1972 - A Story Like the Wind (53 page)

He could give François countless illustrations of this kind of intercommunication between men and the life of the bush, between the intent of one animal and another, until it all wove itself into a pattern of universal inter-communication, fashioning, among many other things the bird-song and change of tune flaring among the trembling reeds by the river and over the shivering tree-tops of the bush around them. Yes, he feared that it all added up to the sad fact that, like François, he did not like this change of tune at all and was convinced that some new element had entered the life of the bush.

Mopani’s reference to a ‘new element’ made François think of the Moncktons. He did not for a moment mean to put it forward as an explanation of the changes that Mopani had been describing. But, as Mopani paused after this singularly long exposition, François blurted out the news of Sir James’s arrival.

‘Yes,’ Mopani said, ‘I know about Sir James’s coming. In fact I have an urgent message which the Government telephoned to me last night and asked me to deliver to him. More important, I have messages for you from Lammie as well. We will talk about these things presently, but at the moment…’

What Mopani had intended to say was interrupted by Noble. A pitiful nicker came from the horse. He put his great head into Mopani’s shoulder and nudged him as if to remind him of his existence and the fact that, whatever the views of Mopani and François on the famous cooling-off process, Noble was certain that its virtues could be grossly overrated. Mopani smiled a smile at himself which François knew would have been a great and inappropriate laugh in anybody else, shattering the delicacy of the moment. While he ruffled Noble he remarked fondly, ‘Yes, boy, yes. I agree most emphatically, it’s high time we gave you your liquor and your food.’

Soon they had Noble in his favourite stall in the corner of the stable, hard by the double door. A deep, warm bed of clean yellow straw glowed around him like lamplight in the evening shadows. His crib was full of thek best clover and maize. As always at Hunter’s Drift it was soaked in water for some twenty hours before it was fed to the horses. By this time Noble was so hungry that he lowered his head and pushed Mopani aside almost roughly in order to get at his food. One wonders, therefore, whether he appreciated, or even heard, one of Mopani’s rare jokes.

Mopani, as François knew better than most, despite his reputation for being a serious, some thought over-serious person, had his own quiet sense of humour. It was essentially a personal and private aspect of himself which he was shy to reveal to anyone not close to him. When he did so, it was invariably the greatest expression of affection and trust of which he perhaps was capable. The manner of it always touched François so much that he didn’t know whether to laugh, cry or do both together, for it was the sort of humour which is bred only by extreme loneliness in the hearts of men, all the more touching for being utterly child-like and simple.

All it amounted to on this occasion was that, as Mopani fondly rubbed his hand along the bowed neck of Noble, crunching his maize and clover, he said, ‘Good night Noble boy, sleep well, and no nightmares please.’ Having said this, he looked shyly at François to see whether his little joke had been observed.

François was so touched that he used the strongest exclamation of surprise borrowed long ago by his people from their Mohammedan slaves: ‘
Allah-Wereld[Lord-oi
- the-World] Uncle, I wish I could pun as well.’

Outside the stable they found Hintza, Nandi and !#grave;Swayo sitting on their haunches, all exuberance gone and a certain reproachful expectancy on their alert faces, as if they, too, felt they had been neglected too long, a feeling perhaps made all the keener by the most wonderful of all sounds reaching them from the stable: that of a hungry horse crunching his well-earned supper between strong jaws. So they all made immediately for the nearest entrance to the great house which happened to be the kitchen door.

The windows of the house were already shuttered and the house prepared for the night like a great ship battened down for a storm. The only light showing was the glow from the kitchen oil lamp. As they approached they saw the large figure of !#grave;Bamuthi, standing silhouetted beside the door. From inside the kitchen they heard Ousie-Johanna, speaking in an unusually earnest tone, followed immediately by !#grave;Bamuthi’s bidding her an unusually ceremonious farewell. Then the silhouette vanished from the shining door and they heard the muffled sound of !#grave;Bamuthi’s massive bare feet on the earth as they moved fast along the pathway which led to the Matabele kraals. Added to all he was feeling about the natural sounds of the bush and the heavy fall of night, that scene of brief farewell by the door seemed to François suddenly extremely odd and the hour too late for comfort.

Ousie-Johanna barely greeted Mopani and François when they entered the kitchen, and it needed only one look at her face to make François realize that something had upset her. ‘Why, little old Ousie, what’s the matter? Is there anything I can do to help you?’ he asked.

Ousie-Johanna’s response to this proof of sympathy was immediate. It was, she explained, something !#grave;Bamuthi had said to her, not even what he had said as the manner in which he had said it, which had upset her. She hastened to add that !#grave;Bamuthi was a heathen and had many superstitions with which she herself could never hold, but there was no doubt, as her Little Feather knew, that he was also a very smart person and knew a thing or two that other people, far better educated, could learn to their advantage.

Knowing how long Ousie-Johanna could be in coming to the point, François pressed her again to say what troubled her.

‘
Auck
, Little Feather,’ she confessed, as if afraid now that it amounted to very little. ‘It was just that when I reproached !#grave;Bamuthi for being so late in bringing me the cream I had asked him for when I knew we had a visitor, he said that something had made them late with their milking. When I asked him what it was, he told me—would you believe it?—that it had been the birds down by the river.’

She paused, as if she feared that such an unusual excuse would strike François and Mopani as being as absurd as it had struck her. To her astonishment she saw the two of them exchange a very odd, knowing glance and then her Little Feather, looking at her, with his eyes large with interest, asked, ‘And what did you say to him then, little old Ousie?’

‘I told him straight it was a blerrie lot of childish nonsense, allowing birds to get in the way of so important a matter as milking!’

Something of the original heat of her remonstrance came into her voice, but quickly receded as she went on to ask, ‘But do you know what he said to me then?’ Too caught up now in the emotions of the impending revelation, she did not wait for an answer, but hurried on, ‘He told me that they had always to listen in to the birds, because always the birds were the first to know.’

She paused again, convinced that now, surely, François and Mopani would comment on the absurdity of it all, but, as they remained silent and apparently as interested as ever, she went on, ‘So I asked him straight, what important thing it was that the birds were the first to know tonight?’

Some of the sarcasm which had accompanied her question was back in her voice and she asked rhetorically, to give herself a plausible excuse to pause for the full effect of the answer, ‘And what do you think he said? He looked at me with those great eyes of his and said in a voice that made my heart go black on me, ‘It is too soon to tell for certain. But all are agreed that the birds have changed their tune.’’

All traces of sarcasm vanished now from her voice and, to François’s dismay Ousie-Johanna’s own dark, large eyes seemed full and overflowing with the light of wordless apprehension.

Lady Precious Stream

F
rançois had never been more grateful for Mopani’s company than he was that night, nor more grateful for having Lammie’s messages explaining, at great and affectionate length, the reasons for her delay in the south. There was also the coming of the Moncktons and Mopani’s intention to call on Sir James early the next day, as well as a score or more of relatively objective matters to discuss. They had both experienced the fact often enough, that it took only a small tent and a fire to exclude the mystery and abolish the darkness of the universe enthroned glittering and high in the exalted African night. So one can imagine how successfully the dining-room, full of the light of oil lamps as a comb in a beehive is with translucent honey, banished the darkness outside. Excluded, too, was the sea of sounds that had joined the acute fall of night and sharpened not just François’s and Mopani’s apprehension but, judging by Ousie-Johanna’s account, also that of everyone else at Hunter’s Drift. Was it pure coincidence (although if it were so one is certain François would not have found it any the less meaningful), that Mopani chose for his after-dinner reading from the Joubert family Bible, the psalm which begins: ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’?

It was indicative of François’s new state that it was not the fact that the Lord was his shepherd (Mopani read it as if it were one of the great unchanging, unchangeable and everlasting facts of life) which impressed him most now, as it had always done in the past, but rather the verse: Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death’.

Ouwa’s death, some eighteen days before, no doubt was partly responsible but, whatever the cause, this verse for the first time held his imagination so firmly that he could not share the psalmist’s emotion expressed in the triumphant assertion:

‘I fear no evil’, and so on to the final resolution of both fear and evil which had always made such music in his heart; ‘I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever’.

He did not analyse the process of reservation which held him back. All he knew now was that those lines were ringing a kind of prophetic warning in his imagination, like a church bell in a deep medieval valley warning unsuspecting man of invasion and that, in a way he could not explain, he was indeed afraid of the future. He felt not at all sure that he would dwell indefinitely in the great house in which he was sitting at that moment, apparently so secure in such an atmosphere of well-being, surrounded by striking evidence of the love of many generations of his family.

All within him suddenly felt horribly and dangerously ephemeral. It was only by concentrating on Mopani’s presence, and on what he stood for, and by remembering all the many long, dangerous and unpredictable vicissitudes through which Mopani had come without ever losing any of the feeling that the Lord had unfailingly been and remained
his
shepherd, that François managed to recover some measure of courage within.

But later, alone with Hintza in the darkness of his room, he was back in a turmoil of uncertainty. This new fear was aided and abetted by an element of guilt over the secrets he had kept, particularly his encounter with the ‘men of the spear’ and his failure to report it to Mopani as !#grave;Bamuthi had counselled at the time. Why had he not mentioned the coming of these men? Of course it was because he feared it might lead to the disclosure of his visit to uLangalibalela’s kraal and his reasons for going there. Much as he loved and trusted Mopani, he did not think that even he would entirely understand. He knew he could be wrong, but he could not just then face the thought of any misunderstanding between himself and the old hunter, whose unqualified support was more important to him than ever. So wherever his review of himself took François, it always led to the one conclusion that not only had the birds changed their tune but so had he. He was not at all certain that he liked the change, whatever it was, only that it left him feeling frighten-ingly alone.

He found himself looking back with inexpressible longing to that evening when Hintza had first come into his life. It was as if that moment had marked off a frontier in his experience, rather like the border of the great garden which is the image of man’s beginning, when he was still without knowledge of good or evil, surrounded by trees full of yellow fruit, a light that was of neither night nor day dripping like water from leaves as they shook and trembled still from the movement of the hand which had just fashioned them. And it seemed to him now that he had been expelled from all such a garden symbolized, and that he could never go back. Indeed the awareness of a new, imperative self appeared to be urging him on like an archangelic presence with a flaming sword mounted over the garden gate, now firmly shut between immense trees of figs, great and purple and aglow against a hard, new amethyst day. This feeling of being alone was assuming the proportions of self-pity when a sound from Hintza corrected him, Hintza was trying to tell him in his quivering whimper that his dreaming self had at last located the hunter’s quarry in some wide and starry dimension of sleep. So why was François as always so slow in locating it too?

François stretched out his hand to stroke Hintza gently. At the touch of his hand Hintza’s whimper instantly ceased, a sigh of relief broke from him to be followed immediately by a great spasm of muscles as all four legs tried (difficult as it was for a dog asleep on a mat) to go through the motions of racing as fast as he could straight for the place where his quarry had just vanished.

The spasm was so long and violent that François had to stroke Hintza repeatedly and say in Bushman softly in his ear, ‘There now, Hin boy, there now…well done! You’ve got him…you’ve got him! Home, boy now, home…’

A sigh of contentment broke from Hintza and he was once more still and relaxed beside François’s bed. Slight as the incident was, it brought an inclination to smile within François which carried with it a rebuke. The act of sleep is nothing if not an act of trust and a re-commitment of one’s daytime self to the unfathomable depth of the urges that have raised life from clay. It was this example of an animal finding life confirmed in sleep by pursuing a great dream which now consoled François. He thought of Mopani’s remarks earlier in the evening on the animals of Africa. He remembered once in a discussion between Ouwa and Lammie, that Ouwa had quoted something from a new Dead Sea Scroll about how to find the way to the Great Kingdom. It said in effect: ‘Follow the birds, the beasts and the fishes and they will lead you in.’