THREE YEARS BEFORE the opening of this story one of my school friends, Eric Watson, had brought me home with him for our long winter vacation, which coincided almost to a day with the whaling season. He was the son of the local representative of the whaling concern, Andrew Watson, who was also one of its main shareholders. We had hardly settled in for our holiday when at my urging, for I gathered he had done it before and did not like it over much for reasons that will soon be plain, he got permission from his father for us to spend some time with the whaling fleet. His father promised at once to speak to his most trusted captain, a man nearing retirement, the very next time his ship came into port. This experienced sailor, he thought, would be the ideal person to take charge of two high-spirited boys at sea. Yet in the end it was not this worthy man who was destined to take us whaling. On the Sunday evening after our arrival on holiday vacation when my host proposed arranging the matter with him, the captain had been unexpectedly detained in his ship. He arrived at the party too late for the purpose for which he had been invited.
However, Thor Larsen, to give our Captain his full name, was, of course, the first of the special guests to arrive. I say “of course”, because I was to discover that he tended to be the first to arrive as well as the last to leave whether it was a matter of drinking with the owner’s representative or quitting the whaling grounds because of a mounting gale.
I was still on the tennis court that Sunday when Thor Larsen joined the players sitting out, relaxed in their Madeira chairs on the lawn above, and watching the game.
It was almost as if time had recognized the significance of the occasion for me and used the winter evening to underline the moment. The scene, in fact, presented itself to me rather like some painting by a “primitive”, an African Douanier Rousseau, wherein the detail was minutely charged with aboriginal wonder, and the encompassing vision, despite the apparent sophistication of the matter, was innocent like that of man’s in the Garden before the Fall. The great spathodia trees around the huge house, so mysterious in their immunity to winter, presented a second manifestation of flower like a flicker of pentecostal fire against the bright blue sky.
There was just enough of a shiver in the evening air to set their leaves and petals trembling as if indeed some transcendental spirit were walking their perennial green. Beyond their dark leaves and between their great trunks, I snatched at glimpses of the ample house, first the outline of the old tiled roof with an edge of gold to it from the westering sun and then, since the building faced east, the white of the smooth walls below it, ashen with shadow. As a result, the glass of the windows was secret and without lustre and the wide-open doorway was re-sealed like a Nigerian tomb with the ebony of averted light.
Below the broad terrace right to the edge of the tennis court spread a lawn of Zulu grass in shrill barbaric green, each blade keen as the head of an assegai. There, in the centre of a long crescent of Madeira chairs, their wicker glowing with the sun spilling over the leaves of the trees behind them, stood a long table under a dazzling white cloth covered with crystal bowls, cut-glass tumblers and decanters, all quick with light.
Beside the table stood the tall Zulu butler. When not serving one of the flannelled men in the chairs, he stood massively still as if fixed in one position by a great weight of undeclared spirit within. He wore a long white coat of starched drill that fell to his knees. From one shoulder a wide band of Prussian blue velvet crossed his broad front to be gathered on his hip into a long tassel of gold. The upper part of him looked splendidly ambassadorial, as if the great legendary African kingdom of Monomotapo, which the valiant Portuguese discoverers who had given the land its name had sought for so long in vain, were indeed a reality and he its plenipotentiary. But when one’s eyes followed the stiff trousers beneath the coat down to the ankles the impression was cancelled, for the man’s broad feet were bare.
This may sound a small thing but the fact remains that it has persistently dogged me all my life, demanding evaluation from my imagination. All I knew as a boy was that where Europeans were in control this was the implacable custom not only in Port Natal but all over Africa. I knew several instances of white employers who had dismissed black domestic servants after years in their employ because they suddenly insisted on wearing shoes; and this was considered an outrage.
Today, perhaps, I can see further. Understandably, we like to think of ourselves as creatures of pure reason. But as I grow older I am struck by the power of something that is beyond reason and conduct and utterly non-rational in nature and intent. It appears that we are all subject to some dark symbolism that imposes on us patterns of behaviour which have to be obeyed. We can reject them in the light of reason and relieve them and ourselves of some of their and our own darkness in the process; but we cannot obliterate them. If they cannot have their way with us squarely and fairly, then they will do so violently and opaquely.
Today, this matter of the butler’s bare feet is to me one clear image, among a host of others, of behaviour that we were darkly compelled to follow in Africa without really knowing what we were doing. The bare feet were, perhaps, a mark of the extent to which we exceeded our humanity in Africa and unwittingly assumed the role of gods, for certain forms of worship do demand that men remove their foot-wear before entering the temples. Anyhow, we are only now beginning to encounter, like the first faint ripples of a converging typhoon, the consequences of the equinoxial tensions we have set up both in the Africans and ourselves.
I suppose it is natural to tend to look towards established power, the commanding heights, the far horizons and the stars set in their Galileonian courses, for prescriptions of fate. But I think now that it is in the small and uncared for grains around our feet that the forces of change grow great and terrible.
That evening, I realized with the shock of hindsight that the Zulu butler stood there not only as an image of some fateful contradiction in ourselves, but also as a warning predicting a dangerous decline invisible ahead. At the same time I found his incongruous state of apparel merely rather absurd and endearing. Whenever I had a chance to observe him it merely made me smile to see him standing there thus, looking so seriously over the men sprawled in the yellow chairs, their faces and necks pink with blood-pressure and exertion. And he continued to look with the utmost gravity out over the tennis court and the red roofs of the houses set in colonial fashion, in wide gardens full of native trees, their leaves a dark pagan green, lit here and there only by that quick spathodia flicker of which I have spoken, out over to the aspiring city, its glass glittering with the vivid sunset colour and beyond to the shining harbour and the blue Indian ocean as if at any moment there, on the faultless rim of the graphic winter’s evening, would come a ship charged with a cargo of overwhelming import to him.
It was the first time I myself had ever seen the sea and I felt that perhaps just watching it could be a whole-time occupation. There was the great harbour, its open water shining like a speckled old mirror, framed in the archaic gilt of the sun. It was full of ships of all kinds, few of them flying the same flags or painted the same brilliant colours. There was something miraculous about having the ships themselves directly under my eyes to give living fullness to the paintings in museums and illustrations in books that I had seen. A ship which had just crossed the bar at the harbour mouth was swinging round north towards Mozambique. As she completed the movement she lay broadside on to us. Gathering way on her course, the muscular swell of the Indian Ocean, which here is never lean or feeble as it can be in other oceans, gripped her and pushed her slowly far over to her side. She went gracefully to starboard as if willing to be tumbled on her back, then righted herself and, coming back to give her port shoulder a turn too, caught the sun full on the windows of her bridge and wheel-house to flash like a heliograph back to the land. I did not know her name or her destination but the flash was like a signal intended especially for me.
I turned my back on the sea to notice the butler giving me an oddly comradely look, as if he had read my reactions. That did not surprise me. The life that the black people of Africa led with us, who seldom spoke their language or knew their ways, forced them to rely on their intuitions and sharpened them to an extraordinary degree. Their awareness of what we were as human beings often was more accurate than our own judgements of one another despite our advantages of a common language and easy contacts. Or are these perhaps not advantages after all? Anyway it was not the first time that I had had to go to the rag-and-tatter Africans of my childhood to re-learn the importance of the look in the human eye. I got to know the butler better later but on this Sunday evening, though slightly astonished by the intensity of his regard, I was strangely pleased when he raised his hand above his shoulder to salute me and followed it up with a smile.
Presently I was on the court myself. My partner and I became hotly engaged; at last the match stood at 12–11 in our favour. The score was match point to our advantage when one of our opponents smashed a short lob from my partner at an acute angle down into my half of the court. Somehow I had anticipated his stroke, got to the ball and, as often happens when I have no time for deliberation, by sheer instinct I sent back a winner, a fast low back-hand stroke driving the ball just out of reach of the man at the net. For a moment it looked as if it were going out but a spurt of white chalk showed that I had just managed to find the far corner of the court.
The watchers in the chairs, who had stopped talking and followed the last two games closely, called out, “Well done, you two, well done!” and then immediately resumed talking and drinking, with the exception of one man, the only one of them not in flannels.
Rather apart, in a chair at the extreme left of the group, he went on clapping, calling out again and again in a loud voice: “Bravo! Bravo!” Indeed he kept it up so long that some of the spectators turned to stare at him.
If the man noticed it, he did not show it. Yet I doubt whether he did. Knowing him as I did afterwards, I do not think it would ever have occurred to him that anybody would regard him as an inferior. Instead of returning their quick sharp regard, he kept his eyes on me even when he stopped applauding.
I had to walk close by his chair thereafter in order to reach my own, and as I did not know him and was in any case only a boy, would not have dreamt of speaking to him first. But it was he who stopped me and spoke.
Up to then I had always assumed that Scandinavians, particularly Norwegians, were all tall, fair and blue-eyed. Thor Larsen, for it was he, was the first of the exceptions I have since encountered. He did not stand, I believe, a fraction more than five foot seven inches in his shoes. He was broad-shouldered, unusually long-bodied, long-armed with a powerful chest, shortish neck and a face oddly Mongolian except that his slightly slanted eyes in the broad head above the high cheek bones and underneath black eyebrows and black hair were an intense and vivid grey. Yet there was nothing grey about the impression he made on me.
He struck me at once as a person strangely dark, like the midnight blue of the sea under a cloudless sky. It was a blackness, moreover, that owed nothing to colour of hair or skin. Thor Larsen’s darkness was personal and part perhaps of his national character, for I have come to suspect that even the fairest of Scandinavians contain something of the darkness of their long Arctic winter in their spirit. Ibsen, Strindberg and even the fairy tales of Hans Andersen are charged for me with a frightening element of darkness. What light there is in them is, as it were, that of a sun low on the horizon, a native midnight sun of their spirit. But in Larsen’s case it struck me there was a factor of choice—as if he turned to darkness freely as the element in which his self-assured spirit could shine to the greatest advantage.
As I walked past him, one broad hand left the empty glass he had been clasping in both, his long arm darted out and he seized mine in a firm grip.
“You play good, very good, not?” He addressed me in a deep voice, rasping and uninitiated in the subtleties of doubt.
His action was so unsuspected that I was startled by it, blushing at the ardent note of his praise.
Looking briefly into his intense eyes and down on a face that was marked almost as if by smallpox with long exposure to extremes of weather, I said diffidently: “Thanks. We were rather lucky to win.”
“Nonsense!” he answered decisively. “You play good; your eye good, very good. Your reflexes quick, not?” Despite the clumsy accent and idiom, the phrases were fired rapidly at me. He paused briefly and then, showing that though English was a foreign language to him his ear was as ready as his tongue, he asked: “You’re not English, not?”
“No,” I said. “My people are Boers. I come from far up-country.”
“Ha! A-ha! A Boer, a young Boer!”
Pronouncing “Boer” as “Bo-herr”, he uttered the word as though it explained everything.
His father, he went on to say at some length, had fought for the Boers in the Boer War with a brigade of Scandinavian volunteers who had come out to help us against Milner’s English, and his father had told him “Bo-herr” shot “damn much better” than anybody in the world.
“You too shoot good, not?” he concluded. “I think so, that’s why you play tennis so good! Not?”
I was unable to admit that I did shoot rather well and that indeed I had quite a reputation as a quick and unusually accurate long-distance shot. I felt so embarrassed to be singled out and discussed so loudly in such a personal manner in front of people I had only just met that I tried to move on.
However, he held on to my arm and commanded: “I want to talk with you. You fetch a chair and you sit here!”
Much as I disliked the prospect, I could not refuse without being rude. I nodded, laid my racket on the grass by his chair and went to find one of my own.
Behind me I heard him shout “Jack!” and I saw the Zulu butler’s monumental pose vanish into immediate action. Obviously knowing the precise import of the shout, he scooped up a tray with a decanter of gin and angustura on it, and carried it with long strides of massive grace to Larsen.
Chair in hand and thirsty myself, I went to wait at the table for the butler’s return. He was, as I had noticed since my arrival two days before, much older than he had appeared at a superficial glance. I watched him shake some drops of angustura into Larsen’s glass, twirl it expertly round in his fingers and, like a born connoisseur, hold it up against the sunset to see that the bitters were spread evenly all over the glass. In that light his face was aubergine, the stained glass a brilliant transparent pink, and the half tumbler of gin he poured out flashed like melted platinum.
When he returned to the table, as this was the first moment I had had alone with him, I said to him in polite Sindakwena, the language of the Amangtakwena of Umangoni on whose frontiers we lived, “I see you, oh! my father: I see you.”
His face glowed with pleasure, and from deep down, more from his stomach than his throat, he exclaimed “Auck! I greet you, ’Nkosan. Little Prince, I greet you.”
“They call you Jack here,” I went on, warmed by so chivalrous a greeting. “But what do they call you in your father’s house?”
Well-intentioned as my host was, I suspected he would not have bothered to enquire after his butler’s native name. Personal names among the Zulu are either so long or so difficult for European tongues that it had become a colonial habit to inflict on African servants simple European names like “Jack”. My suspicion was confirmed when I noticed what warmth the question brought to the butler’s eyes.
“My father has long since left me his kraals,” he said, using the same idiom the Amangtakwena did to indicate that his father was dead. “But in my father’s house I was called Nkomidhl’ilale.”
Smiling to myself at the thought of what my host would have made of such a name, I took to it with relish. It meant literally “A steer that eats and lies down” and was, I knew, clearly intended to convey that he came of a family of substance and had been born into a state of plenty. I had all along assumed from the way he spoke that among his own people he must be a person of importance, for among them the three main marks of the gentleman were to be well-spoken, as he was, fearless and intelligent. His name set assumption beyond doubt for me.
“Would you, Nkomi-dhl’ilale, please give me a glass of grinadella juice?” I asked.
“Auck!” he exclaimed once more with satisfaction, poured out a tumbler full to over-flowing of the thick green-yellow juice of the purple passion fruit of Africa, put it on a silver salver and handed it to me instead of giving me the glass direct.
“Auck!” he muttered, shaking his head and, putting the salver down, covered his mouth with his hands to laugh into them with happy surprise.
I wish I could convey how much that “Auck!” meant to me. Zulus have a whole range of exclamations which, like “Auck”, are a direct musical abstraction of subtle shades of feeling and say, with one chord, what several sentences could not express.
The “Auck!” still alive in my ears, I was turning to join Thor Larsen when he whispered: “’Nkosan! ’Nkosan!”
“Yes, Nkomi-dhl’ilale,” I responded, standing still and thinking I detected a note of urgency in his voice.
He did not reply at once and appeared to be pondering what to say. Finally he said slowly: “You are going back to the man whose place is on the great water?”
“Yes. Why?” I asked, receiving confirmation of what I had already assumed, namely that Larsen had something to do with whaling.
“He has the thirst of a chief of chiefs,” the Zulu replied. After another pause to let this information bring its effect, he added: “And ’Nkosan, he has the eyes of an ’Nyanga—a witch-doctor.”
His tone now indeed was urgent. Yet I felt he was not warning me so much as drawing my attention to facts of importance that he feared I might miss out of lack of experience. “It would be as well, ’Nkosan,” he concluded, his tone low with the gravity of his exhortation, “not to forget to spit three times on leaving his presence.”
I could not help smiling inwardly at the effect spitting even once would have had on that respectable colonial company. At the same time I was greatly touched that he should feel so protective towards me. Thanking him for his advice, I felt bound to ask: “You do not like the man whose place is on the water?”
“Oh, no, ’Nkosan! It is not that,” he remonstrated. “He is a chief among men, but he is a house visited by strange spirits.”
I would have liked to have gone on talking to him. It was odd how much more at home I felt with him than the rest of the company, but Larsen was clearly getting more and more impatient for my return. The last thing I wanted just then was to be made conspicuous again by him bawling at me. I joined him not a moment too soon.
I had barely reached for my chair before he presented his first question like a pistol at my head.
“What did that black Jack say to you?”
The tone was suspicious, as if he had an inkling we had been discussing him. It was my first intimation of many that he possessed unusually sensitive antennae of spirit to reinforce his considerable powers of observation.
“I was asking him about his name in Zulu and so on.”
“All that time just asking about a name!” The tone now was not suspicious so much as provisional and suspended between a statement and a question.
“It was a long name that needed explanation,” I said.
“And what was this name?” he asked.
I told him, describing in full my interpretation of the meaning of Nkomi-dhl’ilale.
In the process he was to my relief overcome by a genuine interest. When I finished, he slapped his knee with satisfaction and exclaimed: “Just like the Vikings. Might be a good old Viking name almost, not!”
This apparently was a deeply entrenched scale of comparison of his for, noticing my surprise at the comment, he commanded me: “You look at the ricksha-boys, young Boher; they have horns on the head just like old Viking warriors. These peoples all the times make me think of Vikings even when I know not what for.”
I knew then something of what he meant. I had already encountered the ricksha-pullers of Port Natal, those whom he called “boys” in the accepted colonial manner, though they were all grown men and many of them grey. In fact one could not walk anywhere in Port Natal without numbers of these black men in their colourful dress importuning one for the privilege of being allowed, even on days paralysed with heat, for a few pennies to pull one in their vehicles along the burning streets and up the steep sides of the flashing city. They all wore a head-dress with great horns at the side, just like the Vikings depicted in my illustrated histories at home.
The comparison reinforced the sense of wonder the peoples of Africa had evoked from childhood in me, and some of my reserve towards Larsen diminished accordingly. When he started to draw me out about my home and our life up-country, apparently relishing the smallest detail of what he extracted from me, this reserve vanished almost entirely. His imagination indeed seemed as excited by the interior of our great land, into whose great purple lap the day was beginning to settle, as was my own imagination by his sea.
There was, however, a bias in his questions which I did not understand at all. He was unusually interested in shooting game and put me through a catechism of the animals I had shot, starting characteristically with the biggest and conducting the whole examination of it in short rasping sentences.
“You shot the elephant, not?”
As I nodded, he immediately snapped: “How many?”
“Four,” I answered.
His grey eyes went greyer with the light of a quickened interest. His look, as it took in my youth and size and set them against the constant dream of elephant he had in mind, came as near as it could to showing respect.
“Buffalo?” he asked.
“Six,” I said.
“Lion?”
“Seven.”
“Leopard?”
“Three.”
I was not aware of it but the tone of my voice must have changed. He was on to it at once.
“You do not like the leopard, not?” It was a statement as much as a question.
“No, I do not like hunting leopard,” I amended, since I loved their starry look and easy eurhythmic movement.
“Why not?”
“We think they are very dangerous animals.”
“More so than the elephant?”
“Many of us think so, but all do not agree.”
“Nor do I, I think. I, Thor Larsen, disagree,” he remarked thumping his chest with four fingers of his left hand, and undeterred by the fact that he was speaking outside his experience. “I think elephant must be far more dangerous.”
That “must”, and the emphasis he put on it, should have told me something of how deeply his imagination was concerned with the physical greatness of things. But it passed me by, particularly as I knew experienced hunters who thought as he did. Besides, he gave me no pause for any reflection, so anxious was he to continue his catechism.
So we completed a rapid run through in these stark terms of shooting of all the categories of game known to me. He readily absorbed my brief descriptions of the animals he had not heard of before. At the end I thought he might like to hear something about our birds as well since we have perhaps the most wonderful of all in Africa—even for those with a taste in outsizes, like the ostrich, Goliath heron, lamb-snatcher and giant bustard. However he was not interested in winged things and cut me short, his mind back on the elephant with which he had started.
“Me too!” he exclaimed laughing as if it were a rare joke. “Me too, am a hunter of elephants. I hunt the elephants of the sea.”
Up to that moment I had known only by deduction that he must be one of my host’s captains. Now I knew precisely that he was a whaling man and, judging by his presence among the celebrities gathered on the lawn of the owner’s representative, one of the foremost captains in the fleet.
“And you, have you ever hunted whales, my young Boher?” he asked when he’d stopped laughing.
I shook my head, words failing me at the excitement set off by his question.
“Would you like to hunt whales?” It was only technically a question, for I am sure he knew the answer.
“Gosh!” I exclaimed; and, finding tongue, told him in a rush how much I wanted to, adding that already my friend and I had made his father promise to ask an experienced old Captain of his, on arrival at the party, to take us whaling with him.
Larsen and I both looked around us as I spoke to see whether the Captain had turned up yet, but we saw only men in flannels drinking and talking.
Larsen gave me a look, then stood up abruptly and exclaimed: “Much better you come with me!”
Without waiting for my answer, he marched with an odd balancing step as if the lawn were a deck heaving underneath his feet, across to where our host was talking. That, and the view from behind of his compact body, powerful shoulders, long arms and short legs, imparted something anthropoidal to his movement. Even his clothes, his best suit of a thick navy blue serge, were jungle dark in that gathering of flannels of cream, club blazers, white scarves and silk kerchiefs.
“Boss!” He interrupted his host, his voice audible all over the broad lawn. “Boss! I take your two boys whaling, not?”
The owner’s representative, Andrew Watson, looked up as if a carefully cultivated urbanity would fail him. For a long moment I feared he would give the stocky captain a curt “No”. But helped by the mellowing influence of his own gin, he checked the irritation that was in him.
“Have a chair and join us for a drink while we talk about it.”
He gave Larsen a perfunctory smile, while indicating a chair, and beckoned unnecessarily to his butler who was already picking up his tray to come to them.
What precisely passed between them I could not tell but it didn’t last long.
Larsen had no sooner swallowed his gin than he left as abruptly as he had arrived.
“That’s settled!” he announced with gruff satisfaction, waving his hand imperiously. “Next Sunday evening you come to my ship and I show you the hunting of whales.”
I was beginning to thank him when he shook a thick sallow finger at me and stopped me short.
“But I do not show you the hunting of whales without payment!” he remarked.
Consternation and confusion in me then was great and must have shown on my face. I came of a poor nation who seldom had enough money. We were rich in land. My own family owned hundreds of thousands of acres, thousands of sheep, much cattle and many horses. We never lacked food but we were a thousand miles from our nearest markets on the coast and often the rail charges were greater than the price fetched by our produce. Ready money, as our wool-brokers with unconscious irony called it, for I have never known a more unready substance, was difficult to come by. I had barely been able to raise my fare for my holiday by the sea. I could not possibly afford to pay Larsen anything.
Noticing my dismay, he reassured me at once: “Yes, you too must pay. Something for nothing is no good, not? For every whale I show you, you pay me one day, by showing me elephant. Next Sunday we open a whale-elephant account book, not? And no worry, I give you plenty credit.”
He seized my arm in his broad hand, squeezed it, and a look came to his eye which, remembering the butler’s description of it, might have been that of a sorcerer acknowledging a chosen apprentice, while he laughed as if it were all sheer fun. But I knew already in my blood and bones that he was being more serious than he had been over anything that had passed between us since we met.
In a state of wild excitement I excused myself and rushed to Eric with the news. He said in a voice that subdued me at once: “I don’t think father would have liked that much.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“He would have preferred us to go with his favourite captain. Besides, he’s never told me, but I have a feeling, that he, that they all, find your friend Larsen a bit too strange for their liking.”
He said all this in a way that made me feel responsible and I stammered: “Oh, I—I’m sorry.”
“Oh, don’t worry. You couldn’t help it. After all, father could have said ‘no’ if he’d wanted to,” he answered, more out of desire to reassure than out of conviction.
Fortunately I was too young and enthusiastic to let this cloud the prospect before us for long. Yet from that moment my host’s attitude to me underwent a subtle change. The temperature and scale of the warm and expansive welcome with which he had received me contracted. It was, I think, a slight variation of the mechanism in the human spirit which in its extreme form once made an oriental potentate cut off the head of the messenger who had brought him bad news. It is as if none of us can quite rid our natures of the assumption that anyone involved in circumstances not to our liking cannot be wholly innocent himself. And our natures may be partially right. What we are in ourselves may well attract out of the infinite range of possibilities at the disposal of chance and circumstance those that correspond closest to it, just as a magnet will extract only one set of metals from among all other elements. Just as there are human beings who can communicate grave diseases to others by possessing it, although in a degree so small that they never succumb to it themselves, may there not also be human carriers in this matter of mischance?
However, in due course, we did go to sea with Thor Larsen, and so began the pattern of events with which I am concerned.