The Complete Short Stories (2 page)

Daphne was put up on a
camp bed in Mrs Coates’s bedroom. She noticed that her hostess had no revolver
by her side, nor was anyone on sentry duty outside the door.

‘Aren’t you afraid of
the munts?’ said Daphne.

‘Good gracious, why? Our
boys are marvellous.’

‘Auntie Chakata always
sleeps with a pistol by her side.’

‘Is she afraid of rape,
then?’ said Mrs Coates. All the children in the Colony understood the term;
rape was a capital offence, and on very remote occasions the Colony would be
astir about a case of rape, whether the accused was a white man or a black.

It was a new thought to
Daphne that Mrs Chakata might fear rape, not murder as she had supposed. She
looked at Mrs Coates with wonder. ‘There isn’t anyone, is there, would rape
Auntie Chakata?’ Mrs Coates was smiling to herself.

Often, when she was out
with the Coates children, Daphne would hear the go-away bird. One day when the
children were walking through a field of maize, the older Coates boy, John,
said to Daphne,

‘Why do you suddenly
stop still like that?’

‘I’m listening to the
go-away bird,’ she said.

Her face was shaded
under the wide brim of her hat, and the maize rose all round her, taller than
herself. John Coates, who was sixteen, folded his arms and looked at her, for
it was an odd thing for a little girl to notice the go-away bird.

‘What are you looking
at?’ she said.

He didn’t answer. The
maize reached to his shoulder. He was put into a dither, and so he continued to
look at her, arms folded, as if he felt confident.

‘Don’t stand like that,’
Daphne said. ‘You remind me of Old Tuys.

John immediately
laughed. He took his opportunity to gain a point, to alleviate his awkwardness
and support his pose. ‘You got a handful there with Old Tuys,’ he said.

‘Old Tuys is the best
tobacco baas in the country,’ she said defiantly. ‘Uncle Chakata likes Old
Tuys.’

‘No, he does not like
him,’ said John.

‘Yes, he does so, or he
wouldn’t keep him on.’

‘My girl,’ said John, ‘I
know why Chakata keeps on Old Tuys.
You
know. Everyone knows. It isn’t
because he likes him.’

They moved on to join
the other children. Daphne wondered why Chakata kept on Old Tuys.

They scrounged a lift to
the dorp. The Coates family were uninhibited about speaking Afrikaans, chatting
in rapid gutturals to people they met while Daphne stood by, shyly following
what she could of the conversation.

They were to return to
the car at five o’clock, and it was now only half past three. Daphne took her
chance and slipped away from the group through the post office and out at the
back yard where the natives were squatting round their mealie-pot. They watched
her with their childish interest as she made her way past the native huts and
the privies and out on the sanitary lane at the foot of the yard.

Daphne nipped across a
field and up the steep track of Donald Cloete’s kopje. It bore this name,
because Donald Cloete was the only person who lived on the hill, although there
were several empty shacks surrounding his.

Donald Cloete had been
to Cambridge. Indoors, he had two photographs on the wall. One was Donald in
the cricket team, not easily recognizable behind his wide, curly moustache and
among the other young men who looked so like him and stood in the same stiff,
self-assured manner that Daphne had observed in pictures of the Pioneer heroes.
The picture was dated 1898. Another group showed Donald in uniform among his comrades
of the Royal Flying Corps. It was dated 1918, but Donald behind his moustache
did not look much older than he appeared in the Cambridge picture.

Daphne looked round the
open door and saw Donald seated in his dilapidated cane chair. His white shirt
was stained with beetroot.

‘Are you drunk, Donald,’
she inquired politely, ‘or are you sober?’

Donald always told the
truth. ‘I’m sober,’ he said. ‘Come in.’

At fifty-six his
appearance now had very little in common with the young Cambridge cricketer or
the RFC pilot. He had been in hundreds of jobs, had married and lost his wife
to a younger and more energetic man. The past eight years had been the most
settled in his life, for he was Town Clerk of the dorp, a job which made few
demands on punctuality, industry, smartness of appearance, and concentration,
which qualities Donald lacked. Sometimes when the Council held its monthly
meeting, and Donald happened to stagger in late and drunk, the Chairman would
ask Donald to leave the meeting, and in his absence propose his dismissal.
Sometimes they unanimously dismissed him and after the meeting he was informed
of the decision. However, next day Donald would dress himself cleanly and call
in to see the butcher with a yarn about the RFC; he would call on the headmaster
who had been to Cambridge some years later than Donald; and after doing a round
of the Council members he would busy himself in the district, would ride for
miles on his bicycle seeing that fences were up where they should be, and
signposts which had fallen in the rains set upright and prominent. Within a
week, Donald’s dismissal would be ignored by everyone. He would relax then, and
if he entered up a birth or a death during the week, it was a good week’s work.

‘Who brought you from
the farm?’ said Donald.

‘Ticky Talbot,’ said
Daphne.

‘Nice to see you,’ said
Donald. And he called to his servant for tea.

‘Five more years and
then I go to England,’ said Daphne, for this was the usual subject between
them, and she did not feel it right to come to the real purpose of her visit so
soon.

‘That will be the time,’
said Donald. ‘When you go to England, that will be the time.’ And he told her
all over again about the water meadows at Cambridge, the country pubs, the
hedging and ditching, the pink-coated riders.

Donald’s ragged native
brought in tea in two big cups, holding one in each hand. One he gave to Daphne
and the other to Donald.

How small, Donald said,
were the English streams which never dried up. How small the fields, little
bits of acreage, and none of the cottage women bitchy for they did their own
housework and had no time to bitch. And then, of course, the better classes
taking tea in their long galleries throughout the land, in springtime, with the
pale sunlight dripping through the mullioned windows on to the mellow Old
Windsor chairs, and the smell of hyacinths…

‘Oh, I see. Now tell me
about London, Donald. Tell me about the theatres and bioscopes.

‘They don’t say “bioscope”
there, they say “cinema” or “the pictures”.

‘I say, Donald,’ she
said, for she noticed it was twenty-past four, ‘I want you to tell me something
straight.’

‘Fire ahead,’ said
Donald.

‘Why does Uncle Chakata
keep on Old Tuys?’

‘I don’t want to lose my
job,’ he said.

‘Upon my honour,’ she
said, ‘if you tell me about Old Tuys I shan’t betray you.’

‘The whole Colony knows
the story,’ said Donald, ‘but the first one to tell it to you is bound to come
up against Chakata.’

‘May I drop dead on this
floor,’ she said, ‘if I tell my Uncle Chakata on you.

‘How old are you, now?’
Donald said.

‘Nearly thirteen.’

‘It was two years before
you were born — that would make it fifteen years ago, when Old Tuys…’

Old Tuys had already
been married for some time to a Dutch girl from Pretoria. Long before he took
the job at Chakata’s he knew of her infidelities. They had one peculiarity: her
taste was exclusively for Englishmen. The young English settlers whom she met
in the various establishments where Tuys was employed were, guilty or not,
invariably accosted by Tuys: ‘You committed adultery with my wife, you swine.’
There might be a fight, or Tuys would threaten his gun. However it might be,
and whether or not these young men were his wife’s lovers, Tuys was usually
turned off the job.

It was said he was going
to shoot his wife and arrange it to look like an accident. Simply because this
intention was widely reported, he could not have carried out the plan
successfully, even if he did, in fact, contemplate the deed. Certainly he beat
her up from time to time.

Tuys hoped eventually to
get a farm of his own. Chakata, who knew of his troubles, took Tuys on to learn
the tobacco sheds. Tuys and his wife moved into a small house on Chakata’s
land. ‘Any trouble with the lady, Tuys,’ said Chakata, ‘come to me, for in a
young country like this, with four white men to every one white woman, there is
bound to be trouble.’

There was trouble the
first week with a trooper.

‘Look here, Tuys,’ said
Chakata, ‘I’ll talk to her.’ He had frequently in his life had the painful duty
of giving his servants a talking-to on sex. At the Pattersons’ home in England
it had been a routine affair.

Hatty Tuys was not
beautiful: in fact she was dark and scraggy. However, Chakata not only failed
to reform her, he succumbed to her. She wept. She said she hated Tuys.

Donald paused in his story
to remark to Daphne, ‘Mind you, this sort of thing doesn’t happen in England.’

‘Doesn’t it?’ said
Daphne.

‘Oh well, there are love
affairs but they take time. You have to sort of build them up with a woman. In
England, a man of Chakata’s importance might feel sorry for a slut if she
started to cry, but he wouldn’t just make love to her on the spot. The climate’s
cooler there, you see, and there are a lot more girls.’

‘Oh, I see,’ said
Daphne. ‘What did Uncle Chakata do next?’

‘Well, as soon as he had
played the fool with Mrs Tuys he felt sorry. He told her it was a moment of
weakness and it would never occur again. But it did.’

‘Did Tuys find out?’

‘Tuys found out. He went
to Mrs Chakata and tried to rape her.’

‘Didn’t it come off?’

‘No, it didn’t come off.’

‘It must have been the
whisky in her breath. It must have put him off,’ said Daphne.

‘In England,’ said
Donald, ‘girls your age don’t know very much about these things.’

‘Oh, I see,’ said
Daphne.

‘It’s all different
there. Well, Mrs Chakata complained to Chakata, and wanted him to shoot Tuys.
He refused, of course, and he gave Tuys a rise and made him manager. And from
that day he wouldn’t look at Mrs Tuys, wouldn’t even look at her. Whenever he
caught sight of her about the farm, he looked the other way. In the end she
wrote to Chakata to say she was mad in love with him and if she couldn’t have
him she would shoot herself. The note was written in block letters, in
Afrikaans.’

‘Chakata would never
answer it, then,’ Daphne said.

‘You are right,’ said Donald.
‘And Mrs Tuys shot herself. Old Tuys has sworn to be revenged on Chakata some
day. That’s why Mrs Chakata has a gun at her bedside. She has implored Chakata
to get rid of Old Tuys. So he should, of course.’

‘He can’t, very well,
when you think of it,’ said Daphne.

‘It’s only his remorse,’
said Donald, ‘and his English honour. If Old Tuys was an Englishman, Daphne, he
would have cleared off the farm long ago. But no, he remains, he has sworn on
the Bible to be revenged.’

‘It must be our climate,’
said Daphne. ‘I have never liked the way Old Tuys looks at me.’

‘The Colony is a savage
place,’ he said. He rose and poured himself a whisky. ‘I grant you,’ he said, ‘we
have the natives under control. I grant you we have the leopards under control
—’

‘Oh, remember Moses,’
said Daphne. Her former playmate, Moses, had been got by a leopard two years
ago.

‘That was exceptional.
We are getting control over malaria. But we haven’t got the
savage in
ourselves
under control. This place brings out
the savage in ourselves.’
He finished his drink and poured another. ‘If you go to England,’ he said, ‘don’t
come back.’

‘Oh, I see,’ said
Daphne.

She was ten minutes late
when she arrived at the car. The party had been anxious about her.

‘Where did you get to?
You slipped away … we asked everywhere … John Coates said in a mock-girlish
tone, ‘Oh, she’s been listening to the go-away bird out on the lone wide veldt.’

‘Five more years and
then I go to England. Four years … three … Meanwhile, life in the Colony
seemed to become more exciting every year. In fact, it went on as usual, but
Daphne’s capacity for excitement developed as she grew into her teens.

She had a trip to Kenya
to stay with a married cousin, another trip to Johannesburg with Mrs Coates to
buy clothes.

‘Typical English beauty
Daphne’s turning out to be,’ said Chakata. In reality she was too blonde to be
typically English; she took after her father’s family, the Cape du Toits, who
were a mixture of Dutch and Huguenot stock.

At sixteen she passed
her matric and her name was entered for a teachers’ training college in the
Capital. During the holidays she flirted with John Coates, who would drive her
round the countryside in the little German Volkswagen which his father had
obtained for him. They would go on Sunday afternoons to the Williams Hotel on
the great main road for tea and a swim in the bathing-pool with all the
district who converged there weekly from farms and towns.

‘In England,’ Daphne
would tell him, ‘you can bathe in the rivers. No bilharzia there, no crocs.

‘There’s going to be a
war in Europe,’ said John.

Daphne would sit on the
hotel stoep in her smart new linen slacks, sipping her gin and lime, delighted
and amazed to be grown-up, to be greeted by her farming neighbours.

“Lo, Daphne, how are
your mealies?’

‘Not too bad, how are
yours?’

‘Halo, Daphne, how’s the
tobacco?’

‘Rotten, Old Tuys says.’

‘I hear Chakata’s sold
La Flèche.’