This Was the Old Chief's Country (48 page)

It was in this room that Maggie confronted him with a letter from Paul's headmaster. The scholarship money was finished. Was it intended that the boy should try for a fresh one to take him through university? In this case, he must change his attitude, for, while he could not be described as stupid, he ‘showed no real inclination for serious application'. If not, there was ‘no immediate necessity for reviewing the state of affairs', but a list of employers was enclosed with whom Mrs Barnes might care to communicate. In short, the headmaster thought Paul was thick-witted. Maggie was furious.
Her
son become a mere clerk! She informed Alec, peremptorily, that they must find the money to send Paul through university. Alec was engaged in making a fine diagram of his new shaft in cross-section, and he lifted a blank face to say: ‘Why spoon-feed the boy? If he was any good he'd work.' The words struck Maggie painfully, for they summed up her own belief; but she found herself thinking that it was all Alec's fault for being English and infecting her son with laziness. She controlled this thought and said they must find the money, even if Alec curtailed his experimenting. He looked at her in amazement and anger. She
saw that the anger was against her false scale of values. He was thinking: What is one child's future (even if he happens to be my own, which is a mere biological accident, after all) against a discovery which might change the future of the world? He maintained the silence necessary when dealing with little-minded people. But she would not give in. She argued and even wept, and gave him no peace, until his silence crumbled into violence and he shouted: ‘Oh, all right then, have it your own way.'

At first Maggie thought that she should have done this before ‘for his own good'. It was not long before she was sorry she had done it. For Alec went striding anxiously about the farm, his eyes worriedly resting on the things he had not really seen for so long – eroded soil, dragging fences, blocked drains – he had been driven out of that inward refuge where everything was clear and meaningful, and there was a cloud of fear on his face like a child with night-terrors. It hurt Maggie to look at him; but for a while she held out, and wrote a proud letter to the headmaster saying there was no need to trouble about a scholarship, they could pay the money. She wrote to Paul himself, a nagging letter, saying that his laziness was making his father ill, and the very least he could do ‘after all his father had done for him' was to pass his matriculation well.

This letter shocked Paul, but not in the way she had intended. He knew quite well that his father would never notice whether he passed an examination or not. His mother's dishonesty made him hate her; and he came home from school in a set and defiant mood, saying he did not want to go to university. This betrayal made Maggie frantic. Physically she was passing through a difficult time, and the boy hardly recognized this hectoring and irritable mother. For the sake of peace he agreed to go to university, but in a way which told Maggie that he had no intention at all of doing any work. But his going depended, after all, on Alec, and when Maggie confronted him with the fact that money for fees was needed, he replied, vaguely, that he would have it in good time. It was not quite the old vagueness, for there was a fever and urgency in him that seemed hopeful to Maggie, and she looked every day at the fields for signs of reorganization. There were no changes yet.

Weeks passed, and again she went to him, asking what his new plans were. Alec replied, irritably, that he was doing what he could, and what did she expect, a miracle to order? There was something familiar in this tone and she looked closely at him and demanded: ‘Alec, what exactly are you doing?'

He answered in the old, vague way: ‘I'm on to it now, Maggie, I'm certain I'll have the answer inside a month.'

She understood that she had spurred him, not into working on the farm, but into putting fresh energies behind the gold-seeking. It was such a shock to her that she felt really ill, and for some days she kept to her bed. It was not real illness, but a temporary withdrawal from living. She pulled the curtains and lay in the hot half-dark. The servants took in her meals, for she could not bear the sight of either her son or her husband. When Paul entered tentatively, after knocking and getting no reply, he found her lying in her old dressing-gown, her eyes averted, her face flushed and exhausted, and she replied to his questions with nervous dislike. But it was Paul who coaxed her back into the family, with that gentle, protective sympathy which was so strange in a boy of his age. She came back because she had to; she took her place again and behaved sensibly, but in a tight and controlled way which upset Paul, and which Alec ignored, for he was quite obsessed. He would come in for meals, his eyes hot and glittering, and eat unconsciously, throwing out remarks like: Next week I'll know. I'll soon know for sure.

In spite of themselves, Paul and Maggie were affected by his certainty. Each was thinking secretly: Suppose he's right? After all, the great inventors are always laughed at to begin with.

There was a day when he came triumphantly in, loaded with pieces of rock. ‘Look at this,' he said, confidently. Maggie handled them, to please him. They were of rough, heavy, crumbling substance, like rusty honeycomb. She could see the minerals glistening. She asked: ‘Is this what you wanted?'

‘You'll see,' said Alec, proudly, and ordered Paul to come with him to the shaft, to help bring more samples. Paul went, in his rather sullen way. He did not want to show that he half-believed his father. They returned loaded. Each piece of rock was numbered according to the part of the reef it had been
taken from. Half of each piece was crushed in the mortar, and father and son stood panning all the afternoon.

Paul came to her and said, reluctantly: ‘It seems quite promising, mother.' He was appealing to her to come and look. Silently she rose, and went with him to the water-tanks. Alec gave her a defiant stare, and thrust the pan over to her. There was the usual trail of mineral, and behind was a smear of dull gold, and behind that big grits of the stuff. She looked with listless irony over at Paul, but he nodded seriously. She accepted it from him, for he knew quite a lot by now. Alec saw that she trusted his son when she disbelieved him, and gave her a baffled and angry look. She hastened to smooth things over, ‘Is it a lot?' she asked.

‘Quite enough to make it workable.'

‘I see,' she said, seriously. Hope flickered in her and again she looked over at Paul. He gave an odd, humorous grimace, which meant: Don't get excited about it yet; but she could see that he was really excited. They did not want to admit to each other that they were aroused to a half-belief, so they felt awkward. If this madness turned out to be no madness at all, how foolish they would feel!

‘What are you going to do now?' she asked Alec.

‘I'm sending in all these samples to the Department for proper assaying.'

‘All
of them …' she checked the protest, but she was thinking: That will cost an awful lot of money. ‘And when will you hear?'

‘In about a week.'

Again Paul and she exchanged glances, and they went indoors, leaving Alec to finish the panning. Paul said, with that grudging enthusiasm: ‘You know, mother, if it's true …'

‘If …' she scoffed.

‘But he says if this works it means he can divine anything. He says Governments will be sending for him to divine their coalfields, water, gold – everything!”

‘But Paul,' she said, wearily, ‘they can find coalfields and minerals with scientific instruments, they don't need black magic.' She even felt a little mean to damp the boy in this way. ‘Can they?' he asked, doubtfully. He didn't want to believe it because it sounded so dull to him. ‘But mother, even if he can't divine, and it's all nonsense, we'll have a rich mine on this farm.'

‘That won't satisfy your father,' she said. ‘He'll rest at nothing less than a universal theory.'

The rocks were sent off that same day to the station; and now they were restless and eager, even Maggie, who tried not to show it. They all went to examine this vital shaft one afternoon. It was in a thick patch of bush and they had to walk along a native path to reach the rough clearing, where a simple windlass and swinging iron bucket marked the shaft. Maggie leaned over. There being no gleam of water, as in a well, to mark the bottom, she could see nothing at first. For a short distance the circular hole plunged rockily, with an occasional flash of light from a faceted pebble; then a complete darkness. But as she looked there was a glow of light far below and she could see the tiny form of a man against the lit rock face. ‘How deep?' she asked, shuddering a little.

‘Over a hundred now,' said Alec, casually. ‘I'll go down and have a look.' The Africans swung the bucket out into the centre of the shaft and Alec pulled the rope to him, so that the bucket inclined at the edge, slid in one leg and thrust himself out, so that he hung in space, clinging to the rope with one hand and using an arm and a leg to fend off the walls as the rope unwound him down into the blackness. Maggie found it frightening to watch so she pulled her head back from the shaft so as not to look; but Paul lay on his stomach and peered over.

At last Alec came up again. He scrambled lightly from the rocking bucket to safety, and Maggie suppressed a sigh of relief. ‘You should see that reef,' he said, proudly, ‘it's three feet wide. I've cross-cut in three places and it doesn't break at all.'

Maggie was thinking: Only three days of waiting gone! They were all waiting now, in a condition of hallucinatory calm, for the result to come back from the Assay Department. When only five days had passed Alec said: ‘Let's send the boy in for the post.' She had been expecting this, and although she said ‘Silly to send so soon,' she was eager to do so; after all, they might have replied, one never knew – and so the houseboy
made the trip in to the station. Usually they only sent twice a week for letters. Next day he went again – nothing. And now a week had passed and the three of them were hanging helplessly about the house, watching the road for the post-boy. Eight days: Alec could not work, could not eat, and Paul lounged about the veranda, saying: ‘Won't it be funny to have a big mine just down there, on our own farm. There'll be a town around it, and think what this land will be worth then!'

‘Don't count your chickens,' said Maggie. But all kinds of half-suppressed longings were flooding up in her. It would be nice to have good clothes again; to buy nice linen, instead of the thin, washed-out stuff they had been using for years. Perhaps she could go to the doctor for her headaches, and he would prescribe a holiday, and they could go to Scotland for a holiday and see the old people …

Nine days. The tension was no longer pleasant. Paul and Alec quarrelled. Alec said he would refuse to allow a town to be built around the mine; it would be a pity to waste good farming land. Paul said he was mad – look at Johannesburg, the building lots there were worth thousands the square inch. Maggie again told them not to be foolish; and they laughed at her and said she had no imagination.

The tenth day was a regular mail-day. If there was no letter then Alec said he would telephone the Department; but this was a mere threat, because the Department dealt with hundreds of samples from hopeful gold-searchers all over the country and could not be expected to make special arrangements for one person. But Alec said: ‘I'm surprised they haven't telephoned before. Just like a Government department not to see the importance of something like this.' The post was late. They sat on the darkening veranda, gazing down the road through the mealie-fields, and when the man came at last there was still no letter. They had all three expected it.

And now there was a feeling of anti-climax, and Maggie found a private belief confirmed: that nothing could happen to this family in neat, tidy events; everything must always drag itself out, everything declined and decayed and muddled itself along. Even if there is gold, she thought, secretly, there'll be all kinds of trouble with selling it, and it'll drag out for months
and months! That eleventh day was a long torture. Alec sat in his office, anxiously checking his calculations, drinking cup after cup of strong, sweet tea. Paul pretended to read, and yawned, and watched the clock until Maggie lost her temper with him. The houseboy, now rather resentful because of these repeated trips of seven miles each way on foot, set off late after lunch to the station. They tried to sleep the afternoon away, but could not keep their eyes closed. When the sun was hanging just over the mountains, they again arranged themselves on the veranda to wait. The sun sank, and Maggie telephoned the station: Yes, the train had been two hours late. They ate supper in tense silence and went back to the veranda. The moon was up and everything flooded with that weird light which made the mealie-fields lose solidity, so that there was a swaying and murmuring like a sea all around them. At last Paul shouted: ‘Here he comes!' And now, when they could see the swinging hurricane lamp, that sent a dim, red flicker along the earth across the bright moonlight, they could hardly bring themselves to move. They were thinking: Well, it needn't be today, after all – perhaps we'll have this waiting tomorrow, too.

The man handed in the sack. Maggie took it, removed the bundle of letters and handed them to Alec; she could see a Government envelope. She was feeling sick, and Paul was white, the bones of his face showed too sharply. Alec dropped the letters and then clumsily picked them up. He made several attempts to open the envelope and at last ripped it across, tearing the letter itself. He straightened the paper, held it steady, and – but Maggie had averted her eyes and glanced at Paul. He was looking at her with a sickly and shamed smile.

Alec held the piece of paper loose by one corner, and he was sitting rigid, his eyes dark and blank. ‘No good,' he said at last, in a difficult, jerking voice. He seemed to have shrunk, and the flesh on his face was tight. His lips were blue. He dropped the paper and sat staring. Then he muttered: ‘I can't understand it, I simply can't understand it.'