1972 - A Story Like the Wind (58 page)

There was, too, another remarkable thing in this connection. The more powerful and brave the animal, like the elephant or even lion, the more gentle and tender were its natural ways, however quick and ruthless the act of killing in self-defence or for food had to be. He would love to show them to her in the midst of their families, considerate, delicate and wise, purring sounds of experience to their young. The instinct of the fearless and strong to live and let live was strongest in such powerful animals.

He would like, too, to show her one day also the other side of
isi-Vuba
and how, for instance, it was a great architect and engineer. How it built a cunning, impregnable home in the banks of the river, tunnelling anything from eight to twelve feet deep into them, in an expert manner which would make her proud of it, and see that it was not an unworthy image for a father who was building so formidably on a hill.

François’s explanation, long for him, did something to restore Luciana’s natural high spirits. She had been watching the river while he had been speaking and now it did not mean entirely what it had meant to her in the beginning. Now it was her turn to feel as if the river also had a current inside herself, carrying up on game, it’ll fly straight up in the air, calling out at the top of its complaining voice to draw attention to us. It’s a conceited little bird, with a crown of feathers on its head, a Roman nose and a proper magistrate’s beak, just ordering everybody about. Listen…it’s one of the few birds I know who speaks English... can you hear?

Yes, she heard it plainly and with satisfaction, ordering them off with a judge’s weary enunciation: ‘Oh go-go-go-away I Go away!’

Finishing School of the Bush

T
hey arrived back in camp rather late for lunch. Had it not been for the fact that Sir James had not only thoroughly enjoyed his morning with Mopani, but been given much cause for deliberation over the message Mopani had brought him, he would have scolded his daughter for keeping them waiting, and would have been correspondingly distant in his manner with François. His good humour, however, had been encouraged by several glasses of his favourite sherry straight from the large white refrigerator looming in his dining-tent. As a result, he could not have been more gracious in the way he presided at table. He helped them to the most precious delicacies from the hamper which was sent regularly to him from a great London store that had specialized for centuries in administering to the tastes of Englishmen condemned to exile in the service of the Empire.

Besides, there was a new element at work in Sir James’s mind, and it was of particular importance to François. Mopani’s love of François, and the way he had spoken of him not as a young boy but as an equal and a respected partner, had had a considerable impact on Sir James, who was at heart a thoroughly honourable and decent person.

So for the first time François was addressed straightforwardly as François, an event so unexpected that he nearly choked over a spoonful of hot turtle soup. Nor did the change fail to escape Sir James’s daughter. Her spirits were already so bright and high that one would have thought them raised to the ultimate, since nothing confirms friendship so much as a feeling of having done something together, apart from a mere exchange of ideas, however congenial. Even so, this slight sign that her father now might lift the mental sanctions which he had applied to François and see him as she was seeing him, was almost too much for her.

The stimulus indeed was so great that for once she sat and ate in silence, not listening to the conversation but watching, as one watches the faces of actors in a theatre, the expressions of the men as they talked, obviously finding in the wise way of children and primitive people, that the look in the human eye ultimately says far more than any words devised by the most articulate of men. So unusual was her silence that Sir James misinterpreted it, and reproached her for having done too much by going on the long excursion to the river and tiring herself unnecessarily.

This reproach only increased Amelia’s criticism of her employer. To her, it was further evidence of how much Sir James still had to learn about her sex, provided he still had it in him to learn, which she was inclined to doubt. For her, the meaning of the silence could not have been plainer. Already she was beginning to believe that the most difficult moment of all in her relationship with Luciana was approaching, when, as she put it to herself, even the horse which had figured so prominently in her early morning soliloquy, would be put permanently out to grass in the young girl’s spirit, and only its rider would be left in the centre of a storm of fantasy.

But the greatest surprise of all came towards the end of the meal. Sir James was pressing Mopani to more Stilton, Bath clivers and coffee. Mopani, whom François thought had just about as great a natural sense of the importance of good manners as !#grave;Bamuthi, declined politely, explaining that if they were to get to Hunter’s Drift before Sir James and his party, he and François should really be on their way.

François’s surprise was great and he certainly showed it. For Sir James had been so lively, dominating the conversation at table almost as if he was once more in the cuddy of one of Her Majesty’s ships, that Mopani had not had a chance to tell François of the plan which he and Sir James had made. This was that they should hasten to Mopani’s camp in order to telephone the Government in the capital. For the message which Mopani had brought was an urgent summons requesting Sir James’s immediate return to London to head a Royal Commission appointed to examine aid for what were now called the developing countries in Africa. The summons could not have come at a more inconvenient moment from Sir James’s point of view. Yet he would not have been so successful in his career if he had not, in a sense, been born to it. Although he would go through all the motions of asking for more information about the appointment offered to him, he already knew instinctively that he would be compelled to accept it.

So, at Mopani’s suggestion, he was going to leave Amelia and his daughter at Hunter’s Drift for the three or four days that it would take him to travel to Mopani’s camp and back.

Seeing Francis’s surprise, Mopani, now somewhat aggrieved that the news had had to be broken in this way, immediately apologized for not first telling him of the arrangement. Happily the look on François’s face made any explanation of how much he welcomed the decision superfluous. But the most unexpected reaction of all came from Luciana. She jumped from her chair, skipped round the table and stopping beside François’s chair said in a bright, clear and rather bird-like voice, ‘Oh go-go-go-away! Go away!’ She laughed unashamedly, certain that François would understand even if no one else did. And that was all that mattered.

But Sir James took her outburst literally and reproved her sharply, ‘Attention Chisai, attention! You must be very tired to speak like that to one of our guests.’

Unabashed, she came to attention, giving him a mock salute and saying, ‘Aye-aye sir.’

To François, the time between the arrival of Sir James, Amelia and Luciana at Hunter’s Drift that evening and the return of Sir James and Mopani three and a half days later, passed far too quickly. Although he rose early on the morning after the arrival of his guests, to make certain that Mopani and Sir James had a proper breakfast before they left on their journey, he found Luciana already in the kitchen helping Ousie-Johanna, while Amelia, serene and august, was in Ousie-Johanna’s place of honour at the head of the table with a large pot of coffee to herself. Her state of mind about her Luciana seemed to have changed, for she showed no trace of concern now in the fact that Luciana was darting around in the kitchen in her pyjamas.

The moment François walked in, Luciana, without bothering to say ‘Good morning’ announced, as if it were a message of the greatest importance, ‘Do you know, your Ousie’s calling me Nonnie, too?’

François, feeling that if Ousie-Johanna had not done just that, he would have been compelled to remonstrate over such a lack of good manners (since ‘little mistress’ was the polite form of address for her in the circumstances), merely answered, ‘I should hope so!’

Disappointed that he apparently did not see how significant it was for her, she could only gape at him and exclaim, ‘Oh!’

She may even have stayed abashed for a full minute, were she not feeling far too happy to let anything distress her. So she quickly said what a pity it was that she couldn’t speak Ousie-Johanna’s language, because she was certain that the ‘Lady of the Kitchen’ was trying to tell her things of the greatest interest.

François explained all this faithfully to Ousie-Johanna whose cup of joy, already full by having Amelia at the head of her table, flowed over at such amply merited appreciation of her experience and wisdom. Tears came to her eyes and she asked François, ‘Please tell the Little old Nonnie that I was merely explaining to her how important it was to know exactly how to pour coffee into a pot. It is not only a question of having the pot hot first but of getting the right amount into it. Now take your Lammie. We all know she is no fool, but you know it is impossible to get her to get a pint of coffee into that pot. It takes experience to do it and in this house, I am the only one who has ever been able to do so.’

François explained this to Luciana and took the precaution of saying, ‘You must please be careful not to laugh. And look properly impressed. She was trying to tell you that she is the only person who can get a pint of coffee into that pot which will not hold a pint for anybody else. But really she has no idea what a pint is.’

Ousie-Johanna, thus encouraged, told him to tell Nonnie that she must not worry about her father going off with Mopani. ‘Tell her, please,’ she begged François, ‘that Mopani will take good care of her father. He has more backbone in his little finger than most people have in the whole of their hand…And tell her that the moment I have done breakfast, I’ll pray for them and play ‘God be with you till we meet again’ on the gramophone.’

François, after another precautionary warning to Nonnie, translated word for word what she had said. Somehow, sharing these secret sources of amusement added immeasurably to François’s and Nonnie’s relationship.

During the whole of the period that Sir James and Mopani were absent François felt his duties as a host justified him in suspending his own schooling. Every morning after breakfast, before the heat of the day, he would set out with Nonnie to show her some of the many things in the bush that were dear to him. He did this not on horseback as Nonnie, if consulted, perhaps might have preferred, but on foot. For him, going on foot out into the bush with Hintza was by far the best way of discovering the world of the small, the shy and the defenceless, which were for him the true glory of his world. It was all part of the Bushman concept of things that his beloved Old Koba had, for good or ill, induced in him, so that the importance of the small mattered far more to him than the physically great. Old Koba had had charge of François’s imagination for the first nine years of his life, and in one profound aspect of himself, she had transformed him into a Bushman. That is one of the many complex reasons why the coming of Xhabbo had meant so much to him. And it was like an inspired Bushman that he took Nonnie on excursions to see the secret life of the bush. He never thought of her now as Luciana. He was, indeed, so surprised when somebody called her by that name that he would look around him as if for a stranger.

On their first excursion he had some opposition from Amelia to overcome, and he might not have been successful had not Ousie-Johanna come to his support. Although Ousie-Johanna and Amelia had hardly a dozen words in common, painfully coined, they had acquired an impressive Esperanto of noises, looks and gestures more meaningful, immediate and satisfying than any fragmentary exchange of words could have been.

Despite the acute anxieties Ousie-Johanna had suffered on François’s account in the past, she secretly had the utmost confidence in him as a hunter and woodsman. Also it was only natural to her that François and Nonnie, like all the young of her own and !#grave;Bamuthi’s people, should go out into the bush to enjoy themselves, like those she had known in the far south, where all the young were allowed to swim and play freely in the blue Indian Ocean.

Significantly enough, Amelia’s greatest worry appeared to be that on these excursions François took Luciana on foot. Seeing the three of them, Hintza in the lead, then François and finally Luciana, vanishing into that great bush, was almost too much for her. For one thing the bush was always so disquieting, murmuring and whispering, its green, copper and burnished leaves quivering and trembling, sun-shattering and light-tapping, even in the airless hours of day as if they were registering the beat of the heart of a hidden, powerful and potentially antagonistic force. That alone frightened her. Then at heart she was always homesick for one of those little Portuguese towns which, remembered even in exile, pre-suppose a tranquil square, a small bandstand in the centre, music at night-fall and the smell of scarlet geraniums heavy on the air to invest it, as it were, with incense for the communion of man at the end of a day of labour with the sanctity of starry and God-like nights.

Also it was for her the final proof that the great innocent epoch of horses had for ever come to an end. Now, for good or ill, Luciana was at the frontier of the enigmatic age of man, where heart and mind have to dismount inwardly and go on foot, slowly, step by step, into the unknown future. No governess could give assistance. Only life and always (here she would cross herself very quickly) such guidance as the Church and the saints in Heaven had provided could protect them. But since the massacre, although Amelia would have been the last person to admit it, her belief in such guidance was no longer what once it had been.

This reasoning, which was not thought but pure peasant intuition was so profound that, after arguing in vain against Fran-gois’s first excursion when she saw them all vanishing into the bush, she burst into tears. Quickly she was taken into Ousie-Johanna’s arms, and later consoled by coffee and fluffy buns. When in doubt, Ousie-Johanna firmly believed, food and drink came first, and then prayer and song.