The Complete Short Stories Part 5

'Ca.s.se,' said Daphne, 'Michael Ca.s.se. Is that the name?'

'This stuff the doctor gives me's no good. In fact it makes me worse. Another tobacco manager was living in the house Old Tuys had occupied. Old Tuys was at the farmhouse with Chakata. He sat in his corner of the stoep, talking nonsense to himself, or ambled about the farm. Chakata was annoyed when Old Tuys walked about, for he himself could barely hobble. 'A pathetic case,' he would say as Old Tuys strolled by, 'he's got his limbs, but he hasn't got his faculties. I at least have my faculties.' He preferred to see Old Tuys in his chair on the stoep. Then Chakata would say, 'You know, after all these years, I have a soft spot for Old Tuys.

Old Tuys ate noisily. Chakata did not seem to mind. It struck Daphne that she was useless to Chakata now that she was no longer a goad for Old Tuys. She decided to stay at the farm no longer than a month. She would get a job in the Capital.

The third day after her arrival there was a break in the rains. She wandered round the sunny farm all morning, and after lunch set off northward for Makata's kraal. The new tobacco manager agreed very happily to come with his car and fetch her later on.

She had become unused to trekking any distance. Her energy ebbed after the first mile. A cloud of locusts caught her attention and automatically she stopped to watch anxiously whether the swarm would settle on Chakata's mealies or miss them. It pa.s.sed over. She sat to rest on a stone, disturbing a baby lizard. 'Go'way. Go'way,' she heard.

Daphne called aloud, 'G.o.d help me. Life is unbearable.'

A house-boy came running to Chakata who was round by the tobacco shed resting on two sticks.

'Baas Tuys is gone to shoot buck. The piccanin say he take a gun to shoot buck.'

'Who? What?'

'Baas Tuys with gun.'

'Where? Which way?'

'Is gone by north. The piccanin have seen him. Was after lunch piccanin say, he talk that he go to shoot buck.'

A few more natives had gathered round.

'Run, quick, all of you. Get that gun off Old Tuys. Fetch him back.'

They looked at him hesitantly. It was not every day that a native was instructed to wrest a gun from the hands of a white man.

'Go, you fools. Run.'

They returned slowly and fearfully half an hour later. Chakata had hobbled to the end of the paddock to meet them.

'Where's Tuys? Did you get him?'

They did not answer at first. Then one of them pointed to the path through the maize where Old Tuys was staggering home, exhausted, dragging something behind him.

'Go and pick her up,' ordered Chakata.

'I got me a buck,' said Old Tuys, looking with pride at the company. 'Man, there's life in the old dog yet. I got us a buck.'

He looked closely at Chakata. He could not understand why Chakata was not impressed.

'We have buck for dinner, man Chakata,' he said.

Burials follow quickly after death in the Colony, for the temperature does not allow of delay. The inquest was held and Daphne was buried next day. Michael Ca.s.se came over for the funeral to the cemetery outside the dorp.

'I knew her quite well, you know. She stayed with my mother,' he said to Chakata. 'My mother gave her a bird, or something like that.' He giggled. Chakata looked at him curiously and saw that the man was not smiling.

Chakata was being helped into the car. 'I must see a specialist,' he said.

Ralph Mercer was moved when he heard the news. It was like the confirmation of something one knew already. Daphne had begun to live when he had first met her, and when she had gone she had been in a sense dead. He tried to explain this to his mother.

'Like flowers, you know, in the garden. One can't say they really exist unless one's looking at them. Or take -'

'Flowers, garden ... You are talking of a human soul.'

It was a year later that Ralph felt a crisis in his work. His books were selling, but on the other hand they were not taken seriously enough by serious people. All his novels had ended happily. He decided to write a tragedy.

He ranged his experience for a tragedy. He thought of, and rejected as too ba.n.a.l, the domestic ruptures of his friends past and present. He rejected the story of his mother, widowed young, disappointed in her son, but still pushing on: that was too personal. He thought of Daphne. That might lead to something both exotic and tragic. He recalled her stories of Old Tuys and Chakata, the theme of the lifelong feud. He took a ticket on a plane to the Colony in order to obtain background material at first hand.

Almost immediately he arrived in the Colony he found himself beset by admirers. He had never before been so celebrated and popular in his person. He was invited to Government House. Dinners were given in his honour, and people drove in through swollen rivers from outlying districts to attend them. He had to pick and choose amongst the invitations he received. Everyone with a white skin had heard of, if they had not read, Ralph Mercer. Moreover, seated among this company on wide verandas after dinner he could look round without catching the cool eye of some critic, some frightful man whom the public hardly ever heard of, but who, at home, was always present at parties of this sort, and who put Ralph out. He began to think he had vastly underrated the intelligence of his public.

'I have been thinking of changing my style. I've been thinking of writing a tragedy.'

'Good Lord,' said the retired brigadier whom he had addressed, 'you don't want to do that.'

Everyone said the same.

Another thing everyone said was, 'Why don't you settle here?' or 'Why don't you take a place and live here for part of the year? It's the only way to avoid the heavy taxes.

At the Club he had met Michael Ca.s.se who had come up to the Capital to see the Land Bank about a loan.

'My wife adores your books,' said Michael. He giggled. Ralph wondered for a moment if Michael was a critic.

'We have a mutual friend,' said Michael, 'or rather had. Daphne du Toit. I went to her funeral.' He giggled.

'The reason I've come out here is to see her grave,' said Ralph defensively. 'And to talk to her uncle.'

'Got a car?' said Michael. 'If not I'll drive you down. I live near them.' Ralph realized that Michael's giggle was a nervous tic.

'I might settle in the Colony - seven months in the year, you know,' he confided.

'There's a nice place near us,' said Michael. 'It's coming up for sale soon.

Ralph had been two months in the Colony, had toured the country, had been shown all the interesting spots, and met the enjoyable people, when at last he accepted Michael's invitation to stay at his farm.

'Are you writing anything at the moment?' said Michael's wife.

'No, but I'm collecting material.'

'Oh, will it be about the Colony?'

'It's difficult to say.'

He was not sure now that the Daphne idea would be as appealing as he had thought. He could not envisage his public, especially that section which he had recently met at dose quarters, appreciating such a theme.

Michael showed him over the farm which was up for sale. Ralph said he would almost certainly take it.

They went to see Chakata and Ralph spoke of Daphne. Chakata said, 'Why didn't she settle down in England? Why did she come back?'

'I suppose she wanted to,' said Michael, and giggled.

Chakata spoke of his rheumatism. He hobbled out on the stoep and called for drinks. As they followed, Ralph noticed a lanky old man seated in the corner, muttering to himself.

He inquired of Chakata. 'Is that Mr Tuys? Daphne told me about Mr Tuys.'

Chakata said, 'Bad year for maize. I shan't live long.'

Michael drove Ralph down to the cemetery. His wife had suggested: 'Leave him alone for a while in the cemetery. I think he was in love with the girl.' Michael respected his wife's delicacy. He giggled, left Ralph at the graveside, and explaining that he had some errands to do in the village, said he would be back by and by.

'You won't be long,' said Ralph, 'will you?'

'Oh no,' said Michael.

'There seem to be a lot of mosquitoes about here. Is it a fever area?'

'Oh no.' He giggled and went.

After Ralph had looked at the inscription, 'Daphne du Toit, 1922-1950, he walked up and down. He looked blankly at the gravestones and noticed one inscribed 'Donald Cloete'. This name seemed familiar, but he could not remember in what way. Perhaps it was someone Daphne had talked about.

'Go'way, go'way.'

That was the bird, just behind Daphne's grave. She had often mentioned the bird.

'It says go'way, go'way.

'Well, what about it?' he had said to her irritably, for sometimes she had appeared to him, as in a revelation, a personified Stupidity.

She would tell him, 'There's a bird that says "Go'way, go'way",' without connecting the information with any particular event; she would expect him to be interested, as if he were an ornithologist, not an author.

'Go'way, go'way,' said the bird behind Daphne's grave.

He heard the bird at some time during each day for the next six weeks while he was completing his tour of the rural s.p.a.ces. He was glad to return to the Capital, and to be free of its voice. Relaxing in the Club, it was as though the bird had never existed.

However, he went with the Governor for a round of golf: 'Go'way. Go'way ...'

He booked a seat on the plane to England for the following week. He met Michael once more by chance at Williams Hotel.

'That farm,' said Michael '- someone else has made an offer. You'd better settle right away.'

'I don't want it,' said Ralph. 'I don't want to stay here.' They sat on the stoep drinking highb.a.l.l.s. Beyond the mosquito netting was the bird.

'Can you hear that go-away bird?' said Ralph. Michael listened obediently.

'No, I can't say I can.' He giggled, and Ralph wanted to hit him.

'I hear it everywhere,' said Ralph. 'I don't like it. That's why I'm going.'

'Good Lord. Keen on bird life, are you?'

'No, not particularly.'

'Ralph Mercer isn't going to buy the farm,' Michael told his wife that evening.

'I thought it was settled.'

'No, he's going home. He isn't coming back. He says he doesn't like the birds here.'

'I wish you could cure that giggle, Michael. What did you say he doesn't like?'

'The birds.'

'Birds. Is he an ornithologist then?'

'No, I think he's RC.'

'A man, darling, who studies birds.'

'Oh! Well, no, he said no, he's not particularly interested in birds.'

'How extraordinary,' she said.

The Curtain Blown by the Breeze.

It is always when a curtain at an open window flutters in the breeze that I think of that frail white curtain, a piece of fine gauze, which was drawn across the bedroom windows of Mrs Van der Merwe. I never saw the original curtains, which were so carelessly arranged as to leave a gap through which that piccanin of twelve had peeped, one night three years before, and had watched Mrs Van der Merwe suckle her child, and been caught and shot dead by Jannie, her husband. The original curtains had now been replaced by this more delicate stuff, and the husband's sentence still had five years to run, and meanwhile Mrs Van der Merwe was changing her character.

She stopped slouching; she lost the lanky, sullen look of a smallholder's wife; she cleared the old petrol cans out of the yard, and that was only a start; she became a tall lighthouse sending out kindly beams which some took for welcome instead of warnings against the rocks. She bought the best china, stopped keeping pound notes stuffed in a stocking, called herself Sonia instead of Sonji, and entertained.

This was a territory where you could not bathe in the gentlest stream but a germ from the water entered your kidneys and blighted your body for life; where you could not go for a walk before six in the evening without returning crazed by the sun; and in this remote part of the territory, largely occupied by poor whites amidst the overwhelming natural growth of natives, a young spinster could not keep a cat for a pet but it would be one day captured and pitifully shaved by the local white bachelors for fun; it was a place where the tall gra.s.s was dangerous from snakes and the floors dangerous from scorpions. The white people seized on the slightest word, Nature took the lightest footfall, with fanatical seriousness. The English nurses discovered that they could not sit next a man at dinner and be agreeable - perhaps asking him, so as to slice up the boredom, to tell them all the story of his life - without his taking it for a great flirtation and turning up next day after breakfast for the love affair; it was a place where there was never a breath of breeze except in the season of storms and where the curtains in the windows never moved in the breeze unless a storm was to follow.

The English nurses were often advised to put in for transfers to another district.

'It's so much brighter in the north. Towns, life. Civilization, shops. Much cooler - you see, it's high up there in the north. The races.'

'You would like it in the east - those orange-planters. Everything is greener, there's a huge valley. Shooting.'

'Why did they send you nurses to this unhealthy spot? You should go to a healthy spot.'

Some of the nurses left Fort Beit. But those of us who were doing tropical diseases had to stay on, because our clinic, the largest in the Colony, was also a research centre for tropical diseases. Those of us who had to stay on used sometimes to say to each other, 'Isn't it wonderful here? Heaps of servants. Cheap drinks. Birds, beasts, flowers.

The place was not without its strange marvels. I never got used to its travel-film colours except in the dry season when the dust made everything real. The dust was thick in the great yard behind the clinic where the natives squatted and stood about, shouting or laughing - it came to the same thing - cooking and eating, while they awaited treatment, or the results of X-rays, or the results of an X-ray of a distant relative. They gave off a fierce smell and kicked up the dust. The sore eyes of the babies were always beset by flies, but the babies slept on regardless, slung on their mothers' backs, and when they woke and cried the women suckled them.

The poor whites of Fort Beit and its area had a reception room of their own inside the building, and here they ate the food they had brought, and lolled about in long silences, sometimes working up to a fight in a corner. The remainder of the society of Fort Beit did not visit the clinic.