This Was the Old Chief's Country

  ‘Do you think there could be gold?’ Paul asked, eagerly, for confirmation, not of the gold, but of his father’s good sense.

  ‘Why not? There’s a mine right here, isn’t there? There’s half a dozen small-workers round and about.’

  ‘How did you find this reef?’

  ‘Just luck. I was after a wild pig, as it happened. It disappeared somewhere here and I put my rifle down against a rock to have a smoke, and when I picked it up the rock caught my eye, and it seemed a likely bit, so I panned it and it showed up well; I dug a trench or two and the reef went down well, and – so here I am.’

  But Paul was still thinking of his father. He was looking away through the trees, over the wire fence to where the trenches were. ‘My father says if he proves right he’ll divine mines for everyone, all over the world, and not only gold but diamonds and coal – and everything!’ maintained Paul proudly, with a defiant look at the miner.

  ‘That’s right, son,’ said James nicely, meeting the look seriously. ‘Your Dad’s all right,’ he added, to comfort the boy. And Paul was grateful. He used to go over to James every day just after breakfast and return late in the evening when the sun had gone. Maggie did not know what to say to him. He could not be blamed for taking his troubles to someone who was prepared to spend time with him. It was not his fault for having Alec as a father – thus Maggie, secretly feeling disloyal.

  One evening she paid a visit to Alec’s trenches. The reef lay diagonally down the slope of the ridge for about a mile, jutting up slantingly, like a rough ledge. At intervals, trenches had been dug across it and in places it had been blown away by a charge of gelignite.

  Maggie was astonished at the extent of the work. There were about twelve labourers, and the sound of picks on flinty earth sounded all around her. From shallow trenches protruded the shoulders and heads of some of the men, but others were out of sight, twelve or more feet down. She stood looking on, feeling sad and tired, computing what the labour must cost each month, let alone the money for gelignite and fuses and picks. Alec was moving through the scrub with his wire. He had a new way of handling it. As a novice he had gripped it carefully, elbows tight at his sides, and walked cautiously as if he were afraid of upsetting the magnetism. Now he strode fast over the ground, his loose bush-shirt flying around him, the wire held lightly between his fingers. He was zigzagging back and forth in a series of twenty-foot stretches, and Maggie saw he was tracking the course of a reef, for at the centre of each of these stretches the wire turned smartly downwards. Maggie could not help thinking there was something rather perfunctory in it. ‘Let me try,’ she asked, and for the first time she held the magic wand. ‘Walk along here,’ her husband ordered, frowning with the concentration he put into it; and she walked as bidden. It was true that the wire seemed to tug and strain her hands; but she tried again and it appeared to her that if she pulled the two ends apart, pressure tugged the point over and down, whereas if she held it without tension it remained unresponsive. Surely it could not be as simple as that? Surely Alec was not willing the wire to move as he wanted? He saw the doubt in her face and said quickly: ‘Perhaps you haven’t the electricity in you.’ ‘I daresay not,’ she agreed, dryly; and then asked quickly, trying to sound interested, because at once he reacted like a child to the dry note in her voice: ‘Is this water or a reef?’

  ‘A reef.’ His face had brightened pathetically at this sign of interest, and he explained: ‘I’ve worked out that either an iron rod or a twig works equally well for water, but if you neutralize the current with an iron nut on the end there must be mineral beneath, but I don’t know whether gold or just any mineral.’

  Maggie digested this, with difficulty, and then said: ‘You say an iron rod, but this is just called galvanized iron, it’s just a name, it might be made of anything really, steel or tin – or anything,’ she concluded lamely, her list of metals running out.

  His face was perturbed. She saw that this, after all, very simple idea had never occurred to him. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said, quickly, ‘the point is that it works. I’ve proved it on the reefs at the mine.’ She saw that he was looking thoughtful, nevertheless, and could not prevent herself thinking sarcastically that she had given birth to a new theory, probably based on the word galvanized. ‘How do you know it isn’t reacting to water? That mine is always having trouble with water, they say there’s an underground river running parallel to the main reef.’ But this was obvious enough to be insulting, and Alec said, indignantly: ‘Give me credit for some sense. I checked that a long time ago.’ He took the wire, slipped an iron nut on each bent end and gripped the ends tight. ‘Like that,’ he said. ‘The iron neutralizes, do you see?’ She nodded, and he took off the iron nuts and then she saw him reach into his pocket and take out his signet ring and put that on the wire.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Maggie, with the most curious feeling of dismay. That signet ring she had given him when they were married. She had bought it with money saved from working as a girl in her parents’ shop, and it represented a great deal of sacrifice to her then. Even now, for that matter. And here he was using it as an implement, not even stopping to think how she might feel about it. When he had finished he slipped the gold ring, together with the two iron nuts, back into the pocket of his bush-shirt. ‘You’ll lose it,’ she said, anxiously, but he did not hear her. ‘If the iron neutralizes the water, which I’ve proved,’ he said, worriedly, ‘then the gold ring should neutralize the gold.’ She did not follow the logic of this, though she could not doubt it all had been worked out most logically. He took her slowly along the great reef, talking in that slow, thoughtful way of his. She felt a thwarted misery – for what was the use of being miserable? She did not believe in emotions that were not useful in some way.

  Later he began flying back and forth again over a certain vital patch of earth, and he dropped the signet ring and it rolled off among the long grasses, and she helped him to find it again. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he mused aloud, ‘I’ll give up the trenches here, I think, and sink a proper shaft. Not here. It’s had a fair chance. I’ll try somewhere new.’

  Before they left at sundown she walked over to one of the deep trenches and stood looking down. It was like a grave, she thought. The mouth was narrow, a slit among the long, straggling grass, with the mounds of rubble banked at the ends, and the rosy evening sun glinted red on the grass-stems and flashed on the pebbles. The trees glowed, and the sky was a wash of colour. The side of the trench showed the strata of soil and stone. First a couple of feet of close, hard, reddish soil, hairy with root-structure; then a slab of pinkish stuff mixed with round white pebbles; then a narrow layer of smooth well that resembled the filling in a cake; and then a deep plunge of greyish shale that broke into flakes at the touch of the pick. There was no sign of any reef at the bottom of the trench; and as Alec looked down he was frowning; and she could see that there should have been a reef, and this trench proved something unsettling to the theory.

  Some days later he remarked that he was taking the workers off the reef to a new site. She did not care to ask where; but soon she saw a bustle of activity in the middle of the great mealie-field. Yes, he had decided to sink a shaft just there, he, who had once lost his temper if he found even a small stone in a furrow which might nick the ploughshares.

  It was becoming a very expensive business. The cases of explosive came out from the station twice a month on the wagon; and she had to order boxes of mining candles, instead of packets, from the store. And when Alec panned the samples there were twenty or more, instead of the half dozen, and he would be working at the water-tanks half the morning. He was very pleased with the shaft: he thought he was on the verge of success. There were always a few grains of gold in the pan, and one day a long trail of it, which he estimated at almost as much as would be worth working. He sent a sample to the Mines Department for a proper test, and it came back confirmed. But this was literally a flash in the pan, for nothing fresh happened, and s
oon that shaft was abandoned. Workers dragged an untidy straggle of barbed wire around the shaft so that cattle should not stray into it; and the ploughs detoured there; and in the centre of the once unbroken field stood a tall thicket of grass and scrub, which made Paul furious when he came home for the holidays. He remonstrated with his father, who replied that it had been justified, because from that shaft he had learned a great deal, and one must be prepared to pay for knowledge. He used just those words, very seriously, like a scientist. Maggie remarked that the shaft had cost at least a hundred pounds to sink, and she hoped the knowledge was worth that much. It was the sort of remark she never made these days; and she understood she had made it now because Paul was there, who supported her. As soon as Paul came home she always had the most uncomfortable feeling that his very presence tugged her away from her proper loyalty to Alec. She found herself becoming critical and nagging; while the moment Paul had gone she drifted back into a quiet acceptance, like fatalism. It was not long after that bitter remark that Alec finally lost his signet ring; and because it was necessary to work with a gold ring, asked her for her wedding ring. She had never taken it off her finger since they married, but she slipped it off now and handed it to him without a word. As far as she was concerned it was a moment of spiritual divorce; but a divorce takes two and if the partner doesn’t even notice it, what then?

  He lost that ring too, of course, but it did not matter by then, for he had amended his theory, and gold rings had become a thing of the past. He was now using a rod of fine copper wire with shreds of asbestos wound about it. Neither Maggie nor Paul asked for explanations, for there were pages of detailed notes on his farm desk, and books about magnetic fields and currents and the sympathy of metals, and they could not have understood the terms he used, for his philosophy had become the most extraordinary mixture of alchemy and magic and the latest scientific theories. His office, which for years had held nothing but a safe for money and a bookshelf of farming magazines, was now crammed with lumps of stone, crucibles, mortars, and the walls were covered with maps and diagrams, while divining rods in every kind of metal hung from nails. Next to the newest geological map from the Government office was an old map imagined by a seventeenth-century explorer, with mammoth-like beasts scrolling the border; and the names of the territories were fabulous, like El Dorado, and Golconda, and Queen of Sheba’s Country. There were shelves of retorts and test-tubes and chemicals, and in a corner stood the skull of an ox, for there was a period of months when Alec roamed the farm with that skull dangling from his divining rod, to test a belief that the substances of bone had affinities with probable underground deposits of lime. The books ranged from the latest Government publications to queer pamphlets with titles such as Metallurgy and the Zodiac, or Gold Deposits on Venus.

  It was in this room that Maggie confronted him with a letter from Paul’s headmaster. The scholarship money was finished. Was it intended that the boy should try for a fresh one to take him through university? In this case, he must change his attitude, for, while he could not be described as stupid, he ‘showed no real inclination for serious application’. If not, there was ‘no immediate necessity for reviewing the state of affairs’, but a list of employers was enclosed with whom Mrs Barnes might care to communicate. In short, the headmaster thought Paul was thick-witted. Maggie was furious. Her son become a mere clerk! She informed Alec, peremptorily, that they must find the money to send Paul through university. Alec was engaged in making a fine diagram of his new shaft in cross-section, and he lifted a blank face to say: ‘Why spoon-feed the boy? If he was any good he’d work.’ The words struck Maggie painfully, for they summed up her own belief; but she found herself thinking that it was all Alec’s fault for being English and infecting her son with laziness. She controlled this thought and said they must find the money, even if Alec curtailed his experimenting. He looked at her in amazement and anger. She saw that the anger was against her false scale of values. He was thinking: What is one child’s future (even if he happens to be my own, which is a mere biological accident, after all) against a discovery which might change the future of the world? He maintained the silence necessary when dealing with little-minded people. But she would not give in. She argued and even wept, and gave him no peace, until his silence crumbled into violence and he shouted: ‘Oh, all right then, have it your own way.’

  At first Maggie thought that she should have done this before ‘for his own good’. It was not long before she was sorry she had done it. For Alec went striding anxiously about the farm, his eyes worriedly resting on the things he had not really seen for so long – eroded soil, dragging fences, blocked drains – he had been driven out of that inward refuge where everything was clear and meaningful, and there was a cloud of fear on his face like a child with night-terrors. It hurt Maggie to look at him; but for a while she held out, and wrote a proud letter to the headmaster saying there was no need to trouble about a scholarship, they could pay the money. She wrote to Paul himself, a nagging letter, saying that his laziness was making his father ill, and the very least he could do ‘after all his father had done for him’ was to pass his matriculation well.

  This letter shocked Paul, but not in the way she had intended. He knew quite well that his father would never notice whether he passed an examination or not. His mother’s dishonesty made him hate her; and he came home from school in a set and defiant mood, saying he did not want to go to university. This betrayal made Maggie frantic. Physically she was passing through a difficult time, and the boy hardly recognized this hectoring and irritable mother. For the sake of peace he agreed to go to university, but in a way which told Maggie that he had no intention at all of doing any work. But his going depended, after all, on Alec, and when Maggie confronted him with the fact that money for fees was needed, he replied, vaguely, that he would have it in good time. It was not quite the old vagueness, for there was a fever and urgency in him that seemed hopeful to Maggie, and she looked every day at the fields for signs of reorganization. There were no changes yet.

  Weeks passed, and again she went to him, asking what his new plans were. Alec replied, irritably, that he was doing what he could, and what did she expect, a miracle to order? There was something familiar in this tone and she looked closely at him and demanded: ‘Alec, what exactly are you doing?’

  He answered in the old, vague way: ‘I’m on to it now, Maggie, I’m certain I’ll have the answer inside a month.’

  She understood that she had spurred him, not into working on the farm, but into putting fresh energies behind the gold-seeking. It was such a shock to her that she felt really ill, and for some days she kept to her bed. It was not real illness, but a temporary withdrawal from living. She pulled the curtains and lay in the hot half-dark. The servants took in her meals, for she could not bear the sight of either her son or her husband. When Paul entered tentatively, after knocking and getting no reply, he found her lying in her old dressing-gown, her eyes averted, her face flushed and exhausted, and she replied to his questions with nervous dislike. But it was Paul who coaxed her back into the family, with that gentle, protective sympathy which was so strange in a boy of his age. She came back because she had to; she took her place again and behaved sensibly, but in a tight and controlled way which upset Paul, and which Alec ignored, for he was quite obsessed. He would come in for meals, his eyes hot and glittering, and eat unconsciously, throwing out remarks like: Next week I’ll know. I’ll soon know for sure.

  In spite of themselves, Paul and Maggie were affected by his certainty. Each was thinking secretly: Suppose he’s right? After all, the great inventors are always laughed at to begin with.

  There was a day when he came triumphantly in, loaded with pieces of rock. ‘Look at this,’ he said, confidently. Maggie handled them, to please him. They were of rough, heavy, crumbling substance, like rusty honeycomb. She could see the minerals glistening. She asked: ‘Is this what you wanted?’

  ‘You’ll see,’ said Alec, proudly, and ordere
d Paul to come with him to the shaft, to help bring more samples. Paul went, in his rather sullen way. He did not want to show that he half-believed his father. They returned loaded. Each piece of rock was numbered according to the part of the reef it had been taken from. Half of each piece was crushed in the mortar, and father and son stood panning all the afternoon.

  Paul came to her and said, reluctantly: ‘It seems quite promising, mother.’ He was appealing to her to come and look. Silently she rose, and went with him to the water-tanks. Alec gave her a defiant stare, and thrust the pan over to her. There was the usual trail of mineral, and behind was a smear of dull gold, and behind that big grits of the stuff. She looked with listless irony over at Paul, but he nodded seriously. She accepted it from him, for he knew quite a lot by now. Alec saw that she trusted his son when she disbelieved him, and gave her a baffled and angry look. She hastened to smooth things over, ‘Is it a lot?’ she asked.

  ‘Quite enough to make it workable.’

  ‘I see,’ she said, seriously. Hope flickered in her and again she looked over at Paul. He gave an odd, humorous grimace, which meant: Don’t get excited about it yet; but she could see that he was really excited. They did not want to admit to each other that they were aroused to a half-belief, so they felt awkward. If this madness turned out to be no madness at all, how foolish they would feel!

  ‘What are you going to do now?’ she asked Alec.

  ‘I’m sending in all these samples to the Department for proper assaying.’

  ‘All of them …’ she checked the protest, but she was thinking: That will cost an awful lot of money. ‘And when will you hear?’