This Was the Old Chief's Country (26 page)

George and Smoke were then free to talk about things like the head driver's quarrels with his new wife, or how Smoke himself was thinking of taking a young wife. George would laugh and say: ‘You old rascal. What do you want with a wife at your age?' And Smoke would reply that an old man needed a young body for warmth during the cold weather.

Nor was old Smoke afraid of becoming stern, though reproachful, as if he momentarily regarded himself as George's father, when he said: ‘Little Baas, it is time you got married. It is time there was a woman on this farm.' And George would laugh and reply that he certainly agreed he should get married, but that he could find no woman to suit him.

Once Smoke suggested: ‘The baas will perhaps fetch himself a wife from England?' And George knew then that it was discussed in the compound how he had a photograph of a girl
on his dressing-table: old Smoke's son was cookboy in George's house.

The girl had been his fiancée for a week or so during the war, but the engagement was broken off after one of those practical dissecting discussions that can dissolve a certain kind of love like mist. She was a London girl, who liked her life, with no desire for anything different. There was no bitterness left after the affair; at least not against each other. George remained with a small bewildered anger against himself. He was a man, after all, who liked things in their proper place. It was the engagement he could not forgive himself for: he had been temporarily mad; it was that he could not bear to think of. But he remembered the girl sometimes with an affectionate sensuality. She had married and was living the kind of life he could not imagine any sane person choosing. Why he kept her picture – which was a very artificial posed affair – he did not ask himself. For he had cared for other women more, in his violent intermittent fashion.

However, there was her picture in his room, and it was seen not only by the cookboy and the houseboys but by the rare visitors to the house. There was a rumour in the district that George had a broken heart over a woman in England; and this explanation did as well as any other for George's cheerful but determined self-isolation, for there are some people the word loneliness can never be made to fit. George was alone, and seemed not to know it. What surprised people was that the frame of his life was so much larger than he needed, and for what he was. The three large rooms had been expanded, after a few years, into a dozen. It was the finest house for many miles. Outhouses, storehouses, washhouses and poultry yards spread about the place, and he had laid out a garden, and paid two boys handsomely to keep it beautiful. He had scooped out the soil between a cluster of boulders, and built a fine natural swimming pool over which bamboos hung, reflecting patterns of green foliage and patches of blue sky. Here he swam every morning at sun-up, summer or winter, and at evening, too, when he came from the day's work. He built a row of stables, sufficient to house a dozen beasts, but actually kept only two, one of which was ridden by old Smoke (whose legs were now
too feeble to carry him far) and one which he used himself. This was a mare of great responsiveness and intelligence but with no beauty, chosen with care after weeks of attending sales and following up advertisements: she was for use, not show. George rode her round the farm, working her hard, during the day, and when he stabled her at night patted her as if he were sorry she could not come into the house with him. After he had come from the pool, he sat in the glow from the rapidly fading sunset, looking out over the wild and beautiful valley, and ceremoniously drinking beside a stinkwood table laden with decanters and siphons. Nothing here of the bachelor's bottle and glass on a tin tray; and his dinner was served elaborately by two uniformed men, with whom he chatted or kept silence, as he felt inclined. After dinner coffee was brought to him, and having read farming magazines for half an hour or so, he went to bed. He was asleep every night by nine, and up before the sun.

That was his life. It was his life for years, one of exhausting physical toil, twelve hours a day of sweat and effort in the sun, but surrounded by a space and comfort that seemed to ask for something else. It asked, in short, for a wife. But it is not easy to ask of such a man, living in such a way, what it is he misses, if he misses anything at all.

To ask would mean entering into what he feels during the long hours riding over the ridges of kopje in the sunshine, with the grass waving about him like blond banners. It would mean understanding what made him one of mankind's outriders in the first place.

Even old Smoke himself, ambling beside him on the other horse, would give him a long look on certain occasions, and quietly go off, leaving him by himself.

Sloping away in front of the house was a three-mile-long expanse of untouched grass, which sprang each year so tall that even from their horses the two men could not see over it. There was a track worn through it to a small knoll, a cluster of rocks merely, with trees breaking from the granite for shade. Here it was that George would dismount and, leaning his arm on the neck of his mare, stand gazing down into the valley which was in itself a system of other hills and valleys, so high did Four Winds stand above the rest of the country. Twenty miles away other mountains stood like blocks of tinted crystal, blocking the view; between there were trees and grass, trees and rocks and grass, with the rivers marked by lines of darker vegetation. Slowly, as the years passed, this enormous reach of pure country became marked by patches of cultivation; and smudges of smoke showed where new houses were going up, with the small glittering of roofs. The valley was being developed. Still George stood and gazed, and it seemed as if these encroaching lives affected him not at all. He would stay there half the morning, with the crooning of the green-throated wood pigeons in his ears, and when he rode back home for his meal, his eyes were heavy and veiled.

But he took things as they came. Four Winds, lifted high into the sky among the great windswept sun-quivering mountains, tumbled all over with boulders, offering itself to storms and exposure and invasion by baboons and leopards – this wilderness, this pure, heady isolation, had not affected him after all.

For when the valley had been divided out among new settlers, and his neighbours were now five miles, and not fifteen, away, he began going to their houses and asking them to his. They were very glad to come, for though he was an eccentric, he was harmless enough. He chose to live alone: that piqued the women. He had become very rich; which pleased everyone. For the rest, he was considered mildly crazy because he would not allow an animal to be touched on his farm; and any native caught setting traps for game would be beaten by George himself and then taken to the police afterwards: George considered the fine that he incurred for beating the native well worth it. His farm was as good as a game reserve; and he had to keep his cattle in what were practically stockades for fear of leopards. But if he lost an occasional beast, he could afford it.

George used to give swimming parties on Sundays; he kept open house on that day, and everyone was welcome. He was a good host, the house was beautiful, and his servants were the envy of every housewife; perhaps this was what people found it difficult to forgive him, the perfection of his servants. For they never left him to go ‘home' as other people's boys did; their home was here, on this farm, under old Smoke, and the
compound was a proper native village, and not the usual collection of shambling huts about which no one cared, since no one lived in them long enough to care. For a bachelor to have such well-trained servants was a provocation to the women of the district; and when they teased him about the perfection of his arrangements, their voices had an edge on them. They used to say: ‘You damned old bachelor, you.' And he would reply, with calm good-humour: ‘Yes, I must think about getting me a wife.'

Perhaps he really did feel he ought to marry. He knew it was suspected that this new phase, of entertaining and being entertained, was with a view to finding himself a girl. And the girls, of course, were only too willing. He was nothing, if not a catch; and it was his own fault that he was regarded, coldly, in this light. He would sometimes look at the women sprawled half-naked around the swimming pool under the bamboos – sprawling with deliberate intent, and for his benefit – and his eyes would narrow in a way that was not pleasant. Nor was it even fair, for if a man will not allow himself to be approached by sympathy and kindness, there is only one other approach. But the result of all this was simply that he set that photograph very prominently on the table beside his bed; and when girls remarked on it he replied, letting his eyelids half-close in a way which was of course exasperatingly attractive: ‘Ah, yes, Betty – now
there
was a woman for you.'

At one time it was thought he was ‘caught' after all. One of his boundaries was shared with a middle-aged woman with two grown daughters; she was neither married, nor unmarried, for her husband seemed not to be able to make up his mind whether to divorce her or not, and the girls were in their early twenties, horse-riding, whisky-drinking, flat-bodied tomboys who were used to having their own way with the men they fancied. They would make good wives for men like George, people said: they would give back as good as they got. But they continued to be spoken of in the plural, for George flirted with them both and they were extraordinarily similar. As for the mother, she ran the farm, for her husband was too occupied with a woman in town to do this, and drank a little too much, and could be heard complaining fatalistically: ‘Christ, why did
I have daughters? After all, sons are expected to behave badly.' She used to complain to George, who merely smiled and offered her another drink. ‘God help you if you marry either of them,' she would say, gloomily. ‘May I be forgiven for saying it, but they are fit for nothing but enjoying themselves.'

‘At their age, Mrs Whately, that seems reasonable enough.' Thus George retreated, into a paternally indulgent attitude that nevertheless had a hint in it of cruel relish for the girls' discomfiture.

He used to look for Mrs Whately when he entered a room, and stay beside her for hours, apparently enjoying her company; and she seemed to enjoy his. She did all the talking, while he stretched himself beside her, his eyes fixed thoughtfully on his glass, which he swung lightly between finger and thumb, occasionally letting out an amused grunt. She spoke chiefly of her husband whom she had turned from a liability into an asset, for the whole room would become silent to hear her humorous, grumbling tales of him. ‘He came home last week-end,' she would say, fixing wide astonished eyes on George, ‘and do you know what he said? My God, he said, I don't know what I'd do without you, old girl. If I can't get out of town for a spot of fresh air, sometimes, I'd go mad. And there I was, waiting for him with my grievance ready to air. What can one do with a man like that?' ‘And are you prepared to be a sort of week-end resort?' asked George. ‘Why, Mr Chester!' exclaimed Mrs Whately, widening her eyes to an incredibly foolish astonishment, ‘after all, he's my husband, I suppose.' But this handsome, battered matron was no fool, she could not have run the farm so capably if she had been; and on these occasions George would simply laugh and say: ‘Have another drink.'

At his own swimming parties Mrs Whately was the only woman who never showed herself in a swimming suit. ‘At my age,' she explained, ‘it is better to leave it to one's daughters.' And with an exaggerated sigh of envy she gazed across at the girls. George would gaze, too, non-committally; though on the whole it appeared he did not care for the spare and boyish type. He had been known, however, during those long hot days when thirty or forty people lounged for hours in their swimming
suits on the edge of the pool, eating, drinking, and teasing each other, to rise abruptly, looking inexplicably irritated, and walk off to the stables. There he saddled his mare – who, one would have thought, should have been allowed her Sunday's rest, since she was worked so hard the rest of the week – swung himself up, and was off across the hillsides, riding like a maniac. His guests did not take this hardly; it was the sort of thing one expected of him. They laughed – most particularly the women – and waited for him to come back, saying: ‘Well, old George, you know …'

They used to suggest it would be nice to go riding together, but no one ever succeeded in riding with George. Now that the farms had spread up from the valley over the foothills, George often saw people on horses in the early morning, or at evening; and on these occasions he would signal a hasty greeting with his whip, rise in his stirrups and flash out of sight. This was another of the things people made allowances for: George, that lean, slouching, hard-faced man, riding away along a ridge with his whip raised in perfunctory farewell was positively as much a feature of the landscape as his own house, raised high on the mountain in a shining white pile, or the ten-foot-high notices all along the boundaries saying: Anyone found shooting game will be severely prosecuted.

Once, at evening, he came on Mrs Whately alone, and as instinctively he turned his horse to flee, heard her shout: ‘I won't bite.' He grinned unamiably at her expectant face and shouted back: ‘I'm no more of a fool than you are, my dear.'

At the next swimming party she acknowledged this incident by saying to him thoughtfully, her eyes for once direct and cool: ‘There are many ways of being a fool, Mr Chester, and you are the sort of man who would starve himself to death because he once overate himself on green apples.'

George crimsoned with anger. ‘If you are trying to hint that there are, there really
are
, some
sweet, charming
women, if I took the trouble to look, I promise you women have suggested that before.'

She did not get angry. She merely appeared genuinely surprised. ‘Worse than I thought,' she commented amicably.