This Was the Old Chief's Country

  Alec felt as he did when people urged him to grow tobacco. It would be a betrayal, though what he would be betraying he could not say. And this mine was a betrayal of everything decent. They fetched up the ore, they washed the gold out, melted it to conveniently-handled shapes, thousands of workers spent their lives on it when they might be doing something useful on the land; and ultimately the gold was shipped off to America. He often made the old joke, these days, about digging up gold from one hole in the ground and sending it to America to be buried in another. Maggie listened and wondered at him. What a queer man he was! He noticed nothing until he was faced with it. For years she had been talking about Paul’s future; and only when she packed him off to school did Alec begin to talk, just as if he had only that moment come to consider it, of how he should be educated. For years he had been living a couple of miles from a mine, with the sound of it always in his ears, but it was not until he could see it clear on the next ridge that he seemed to notice it. And yet for years the old miner had been dropping in of an evening. Alec would make a polite enquiry or two and then start farm-talk, which could not possibly interest him. ‘Poor body,’ Maggie had been used to saying, half-scornfully, ‘what’s the use of talking seasons and prices to him?’ For she shared Alec’s feeling that mining was not a serious way of living – not this sort of mining, scratching in the dirt for a little gold. That was how she thought of it. But at least she had thought of it; and here was Alec like a man with a discovery.

  When Paul came home for his holiday and saw the mine lifted black before him on the long, green ridge, he was excited, and made his longest journey afield. He spent a day at the mine and came home chattering about pennyweights and ounces of gold; about reefs and seams and veins; about ore and slimes and cyanide – a whole new language. Maggie poured brisk scorn on the glamour of gold; but she was secretly pleased at this practical new interest. He was at least talking about things, he wasn’t mooning about the farm like a waif returned from exile. She dreamed of him becoming a mining engineer or a geologist. She sent to town for books about famous men of science and left them lying about. Paul hardly glanced at them. His practical experience of handling things, watching growth, seeing iron for implements shaped in a fire, made it so that his knowledge must come first-hand, and afterward be confirmed by reading. And he was roused to quite different thoughts. He would kick at an exposed rock, so that the sparks fell dull red under his boot-soles, and say: ‘Daddy, perhaps this is gold rock?’ Or he would come running with bits of decomposed stone that showed dull gleams of metal and say: ‘Look, this is gold, isn’t it?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Alec, reluctantly. ‘This is all gold country. The prospectors used to come through here. There is a big reef running across that ridge which is exactly the same formation as one of the big reefs on the Rand; once they thought they’d find a mine as big as that one here. But it didn’t come to anything.’

  ‘Perhaps we’ll find it,’ said Paul, obstinately.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Alec, indulgently. But he was stirred, whether he liked it or not. He thought of the old prospectors wandering over the country with their meagre equipment, panning gold from the sand of river-beds, crushing bits of rock, washing the grit for those tiny grains that might proclaim a new Rand. Sometimes, when he came on a projecting ledge of rock, instead of cursing it for being on farmland at all, he would surreptitiously examine it, thinking: That bit there looks as if it had been broken off – perhaps one of the old hands used his hammer here twenty years ago. Or he might find an old digging, half-filled in by the rains, where someone had tried his luck, and he stood looking down at the way the rock lay in folds under the earth, sometimes flat, packed tidily one above the other, sometimes slanting in a crazy plunge where the subterranean forces had pushed and squeezed. And then he would shake himself and turn back to the business of farming, to the visible surfaces, the tame and orderly top-soil that was a shallow and understandable layer responsive to light and air and wetness, where the worms and air-bringing roots worked their miracles of decomposition and growth. He put his thoughts back to this malleable surface of the globe, the soil – or imagined that he did; and suppressed his furtive speculation about the fascinating underground structure – but not altogether. There was slowly growing in him another vision, another need, and he listened to the regular thud-thud of the mine-stamps from the opposite ridge as if they were drums beating from a country whose frontier he was forbidden to cross.

  One evening an old weather-stained man appeared at the door and unslung from his back a great bundle of equipment and came in for the night, assuming the traveller’s privilege of hospitality. He was, in fact, one of the vanishing race of wandering prospectors; and for most of the night he talked about his life on the veld. It was like a story from a child’s adventure book in its simplicities of luck and bad fortune and persistent courage rewarded only by the knowledge of right-doing. For this old man spoke of the search for gold as a scientist might of discovery, or an artist of his art. Twice he had found gold and sold his riches trustingly, so that he was tricked by unscrupulous men who were now rich, while he was as poor as he had been forty years before. He spoke of this angrily, it is true, but it was that kind of anger we maintain from choice, like a relation whose unpleasantness has become, through the years, almost a necessity. There had been one brief period of months when he was very rich indeed, and squandered he did not know how much money in the luxury hotels of the golden city. He spoke of this indifferently, as of a thing which had chosen to visit him, and then as arbitrarily chosen to withdraw. Maggie, listening, was thankful that Paul was not there. And yet this was a tale any child might remember all his life, grateful for a glimpse of one of the old kind of adventurer, bred when there were still parts of the world unknown to map-makers and instrument-makers. This was a character bound to fire any boy; but Maggie thought, stubbornly: There is enough nonsense as it is. And by this she meant, making no bones about it: Alec is enough of a bad influence. For she had come to understand that if Paul was to have that purpose she wanted in him, she must plant it and nurture it herself. She did not like the way Alec listened to this old man, who might be a grand body in his way, but not in her way. He was listening to a siren song, she could see that in his face. And later he began talking again about that nuisance of a great-uncle of his who, in some queer way, he appeared to link with the prospector. What more did the man want? Most sensible people would think that gallivanting off to farm in Africa was adventure enough, twice as adventurous as being a mere waster and ruffian, deceiving honest girls and taking honest people ‘s goods, and ending as a common criminal!

  Maggie, that eminently sensible woman, wept a little that night when Alec was asleep, and perhaps her courage went a little numb. Or rather, it changed its character, becoming more like a shield than a spear, a defensive, not an attacking thing. For when she thought of Alec she felt helpless; and the old man asleep in the room made her angry. Why did he have to come to this farm, why not take his dangerous gleam elsewhere? Long afterwards, she remembered that night and said, tartly, to Alec: ‘Yes, that was when the trouble started, when that old nuisance came lolloping along here with his long tongue wagging …’ But ‘the trouble’ started long before; who could say when? With the war, that so unsettled men and sent them flying off to new countries, new women? With whatever forces they were that bred men’s silly wars? Something in Alec himself: his long-dead ancestor stirring in him and whispering along his veins of wildness and adventure? Well, she would leave all that to Alec and see that her son became a respectable lawyer, or a bridge-builder. That was enough adventure for her.

  When the old man left next day, trudging off through the mealie fields with his pack over his shoulder, Alec watched him from the veranda. And that evening he climbed the hillock behind the house, and saw the small red glow of a fire down in the vlei. There he was, after his day of rock-searching, rock-chipping. He would be cooking his supper, or perhaps already lying wrapped in his blan
ket beside the embers, a fold of it across his face so that the moon would not trouble his eyelids with its shifting, cold gleams. The old man was alone; he did not even take an African with him to interpret the veld; he no longer needed this intermediary, he understood the country as well as the black men who lived on it. Alec went slowly to bed. Thinking of the old prospector who was free, bound to no one, owning nothing but a blanket and a frying-pan and his clothes.

  Not long afterwards a package arrived from the station and Maggie watched Alec open it. It was a gold pan. Alec held it clumsily between his palms, as he had seen the prospector do. He had not yet got the feel of the thing. It was like a deep frying-pan, without a handle, of heavy black metal, with a fine groove round the inside of the rim. This groove was to catch the runnels of silt that should hold grains of gold, if there was any gold. Alec brought back fragments of rock from the lands and crushed them in a mortar and stood beside the water tanks swirling the muddy mixture around and around endlessly, swearing with frustration, because he was still so clumsy and could not get the movements right. Each sample took a long time, and he could not be sure, when he had finished, if it had been properly done. First the handfuls of crushed rock, as fine as face powder, must be placed in the pan and then the water run in. Afterwards it must be shaken so that the heavy metals should sink, and then with a strong sideways movement the lighter grit and dust must be flung out, with the water. Then more water added and the shaking repeated. Finally, there should be nothing but a wash of clean water, and the loose grit and bits of metal sliding along the groove: the dull, soft black of iron, a harder shine for chrome, the false glitter of pyrites, that might be taken for gold by a greenhorn, and finally, and in almost every sample, dragging slow and heavy behind the rest, would be the few dully-shining grains of true gold. But the movements had to be learned. The secret was a subtle little sideways jerk at the end, which separated the metals from the remnants of lighter rock. So stood Alec, methodically practising, with the heavy pan between his palms, the packets of crushed rock on the ground beside him, and on the other side the dripping water-taps. He was squandering the precious water that had to be brought from the well three times a week in the water-cart. The household was always expected to be niggardly with water, and now here was Alec swilling away gallons of it every day. An aggrieved Maggie watched him through the kitchen window.

  But it was still a hobby. Alec worked as usual on the farm, picking up interesting bits of rock if he came across them, and panned them at evening, or early in the morning before breakfast. The house was littered with lumps of rock, and Maggie handled them wonderingly, when she was alone, for she did not intend to encourage Alec in ‘this nonsense’. She was fascinated by the rocks, and she did not want to be fascinated. There were round stones, worn smooth by the wash of water; red stones, marbled with black; green stones, dull like rough jade; blue stones, with a fire of metal when they were shifted against a light. They were beautiful enough to be cut and worn as jewels. Then there were lumps of rough substance, half-way between soil and rock, the colour of ox-blood, and some so rich with metal that they weighed the hand low. Most promising were the decomposing rocks, where the soft parts had been rotted out by wind and water, leaving a crumbling, veiny substance, like a skeleton of the soil, and in some of these the gold could be seen lying thick and close, like dirt along the seams of a garment.

  Alec did not yet know the names of the rocks and minerals, and he was troubled by his ignorance. He sent for books; and in the meantime he moved like an explorer over the farm he imagined he knew as well as it could be known, learning to see it in a new way. That rugged jut of reef, for instance, which intersected the big vlei like the wall of a natural dam – what was the nature of that hard and determined rock, and what happened to it beneath the ground? Why was the soil dark and red at one end of the big field and a sullen orange at the other? He looked at this field when it was bared ready for the planters, and saw how the soil shaded and modulated from acre to acre, according to the varieties of rock from which it had been formed, and he no longer saw the fields, he saw the reefs and shales and silts and rivers of the underworld. He lifted his eyes from this vision and saw the kopjes six miles away; hard granite, they were; and the foothills, tumbled outposts of granite boulders almost to his own boundary – rock from another era, mountains erupted from an older time. On another horizon could be seen the long mountain where chrome was mined and exported to the countries which used it for war. Along the flanks of the mountains showed the scars and levels of the workings – it was another knowledge, another language of labour. He felt as if he had been blind half his life and only just discovered it. And on the slopes of his own farm were the sharp quartz reefs that the prospector told him were promise of gold. Quartz, that most lovely of rocks, coloured and weathered to a thousand shapes and tints, sometimes standing cold and glittering, like miniature snow mountains; sometimes milky, like slabs of opal, or delicate pink and amber with a smoky flush in its depths, as if a fire burnt there invisibly; marbled black, or mottled blue – there was no end to the strangeness and variety of those quartz reefs which for years he had been cursing because they made whole acres of his land unfit for the plough. Now he wandered there with a prospector’s hammer, watching the fragments of rock fly off like chips of ice, or like shattering jewels. When he panned these pieces they showed traces of gold. But not enough: he had already learned how to measure the richness of a sample.

  He sent for a geological map and tacked it to the wall of his farm office. Maggie found it and stood in front of it, studying it when he couldn’t see her. Here was Africa, but in a new aspect. Instead of the shaded greens and browns and blues of the map she was accustomed to see, the colours of earth and growth, the colours of leaf and soil and grass and moving water, now they were harsh colours like the metallic hues of rock. An arsenic green showed the copper deposits of Northern Rhodesia, a cold yellow the gold of the Transvaal – but not only the Transvaal. She had had no idea how much gold there was, worked everywhere; the patches of yellow mottled the subcontinent. But Maggie had no feeling for gold; her sound instincts were against the useless stuff. She looked with interest at the black of the coalfields – one of the richest in the world, Alec said, and hardly touched; at the dull grey of the chrome deposits, whole mountains of it, lying unused; at the glittering light green of the asbestos, at the iron and the manganese and – but most of these names she had never heard, could not even pronounce.

  When Alec’s books came, she would turn over the pages curiously, gaining not so much a knowledge as an intimation of the wonderful future of this continent. Perhaps Alec should have been a scientist, she thought, and not a farmer at all? Perhaps, with this capacity of his for completely losing himself (as he had become lost) he might have been a great man? For this was how the vision narrowed down in her: all the rich potentialities of Africa she saw through her son, who might one day work with coal, or with copper; or through Alec, the man, who ‘might have done well for himself’ if he had had a different education. Education, that was the point. And she turned her thoughts steadily towards her son. All her interests had narrowed to him. She set her will hard like a prayer, towards him, as if her dammed forces could work on him a hundred miles away at school in the city.

  When he came home from school he found his father using a new vocabulary. Alec was still attending to the farm with half his attention, but his passion was directed into this business of gold-finding. He had taken half a dozen labourers from the fields and they were digging trenches along the quartz reef on the ridge. Maggie made no direct comment, but Paul could feel her disapproval. The child was torn between loyalty to his mother and fascination for this new interest, and the trenches won. For some days Maggie hardly saw him, he was with his father, or over at the mine on the ridge.

  ‘Perhaps we’ll have a mine on our farm, too,’ said Paul to Maggie; and then, scornfully: ‘But we won’t have a silly mine like that one, we’ll have a big one, like J
ohannesburg.’ And Maggie’s heart sank, listening to him. Now was the time, she thought, to mould him, and she showed him the coloured map on the office wall and tried to make it come alive for him, as it had for her. She spoke of the need for engineers and experts, but he looked and listened without kindling. ‘But my bairn,’ said Maggie reproachfully, using the old endearment which was falling out of use now, with her other Scots ways of speech, ‘my bairn, it’s time you were making up your mind to what you want. You must know what you want to be.’ He looked sulky and said if they found ‘a big mine, like Johannesburg’, he would be a gold-miner. ‘Oh, no,’ said Maggie, indignantly. ‘That’s just luck. Anyone can have a stroke of luck. It takes a clever man to be educated and know about things.’ So Paul evaded this and said all right then, he’d be a tobacco farmer.

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Maggie again; and wondered herself at the passion she put into it. Why should he not be a tobacco farmer? But it wasn’t what she dreamed of for him. He would become a rich tobacco farmer? He would make his thousands and study the international money-juggling and buy more farms and more farms and have assistants until he sat in an office and directed others, just as if he were a business man? For with tobacco there seemed to be no half-way place, the tobacco farmers drove themselves through night-work and long hours on the fields, as if an invisible whip threatened them, and then they failed, or they succeeded suddenly, and paid others to do the slaving … it was no sort of a life, or at least, not for her son. ‘What’s the matter with having money?’ asked Paul at last, in hostility. ‘Don’t you see,’ said Maggie desperately, trying to convey something of her solid and honest values; ‘anyone can be lucky, anyone can do it. Young men come out from England, with a bit of money behind them, and they needn’t be anything, just fools maybe, and then the weather’s with them, and the prices are good, and they’re rich men – but there’s nothing in that, you want to try something more worthwhile than that, don’t you?’ Paul swung the dark and stubborn eyes on her and asked, dourly: ‘What do you think of my father, then?’ She caught her breath, looked at him in amazement – surely he couldn’t be criticizing his father! But he was; already his eyes were half-ashamed, however, and he said quickly, ‘I’ll think about it,’ and made his escape. He went straight off to the diggings, and seemed to avoid his mother for a time. As for Alec, Maggie thought he’d lost his senses. He came rushing in and out of the house with bits of rock and announcements of imminent riches so that Paul became as bad, and spent half his day crushing stones and watching his father panning. Soon he learned to use the pan himself. Maggie watched the intent child at work beside the water-tanks, while the expensive water went sloshing over to the dry ground, so that there were always puddles, in spite of the strong heat. The tanks ran dry and Alec had to give orders for the water-carts to make an extra journey. Yes, thought Maggie, bitterly, all these years I’ve been saving water and now, over this foolishness, the water-carts can make two or three extra trips a week. Because of this, Alec began talking of sinking a new well; and Maggie grew more bitter still, for she had often asked for a well to be sunk close at the back of the house, and there had never been time or money to see to it. But now, it seemed, Alec found it justified.