Read Online This Was the Old Chief's Country by Doris Lessing - Free Book Online Page B

was a glittering blue day, with a chill edge on the air, that stirred Major Carruthers’ thin blood as he stood, looking in appeal into the sullen face of the native. All at once, feeling the fresh air wash along his cheeks, watching the leaves shake with a ripple of gold on the trees down the slope, he felt superior to his difficulties, and able to face anything. ‘Come,’ he said, with his rare, diffident smile. ‘After all these years, when we have been working together for so long, surely you can do this for me. It won’t be for very long.’
    He watched the man’s face soften in response to his own; and wondered at the unconscious use of the last phrase, for there was no reason, on the face of things, why the situation should not continue as it was for a very long time.
    They began laughing together; and separated cheerfully; the African shaking his head ruefully over the magnitude of the sacrifice asked of him, thus making the incident into a joke; and he dived off into the bush to explain the position to his fellow-workers.
    Repressing a strong desire to go after him, to spend the lovely fresh day walking for pleasure, Major Carruthers went into his wife’s bedroom, inexplicably confident and walking like a young man.
    She lay as always, face to the wall, her protruding shoulders visible beneath the cheap pink bed-jacket he had bought for her illness. She seemed neither better nor worse. But as she turned her head, his buoyancy infected her a little; perhaps, too, she was conscious of the exhilarating day outside her gloomy curtains.
    What kind of a miraculous release was she waiting for? he wondered, as he delicately adjusted her sheets and pillows and laid his hand gently on her head. Over the bony cage of theskull, the skin was papery and bluish. What was she thinking? He had a vision of her brain as a small frightened animal pulsating under his fingers.
    With her eyes still closed, she asked in her querulous thin voice: ‘Why don’t you write to George?’
    Involuntarily his fingers contracted on her hair, causing her to start and to open her reproachful, red-rimmed eyes. He waited for her usual appeal: the children, my health, our future. But she sighed and remained silent, still loyal to the man she had imagined she was marrying; and he could feel her thinking:
the lunatic stiff pride of men.
    Understanding that for her it was merely a question of waiting for his defeat, as her deliverance, he withdrew his hand, in dislike of her, saying: ‘Things are not as bad as that yet.’ The cheerfulness of his voice was genuine, holding still the courage and hope instilled into him by the bright day outside.
    â€˜Why, what has happened?’ she asked swiftly, her voice suddenly strong, looking at him in hope.
    â€˜Nothing,’ he said; and the depression settled down over him again. Indeed, nothing had happened; and his confidence was a trick of the nerves. Soberly he left the bedroom, thinking: I must get that well built; and when that is done, I must do the drains, and then … He was thinking, too, that all these things must wait for the second hut.
    Oddly, the comparatively small problem of that hut occupied his mind during the next few days. A slow and careful man, he set milestones for himself and overtook them one by one.
    Since Christmas the labourers had been working a seven-day week, in order to keep ahead in the race against the weeds. They resented it, of course, but that was the custom. Now that the maize was grown, they expected work to slack off, they expected their Sundays to be restored to them. To ask even half a dozen of them to sacrifice their weekly holiday for the sake of the hated Dutchman might precipitate a crisis. Major Carruthers took his time, stalking his opportunity like a hunter, until one evening he was talking with his bossboy as man to man, about farm problems; but when he broached the subject of a hut, Major Carruthers saw