This Was the Old Chief's Country (57 page)

Tommy said: ‘Good morning,' and she laughed and said, ‘Good morning.'

Then Dirk said: ‘Enough now, let's go.' He sounded very angry. Tommy said: ‘Good-bye.' Dirk's mother said: ‘Good-bye,' and made her little bobbing curtsey, and she moved her child from one arm to another and bit her lip anxiously over her gleaming smile.

Tommy and Dirk went away from the square mud hut where the variously-coloured children stood staring after them.

‘There now,' said Dirk, angrily. ‘You've seen my mother.'

‘I'm sorry,' said Tommy uncomfortably, feeling as if the responsibility for the whole thing rested on him. But Dirk laughed suddenly and said: ‘Oh, all right, all right, white boy, it's not your fault.'

All the same, he seemed pleased that Tommy was upset.

Later, with an affectation of indifference, Tommy asked, thinking of those new children: ‘Does Mr Macintosh come to your mother again now?'

And Dirk answered ‘Yes,' just one word.

In the shed Dirk studied from a geography book, while Tommy sat idle and thought bitterly that they wanted him to be a sailor. Then his idle hands protested, and he took a knife and began slashing at the edge of the table. When the gashes showed a whiteness from the core of the wood, he took a stick
lying on the floor and whittled at it, and when it snapped from thinness he went out to the trees, picked up a lump of old wood from the ground, and brought it back to the shed. He worked on it with his knife, not knowing what it was he made, until a curve under his knife reminded him of Dirk's sister squatting at the hut door, and then he directed his knife with a purpose. For several days he fought with the lump of wood, while Dirk studied. Then he brought a tin of boot polish from the house, and worked the bright brown wax into the creamy white wood, and soon there was a bronze-coloured figure of the little girl, staring with big, curious eyes while she squatted on spindly legs.

Tommy put it in front of Dirk, who turned it around, grinning a little. ‘It's like her,' he said at last. ‘You can have it if you like,' said Tommy. Dirk's teeth flashed, he hesitated, and then reached into his pocket and took out a bundle of dirty cloth. He undid it, and Tommy saw the little clay figure he had made of Dirk years ago. It was crumbling, almost-worn to a lump of mud, but in it was still the vigorous challenge of Dirk's body. Tommy's mind signalled recognition – for he had forgotten he had ever made it – and he picked it up. ‘You kept it?' he asked shyly, and Dirk smiled. They looked at each other, smiling. It was a moment of warm, close feeling, and yet in it was the pain that neither of them understood, and also the cruelty and challenge that made them fight. They lowered their eyes unhappily. ‘I'll do your mother,' said Tommy, getting up and running away into the trees, in order to escape from the challenging closeness. He searched until he found a thorn tree, which is so hard it turns the edge of an axe, and then he took an axe and worked at the felling of the tree until the sun went down. A big stone near him was kept wet to sharpen the axe, and next day he worked on until the tree fell. He sharpened the worn axe again, and cut a length of tree about two feet, and split off the tough bark, and brought it back to the shed. Dirk had fitted a shelf against the logs of the wall at the back. On it he had set the tiny, crumbling figure of himself, and the new bronze shape of his little sister. There was a space left for the new statue. Tommy said, shyly: ‘I'll do it as quickly as I can so that it will be done before the term starts.' Then, lowering
his eyes, which suffered under this new contract of shared feeling, he examined the piece of wood. It was not pale and gleaming like almonds, as was the softer wood. It was a gingery brown, a close-fibred, knotted wood, and down its centre, as he knew, was a hard black spine. He turned it between his hands and thought that this was more difficult than anything he had ever done. For the first time he studied a piece of wood before starting on it, with a desired shape in his mind, trying to see how what he wanted would grow out of the dense mass of material he held.

Then he tried his knife on it and it broke. He asked Dirk for his knife. It was a long piece of metal, taken from a pile of scrap mining machinery, sharpened on stone until it was razor-fine. The handle was cloth wrapped tight around.

With this new and unwieldy tool Tommy fought with the wood for many days. When the holidays were ending, the shape was there, but the face was blank. Dirk's mother was full-bodied, with soft, heavy flesh and full, naked shoulders above a tight, sideways draped cloth. The slender legs were planted firm on naked feet, and the thin arms, knotted with work, were lifted to the weight of a child who, a small, helpless creature swaddled in cloth, looked out with large, curious eyes. But the mother's face was not yet there.

‘I'll finish it next holidays,' said Tommy, and Dirk set it carefully beside the other figures on the shelf. With his back turned he asked cautiously: ‘Perhaps you won't be here next holidays?'

‘Yes I will,' said Tommy, after a pause. ‘Yes I will.'

It was a promise, and they gave each other that small, warm, unwilling smile, and turned away, Dirk back to the compound and Tommy to the house, where his trunk was packed for school.

That night Mr Macintosh came over to the Clarkes' house and spoke with the parents in the front room. Tommy, who was asleep, woke to find Mr Macintosh beside him. He sat on the foot of the bed and said: ‘I want to talk to you, laddie.' Tommy turned the wick of the oil-lamp, and now he could see in the shadowy light that Mr Macintosh had a look of uneasiness about him. He was sitting with his strong old body balanced
behind the big stomach, hands laid on his knees, and his grey Scots eyes were watchful.

‘I want you to think about what I said,' said Mr Macintosh, in a quick, bluff good-humour. ‘Your mother says in two years' time you will have matriculated, you're doing fine at school. And after that you can go to college.'

Tommy lay on his elbow, and in the silence the drums came tapping from the compound, and he said: ‘But Mr Macintosh, I'm not the only one who's good at his books.'

Mr Macintosh stirred, but said bluffly: ‘Well, but I'm talking about you.'

Tommy was silent, because as usual these opponents were so much stronger than was reasonable, simply because of their ability to make words mean something else. And then, his heart painfully beating, he said: ‘Why don't you send Dirk to college? You're so rich, and Dirk knows everything I know. He's better than me at figures. He's a whole book ahead of me, and he can do sums I can't.'

Mr Macintosh crossed his legs impatiently, uncrossed them, and said: ‘Now why should I send Dirk to college?' For now Tommy would have to put into precise words what he meant, and this Mr Macintosh was quite sure he would not do. But to make certain, he lowered his voice and said: ‘Think of your mother, laddie, she's worrying about you, and you don't want to make her worried, do you?'

Tommy looked towards the door, under it came a thick yellow streak of light: in that room his mother and father were waiting in silence for Mr Macintosh to emerge with news of Tommy's sure and wonderful future.

‘You know why Dirk should go to college,' said Tommy in despair, shifting his body unhappily under the sheets, and Mr Macintosh chose not to hear it. He got up, and said quickly: ‘You just think it over, laddie. There's no hurry, but by next holidays I want to know.' And he went out of the room. As he opened the door, a brightly-lit, painful scene was presented to Tommy: his father and mother sat, smiling in embarrassed entreaty at Mr Macintosh. The door shut, and Tommy turned down the light, and there was darkness.

He went to school next day. Mrs Clarke, turning out Mr Macintosh's house as usual, said unhappily: ‘I think you'll find everything in its proper place,' and slipped away, as if she were ashamed.

As for Mr Macintosh, he was in a mood which made others, besides Annie Clarke, speak to him carefully. His cookboy, who had worked for him twelve years, gave notice that month. He had been knocked down twice by that powerful, hairy fist, and he was not a slave, after all, to remain bound to a bad-tempered master. And when a load of rock slipped and crushed the skulls of two workers, and the police came out for an investigation, Mr Macintosh met them irritably, and told them to mind their own business. For the first time in that mine's history of scandalous recklessness, after many such accidents, Mr Macintosh heard the indignant words from the police officer: ‘You speak as if you were above the law, Mr Macintosh. If this happens again, you'll see …'

Worst of all, he ordered Dirk to go back to work in the pit, and Dirk refused.

‘You can't make me,' said Dirk.

‘Who's the boss on this mine?' shouted Mr Macintosh.

‘There's no law to make children work,' said the thirteen-year-old, who stood as tall as his father, a straight, lithe youth against the bulky strength of the old man.

The word
law
whipped the anger in Mr Macintosh to the point where he could feel his eyes go dark, and the blood pounding in that hot darkness in his head. In fact, it was the power of this anger that sobered him, for he had been very young when he had learned to fear his own temper. And above all, he was a shrewd man. He waited until his sight was clear again, and then asked, reasonably: ‘Why do you want to loaf around the compound, why not work for money?'

Dirk said: ‘I can read and write, and I know my figures better than Tommy – Baas Tommy,' he added, in a way which made the anger rise again in Mr Macintosh, so that he had to make a fresh effort to subdue it.

But Tommy was a point of weakness in Mr Macintosh, and it was then that he spoke the words which afterwards made him wonder if he'd gone suddenly crazy. For he said: ‘Very well,
when you're sixteen you can come and do my books and write the letters for the mine.'

Dirk said: ‘All right,' as if this were no more than his due, and walked off, leaving Mr Macintosh impotently furious with himself. For how could anyone but himself see the books? Such a person would be his master. It was impossible, he had no intention of ever letting Dirk, or anyone else, see them. Yet he had made the promise. And so he would have to find another way of using Dirk, or – and the words came involuntarily – getting rid of him.

From a mood of settled bad temper, Mr Macintosh dropped into one of sullen thoughtfulness, which was entirely foreign to his character. Being shrewd is quite different from the process of thinking. Shrewdness, particularly the money-making shrewdness, is a kind of instinct. While Mr Macintosh had always known what he wanted to do, and how to do it, that did not mean he had known why he wanted so much money, or why he had chosen these ways of making it. Mr Macintosh felt like a cat whose nose has been rubbed into its own dirt, and for many nights he sat in the hot little house, that vibrated continually from the noise of the mine-stamps, most uncomfortably considering himself and his life. He reminded himself, for instance, that he was sixty, and presumably had not more than ten or fifteen years to live. It was not a thought that an unreflective man enjoys, particularly when he had never considered his age at all. He was so healthy, strong, tough. But he was sixty nevertheless, and what would be his monument? An enormous pit in the earth, and a million pounds' worth of property. Then how should he spend ten or fifteen years? Exactly as he had the preceding sixty, for he hated being away from this place, and this gave him a caged and useless sensation, for it had never entered his head before that he was not as free as he felt himself to be.

Well, then – and this thought gnawed most closely to Mr Macintosh's pain – why had he not married? For he considered himself a marrying sort of man, and had always intended to find himself the right sort of woman and marry her. Yet he was already sixty. The truth was that Mr Macintosh had no idea at all why he had not married and got himself sons; and in these
slow, uncomfortable ponderings the thought of Dirk's mother intruded itself only to be hastily thrust away. Mr Macintosh, the sensualist, had a taste for dark-skinned women; and now it was certainly too late to admit as a permanent feature of his character something he had always considered as a sort of temporary whim, or makeshift, like someone who learns to enjoy an inferior brand of tobacco when better brands are not available.

He thought of Tommy, of whom he had been used to say: ‘I've taken a fancy to the laddie.' Now it was not so much a fancy as a deep, grieving love. And Tommy was the son of his employee, and looked at him with contempt, and he, Mr Macintosh, reacted with angry shame as if he were guilty of something. Of what? It was ridiculous.

The whole situation was ridiculous, and so Mr Macintosh allowed himself to slide back into his usual frame of mind. Tommy's only a boy, he thought, and he'll see reason in a year or so. And as for Dirk, I'll find him some kind of a job when the time comes …

At the end of the term, when Tommy came home, Mr Macintosh asked, as usual, to see the school report, which usually filled him with pride. Instead of heading the class with approbation from the teachers and high marks in all subjects, Tommy was near the bottom, with such remarks as Slovenly, and Lazy, and Bad-mannered. The only subject in which he got any marks at all was that called Art, which Mr Macintosh did not take into account.

When Tommy was asked by his parents why he was not working, he replied, impatiently: ‘I don't know,' which was quite true; and at once escaped to the anthill. Dirk was there, waiting for the books Tommy always brought for him. Tommy reached at once up to the shelf where stood the figure of Dirk's mother, lifted it down and examined the unworked space which would be the face. ‘I know how to do it,' he said to Dirk, and took out some knives and chisels he had brought from the city.

This was how he spent the three weeks of that holiday, and when he met Mr Macintosh he was sullen and uncomfortable. ‘You'll have to be working a bit better,' he said, before Tommy
went back, to which he received no answer but an unwilling smile.