparently as a matter of prime medieval conscience, to win this battle with Luciana. She seized her firmly by the wrist and using her giant strength dragged the protesting Luciana out of the kitchen, to both François’s disappointment and Ousie-Johanna’s utter incomprehension.

Meanwhile, the battle between the two still raged because soon the kitchen door opened again. Luciana’s , face showed in the opening and she had just time to call out to François, ‘Please tell Mistress Johanna I’ll be back in a jiffy to help her again’, before she was jerked back out of sight and the door slammed violently by Amelia’s elephantine foot.