This Was the Old Chief's Country (52 page)

‘And you're not eighteen yet,' she said, smiling to soften the words. She was thinking that it was a sad falling-off from what she had hoped. What was he? A small-worker. Half-educated, without ambition, dependent on the terrible thing, luck. He might be a small-worker all his life, with James for companion, drinking at week-ends, the African woman in the kitchen – oh, yes, she knew what went on, although he seemed to think she was a fool. And if they were lucky, he would become a rich man, one of the big financiers of the sub-continent. It was possible, anything was possible – she smiled tolerantly and said nothing.

That night she lay awake, trying to arouse in herself the courage to tell Alec. She could not. At breakfast she watched his absorbed, remote face, and tried to find the words. They would not come. After the meal he went into his office, and she went quickly inside. Shading her eyes she looked across the mealie-fields to the ridge. Yes, there went the heavy wagons, laden with the black bulk of the headgear, great pipes, pulleys: Alec had only to look out of his window to see. She slowly went inside and said: ‘Alec, I want to tell you something.' He did not lift his eyes. ‘What is it?' he asked, impatiently.

‘Come with me for a minute.' He looked at her, frowned, then shrugged and went after her. She pointed at the red dust track that showed in the scrub and said: ‘Look.' Her voice sounded like a little girl's.

He glanced at the laden wagons, then slowly moved his eyes along the ridge to where the diggings showed.

‘What is it?' he asked. She tried to speak and found that her lips were trembling. Inside she was crying: Poor thing; poor, poor thing! ‘What is it?' he demanded again. Then, after a pause: ‘Have they found something?'

‘Yes,' she brought out at last.

‘Any good?'

‘They say it might be very good.' She dared to give him a
sideways glance. His face was thoughtful, no more, and she was encouraged to say: ‘James and Paul are partners.'

‘And on that ridge,' he exclaimed at last. There was no resentment in his voice. She glanced at him again, ‘It seems hard, doesn't it?' he said, slowly; and at once she clutched his arm and said: ‘Yes, my dear, it is, it is, I'm so very sorry …' And here she began to cry. She wanted to take him in her arms and comfort him. But he was still gazing over at the ridge. ‘I never tried just that place,' he said, thoughtfully. She stopped crying. ‘Funny, I was going to sink a trench just there, and then – I forget why I didn't.'

‘Yes?' she said, in a little voice. She was understanding that it was all right. Then he remarked: ‘I always said there was gold on that ridge, and there is. I always said it, didn't I?'

‘Yes, my dear, you did – where are you going?' she added, for he was walking away, the divining rod swinging from his hand.

‘I'll just drop over and do a bit of work around their trenches,' she heard as he went, ‘If they know how the reefs lie, then I can test …'

He vanished into the bush, walking fast, the tails of his bushshirt flying.

When Paul saw him coming he went forward to meet him, smiling a rather sickly smile, his heart beating with guilt, and all Alec said was: ‘Your mother told me you'd struck it lucky. Mind if I use my rod around here a bit?' And then, as Paul remained motionless from surprise, he said, impatiently: ‘Come on, there's a good kid, I'm in a hurry.'

And as the labourers unloaded the heavy machinery and James and Paul directed the work, Alec walked in circles and in zigzags, the rods rising and falling in his hands like a variety of trapped insects, his face rapt with thought. He was oblivious to everything. They had to pull him aside to avoid being crushed by the machinery. When, at midday, they asked him to share their cold meat, and broke it to him that they had found a second reef, even richer than the first, with every prospect of ‘going as deep as China', all he said was, and in a proud, pleased voice: ‘Well, that proves it. I told you, didn't I? I always told you so.'

Beyond the plain rose the mountains, blue and hazy in a strong blue sky. Coming closer they were brown and grey and green, ranged heavily one beside the other, but the sky was still blue. Climbing up through the pass the plain flattened and diminished behind, and the peaks rose sharp and dark grey from lower heights of heaped granite boulders, and the sky overhead was deeply blue and clear and the heat came shimmering off in waves from every surface. ‘Through the range, down the pass, and into the plain the other side – let's go quickly, there it will be cooler, the walking easier.' So thinks the traveller. So the traveller has been thinking for many centuries, walking quickly to leave the stifling mountains, to gain the cool plain where the wind moves freely. But there is no plain. Instead, the pass opens into a hollow which is closely surrounded by kopjes: the mountains clench themselves into a fist here, and the palm is a mile-wide reach of thick bush, where the heat gathers and clings, radiating from boulders, rocking off the trees, pouring down from a sky which is not blue, but thick and low and yellow, because of the smoke that rises, and has been rising so long from this mountain-imprisoned hollow. For though it is hot and close and arid half the year, and then warm and steamy and wet in the rains, there is gold here, so there are always people, and everywhere in the bush are pits and slits where the prospectors have been, or shallow holes, or even deep shafts. They say that the Bushmen were here, seeking gold, hundreds of years ago. Perhaps, it is possible. They say that trains of Arabs came from the coast, with slaves and warriors, looking for gold to enrich the courts of the Queen of Sheba. No one has proved they did not.

But it is at least certain that at the turn of the century there
was a big mining company which sank half a dozen fabulously deep shafts, and found gold going ounces to the ton sometimes, but it is a capricious and chancy piece of ground, with reefs all broken and unpredictable, and so this company loaded its heavy equipment into lorries and off they went to look for gold somewhere else, and in a place where the reefs lay more evenly.

For a few years the hollow in the mountains was left silent, no smoke rose to dim the sky, except perhaps for an occasional prospector, whose fire was a single column of wavering blue smoke, as from the cigarette of a giant, rising into the blue, hot sky.

Then all at once the hollow was filled with violence and noise and activity and hundreds of people. Mr Macintosh had bought the rights to mine this gold. They told him he was foolish, that no single man, no matter how rich, could afford to take chances in this place.

But they did not reckon with the character of Mr Macintosh, who had already made a fortune and lost it, in Australia, and then made another in New Zealand, which he still had. He proposed to increase it here. Of course, he had no intention of sinking those expensive shafts which might or might not reach gold and hold the dipping, chancy reefs and seams. The right course was quite clear to Mr Macintosh, and this course he followed, though it was against every known rule of proper mining.

He simply hired hundreds of African labourers and set them to shovel up the soil in the centre of that high, enclosed hollow in the mountains, so that there was soon a deeper hollow, then a vast pit, then a gulf like an inverted mountain. Mr Macintosh was taking great swallows of the earth, like a gold-eating monster, with no fancy ideas about digging shafts or spending money on roofing tunnels. The earth was hauled, at first, up the shelving sides of the gulf in buckets, and these were suspended by ropes made of twisted bark fibre, for why spend money on steel ropes when this fibre was offered free to mankind on every tree? And if it got brittle and broke and the buckets went plunging into the pit, then they were not harmed by the fall, and there was plenty of fibre left on the trees. Later,
when the gulf grew too deep, there were trucks on rails, and it was not unknown for these, too, to go sliding and plunging to the bottom, because in all Mr Macintosh's dealings there was a fine, easy good-humour, which meant he was more likely to laugh at such an accident than grow angry. And if someone's head got in the way of falling buckets or trucks, then there were plenty of black heads and hands for the hiring. And if the loose, sloping bluffs of soil fell in landslides, or if a tunnel, narrow as an antbear's hole, that was run off sideways from the main pit like a tentacle exploring for new reefs, caved in suddenly, swallowing half a dozen men – well, one can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. This was Mr Macintosh's favourite motto.

The Africans who worked this mine called it ‘the pit of death', and they called Mr Macintosh ‘The Gold Stomach'. Nevertheless, they came in their hundreds to work for him, thus providing free arguments for those who said: ‘The native doesn't understand good treatment, he only appreciates the whip, look at Macintosh, he's never short of labour.'

Mr Macintosh's mine, raised high in the mountains, was far from the nearest police station, and he took care that there was always plenty of kaffir beer brewed in the compound, and if the police patrols came searching for criminals, these could count on Mr Macintosh facing the police for them and assuring them that such and such a native, Registration Number Y2345678, had never worked for him. Yes, of course they could see his books.

Mr Macintosh's books and records might appear to the simple-minded as casual and ineffective, but these were not the words used of his methods by those who worked for him, and so Mr Macintosh kept his books himself. He employed no book-keeper, no clerk. In fact, he employed only one white man, an engineer. For the rest, he had six overseers or bossboys whom he paid good salaries and treated like important people.

The engineer was Mr Clarke, and his house and Mr Macintosh's house were on one side of the big pit, and the compound for the Africans was on the other side. Mr Clarke earned fifty pounds a month, which was more than he would earn anywhere else. He was a silent, hardworking man, except when he got
drunk, which was not often. Three or four times in the year he would be off work for a week, and then Mr Macintosh did his work for him till he recovered, when he greeted him with the good-humoured words: ‘Well, laddie, got that off your chest?'

Mr Macintosh did not drink at all. His not drinking was a passionate business, for like many Scots people he ran to extremes. Never a drop of liquor could be found in his house. Also, he was religious, in a reminiscent sort of way, because of his parents, who had been very religious. He lived in a two-roomed shack, with a bare wooden table in it, three wooden chairs, a bed and a wardrobe. The cook boiled beef and carrots and potatoes three days a week, roasted beef three days, and cooked a chicken on Sundays.

Mr Macintosh was one of the richest men in the country, he was more than a millionaire. People used to say to him: But for heaven's sake, he could do anything, go anywhere, what's the point of having so much money if you live in the back of beyond with a parcel of blacks on top of a big hole in the ground?

But to Mr Macintosh it seemed quite natural to live so, and when he went for a holiday to Cape Town, where he lived in the most expensive hotel, he always came back again long before he was expected. He did not like holidays. He liked working.

He wore old, oily khaki trousers, tied at the waist with an old red tie, and he wore a red handkerchief loose around his neck over a white singlet. He was short and broad and strong, with a big square head tilted back on a thick neck. His heavy brown arms and neck sprouted thick black hair around the edges of the singlet. His eyes were small and grey and shrewd. His mouth was thin, pressed tight in the middle. He wore an old felt hat on the back of his head, and carried a stick cut from the bush, and he went strolling around the edge of the pit, slashing the stick at bushes and grass or sometimes at lazy Africans, and he shouted orders to his bossboys, and watched the swarms of workers far below him in the bottom of the pit, and then he would go to his little office and make up his books, and so he spent his day. In the evenings he sometimes asked Mr Clarke to come over and play cards.

Then Mr Clarke would say to his wife: ‘Annie, he wants me,' and she nodded and told her cook to make supper early.

Mrs Clarke was the only white woman on the mine. She did not mind this, being a naturally solitary person. Also, she had been profoundly grateful to reach this haven of fifty pounds a month with a man who did not mind her husband's bouts of drinking. She was a woman of early middle age, with a thin, flat body, a thin, colourless face, and quiet blue eyes. Living here, in this destroying heat, year after year, did not make her ill, it sapped her slowly, leaving her rather numbed and silent. She spoke very little, but then she roused herself and said what was necessary.

For instance, when they first arrived at the mine it was to a two-roomed house. She walked over to Mr Macintosh and said: ‘You are alone, but you have four rooms. There are two of us and the baby, and we have two rooms. There's no sense in it.' Mr Macintosh gave her a quick, hard look, his mouth tightened, and then he began to laugh. ‘Well, yes, that is so,' he said, laughing, and he made the change at once, chuckling every time he remembered how the quiet Annie Clarke had put him in his place.

Similarly, about once a month Annie Clarke went to his house and said: ‘Now get out of my way, I'll get things straight for you.' And when she'd finished tidying up she said: ‘You're nothing but a pig, and that's the truth.' She was referring to his habit of throwing his clothes everywhere, or wearing them for weeks unwashed, and also to other matters which no one else dared to refer to, even as indirectly as this. To this he might reply, chuckling with the pleasure of teasing her: ‘You're a married woman, Mrs Clarke,' and she said: ‘Nothing stops you getting married that I can see.' And she walked away very straight, her cheeks burning with indignation.