Read Online The Complete Short Stories by Muriel Spark - Free Book Online

ebbed after the first mile. A cloud of
locusts caught her attention and automatically she stopped to watch anxiously
whether the swarm would settle on Chakata’s mealies or miss them. It passed
over. She sat to rest on a stone, disturbing a baby lizard. ‘Go’way. Go’way,’
she heard.
    Daphne called aloud, ‘God
help me. Life is unbearable.’
     
    A house-boy came running to Chakata who was
round by the tobacco shed resting on two sticks.
    ‘Baas Tuys is gone to
shoot buck. The piccanin say he take a gun to shoot buck.’
    ‘Who? What?’
    ‘Baas Tuys with gun.’
    ‘Where? Which way?’
    ‘Is gone by north. The
piccanin have seen him. Was after lunch piccanin say, he talk that he go to
shoot buck.’
    A few more natives had
gathered round.
    ‘Run, quick, all of you.
Get that gun off Old Tuys. Fetch him back.’
    They looked at him
hesitantly. It was not every day that a native was instructed to wrest a gun
from the hands of a white man.
    ‘Go, you fools. Run.’
    They returned slowly and
fearfully half an hour later. Chakata had hobbled to the end of the paddock to
meet them.
    ‘Where’s Tuys? Did you
get him?’
    They did not answer at
first. Then one of them pointed to the path through the maize where Old Tuys
was staggering home, exhausted, dragging something behind him.
    ‘Go and pick her up,’
ordered Chakata.
    ‘I got me a buck,’ said
Old Tuys, looking with pride at the company. ‘Man, there’s life in the old dog
yet. I got us a buck.’
    He looked closely at
Chakata. He could not understand why Chakata was not impressed.
    ‘We have buck for
dinner, man Chakata,’ he said.
    Burials follow quickly
after death in the Colony, for the temperature does not allow of delay. The
inquest was held and Daphne was buried next day. Michael Casse came over for
the funeral to the cemetery outside the dorp.
    ‘I knew her quite well,
you know. She stayed with my mother,’ he said to Chakata. ‘My mother gave her a
bird, or something like that.’ He giggled. Chakata looked at him curiously and
saw that the man was not smiling.
    Chakata was being helped
into the car. ‘I must see a specialist,’ he said.
     
    Ralph Mercer was moved when he heard the
news. It was like the confirmation of something one knew already. Daphne had
begun to live when he had first met her, and when she had gone she had been in
a sense dead. He tried to explain this to his mother.
    ‘Like flowers, you know,
in the garden. One can’t say they really exist unless one’s looking at
them. Or take —’
    ‘Flowers, garden … You
are talking of a human soul.’
     
    It was a year later that Ralph felt a
crisis in his work. His books were selling, but on the other hand they were not
taken seriously enough by serious people. All his novels had ended happily. He
decided to write a tragedy.
    He ranged his experience
for a tragedy. He thought of, and rejected as too banal, the domestic ruptures
of his friends past and present. He rejected the story of his mother, widowed
young, disappointed in her son, but still pushing on: that was too personal. He
thought of Daphne. That might lead to something both exotic and tragic. He
recalled her stories of Old Tuys and Chakata, the theme of the lifelong feud.
He took a ticket on a plane to the Colony in order to obtain background
material at first hand.
    Almost immediately he
arrived in the Colony he found himself beset by admirers. He had never before
been so celebrated and popular in his person. He was invited to Government
House. Dinners were given in his honour, and people drove in through swollen
rivers from outlying districts to attend them. He had to pick and choose
amongst the invitations he received. Everyone with a white skin had heard of,
if they had not read, Ralph Mercer. Moreover, seated among this company on wide
verandas after dinner he could look round without catching the cool eye of some
critic, some frightful man whom the public hardly ever heard of, but who, at
home, was