I CAME THEN, at last, to that Saturday evening at the beginning of my fourth whaling season, at the moment in the empty squeaking Kurt Hansen when I was stowing my gear underneath my bunk in Thor Larsen’s cabin, feeling strangely and indefinitely apprehensive. I had just shut the heavy mahogany drawer on my clothes and straightened myself when I heard someone board the deck above me. Someone to keep me company and perhaps explain everything, I thought with relief as heavy footsteps sounded overhead.
I was through the plush curtains of the cabin doorway, out of the saloon and up the companion-way as fast as I had ever been. ’Mlangeni, already changed into his sea-going clothes, was just making himself comfortable beside the warm hatch.
“Oh, Man of Icoco!” I called out, delighted to find him there again so massively real, with a long dark sunset shadow on the yellow wood of the deck beside him. “I see you and I greet you.”
He rose immediately, swung round to return my greeting in kind, but, warm and friendly as it was, it perturbed me. Some subtle element that normally would have been present was withheld, and its absence suggested to me that our ‘Man-in-the-Sun’ was a preoccupied if not troubled person.
I think my dismay was instantly communicated to him, for in that protective manner he had always adopted towards me, he said reassuringly: “Sit here, ’Nkosan, please, and bring me your news.”
He moved over to the far edge of the hatch brushing the cover beside him politely with the broad palm of his great hand. Genuine as the invitation was, the sound of his voice was still not as full as it would normally have been. Yet I knew I could not ask him directly what was the cause. I would have to come round to it the African way, which was difficult for me seeing that apprehension had quickened in me.
“Have you seen the Captain yet?” I asked him. “And d’you know where he’s gone? And why the Kurt Hansen was deserted when I boarded her some twenty minutes ago?”
“The little-killer-of-great-fish, is he not in his place below then?” ’Mlangeni answered, his big black eyes full of surprise. “He was there with another ’Nyanga, when I went ashore to buy tobacco!”
I did not miss the use of the word “another”, since it reminded me that Thor Larsen was, in ’Mlangeni’s view, a witch-doctor too. I remembered how, three years before, Jack, the butler, on my first meeting with Thor Larsen, had warned me that the Captain had the eyes of a witch-doctor. That moment suddenly seemed like a pin-point of light at the end of a long tunnel.
“Another ’Nyanga, ’Mlangeni! What d’you mean? Did the Captain have a visitor then?”
“Yes,” ’Mlangeni told me, Thor Larsen had had a visitor on board, a strange, tall, spare old man, with a dark-grey beard, pointed like the blade of an assegai, and the eyes of a witch-doctor with the light in them of all the dreams in which the ’Nyanga forever walks like a man in his sleep.
There was no doubt from the tone of his voice that he had found the visitation highly portentous. He paused and I had to prod him into speech.
“This visitor, ’Mlangeni, how did he come to the Kurt Hansen? D’you know who he is?”
’Mlangeni shook his head and went on to tell me all he knew of the episode. He had joined the ship at about noon that morning to find the Captain, Leif and Gorgeous on board.
“And how were they?” I asked, happy that I was certain of seeing them soon.
“Well, ’Nkosan, well,” ’Mlangeni answered, and added not surprisingly, since they had all gone straight from our last season to another in the Antarctic and must have only just returned. “But weary like men who have walked too far and too long from home.”
However, ’Mlangeni continued, when he had exchanged greetings with Leif and Gorgeous, stowed his gear and changed his clothes, it was agreed between them that he should stay on watch in the Kurt Hansen while they went ashore for the petty shopping necessary after so long a time at sea. He made himself comfortable on deck, and was smoking the last cigarette when he saw the other ’Nyanga.
As I knew, he went on, there were always, at weekends, scores of visitors and sightseers in the harbour, walking up and down the quayside and eyeing the ships. He, ’Mlangeni, was too used to such people to bother his eyes with them. But suddenly he had been compelled to look up. He was certain I would not be surprised at that because I knew what Iziyangafn1 were: they had the power to direct one’s sight from far greater distances than the few feet which separated the Kurt Hansen’s low deck from the dock. He was made to look straight into the eyes of this man he had described to me.
These eyes, ’Mlangeni said, were singularly clear, of a blue so pale that they were like the sky at Icoco seen through a white haze of summer: yet so bright that they shone in the shadow of a large wide-brimmed khaki hat with a strip of puff-adder skin round the base of its crown.
Their eyes had met and he had looked steadily at ’Mlangeni, as if he had always known him. ’Mlangeni forced himself to look away, and when he dared to glance at the quay again he saw that the stranger had turned sideways to the Kurt Hansen and was walking with long, easy steps right down the line of the whalers, examining each group as he went by them.
’Mlangeni hoped that he had seen the last of the man and that he was merely curious. But to his amazement, when the stranger got to the end of the line of whalers, he turned round and came back again, his eyes intent as before. Clearly he was no ordinary sightseer and his special concern was with one or more of our ships. He passed up and down the entire line thus three times and on each occasion gave ’Mlangeni a brilliant concentrated stare.
’Mlangeni liked this not at all. Afraid that at any moment now the man might speak to him, he was thinking of going below when to his astonishment the Captain, impetuous and hatless, appeared on deck and made straight for the side of the ship to look over at the man on shore.
The man had halted and turned once more to face the Kurt Hansen. ’Mlangeni was certain he had willed the Captain on deck, for he looked at him steadily as if he had known Thor Larsen, too, before. Thor Larsen responded in kind, and ’Mlangeni was not taken aback when suddenly they came out of their trance and Thor Larsen said a rough “good day”, to which the stranger silently raised his hat.
’Mlangeni commented: “’Nkosan,” it was clear to see the stranger had walked far and long where the sun is even hotter than here, for half-way between his eyes and his grey hair the skin of his forehead was as white as milk; but all the rest of his face was dark as Leif’s coffee.
“Perhaps you wish to step on board, not?” ’Mlangeni mimicked the Captain’s tone so well that I couldn’t help smiling.
“Thenk you, mister.” ’Mlangeni reproduced the man’s answer so clearly that I knew he could only have been Afrikaans, or, as ’Mlangeni would have had it, “a Dutchman”.
At once the stranger had come on board, shaken hands firmly with Thor Larsen, before being taken off to be shown all over the bridge, wheelhouse and deck.
’Mlangeni shook his head over this unusual behaviour of the Captain. Besides, ’Mlangeni had the impression that the Dutchman hardly knew any English and understood nothing or little of the Captain’s highly individualistic use of it. None the less they seemed to need no words for understanding since at the end of their tour the Captain had taken the stranger below. There they had been all afternoon, indeed they had seemed so settled that the conscientious ’Mlangeni had thought there could be no harm in slipping ashore to buy some tobacco. But he had not liked the meeting at all.
“When the Iziyanga begin to gather, ’Nkosan,” he concluded ominously, “the shadow of great trouble is come upon us all.”
“But what shadow, ’Mlangeni?” I asked. “You mean something else happened today of which you haven’t yet spoken?”
“No, ’Nkosan,” he shook his head. “Not today.”
He hesitated while he looked over the quay, up to the burning sunset ridge upon which the fashionable houses of Port Natal stood tier upon tier, white-faced and red-roofed, already muffled in purple against the falling night. “No, ’Nkosan, not of today, not here but before I came. I stand before you not I. My body and my heart are stirred up like water with mud. I have become a house of dreams.”
Poor ’Mlangeni. There was no doubt he was deeply troubled and, like all his people, unable to keep it secret for long from those he believed to be friends. Now I had only to ask to be told that he had not been long home in his kraal at Icoco when he began to be worried.
First, a great black mamba had moved into his wife’s hut. The mamba had large, glittering, alert eyes and a yellow scar on his side in the same place as the long scar his great-great-grandfather had received fighting under Chaka as a young man. He had no doubt it was the spirit of his great-great-grandfather come to visit them for some abnormal purpose. They had vacated the hut and daily put milk at the entrance to feed the mamba. They had observed it lying in the sun, curled up like a great metal bangle, but occasionally uncoiling itself to lift its head high, sitting on its tail, while it surveyed the scene as if it owned it. But one had only to look at it closely, ’Mlangeni said, to see it was saying: “Even here at the centre of your own kraal and in the clear light of the sun, watch as I am watching.”
It had stayed with them a full round of the moon and then suddenly vanished, not by day, because they would have seen it, but by night. That was the strangest of all things about this strange visitation for, as I knew, mambas never moved at night; their great-great-grandfather therefore could only have moved by night if he wanted to indicate that there was danger about by day.
“But what danger?” I interrupted.
He shook his head and said he wished he knew. There were many other persons who wished they knew. Was not the worst of all troubles, the trouble for which there was no name? He asked the question of the sky, its blue stained with red—as the sea with the blood of the whale—before he went on to say that almost all the men he met were not as they were, particularly not the men home from towns like Port Natal. They laughed no longer as they used to laugh and their eyes had darkened.
Also there was the cattle. He had never known the cattle so restless at night. There were no lion or leopard about, yet they would low all night long in strange sounds as if questioning the promptings of the spirits of the Amageba,fn2 who as every child knew communed with them. This was so not only at Icoco but all over the land: and it troubled the hearts of all men.
Finally he and Jack, his “brother” and my friend the butler, had gone to consult the greatest seer in the country just before they had had to return to Port Natal.
He was no comfort to them. This seer, ’Mlangeni emphasised, could read the future as I read books. He had made his reputation when still a boy, herding cattle. One night, many years ago, guarding cattle alone, the voice of his dead grandfather had told him to look up at the sky. He obeyed at once. In the clear winter sky over Icoco among the brilliant stars—and no one could have known how great and bright stars could be until he had seen the stars of Icoco in winter—he saw two small and five great stars suddenly break away from the multitude, reverse their course and move against the universe from west to east. A while later they were followed by other lesser stars. The boy reported it to his father, his father to the chief, the chief to their king, and his principal seer. If true, the king’s seer had pronounced, it could only mean trouble such as the world had never seen, because in all the long record of portents in his possession there had never been such a revolt in heaven against nature. But the probability was that it was just a young boy’s imagination.
As the weeks passed and no trouble came, people began to laugh at the young boy and to tease him for being a teller of tales. Then one day, the magistrate and seven policemen from the provincial capital paid them a rare and unexpected visit. He told them that a great war had broken out in the world and that he had come in the name of their king from across the great water to call on grown men to help in the war.
Questioned by the wise old men with metal rings around their heads, the magistrate revealed that the war had broken out the very night the boy had seen the five stars leave their courses and move from west to east. And what was more, ’Mlangeni said, his voice falling to a whisper with awe, the magistrate explained the war was mainly between five great nations and two smaller nations whose names he had never heard.
Now on this present occasion the same seer had seen again a multitude of small, insignificant stars leave their courses and move from east to west until, one by one, they shot from the sky to vanish into the dark. Two of the brightest among them remained pushing on towards the east and the sun, but at the last moment they too shot out of the sky simultaneously, leaving black streaks to mark their end. The seer could not tell what it meant except that it foretold great trouble for many ordinary men: and the trouble might be marked by the coming together of two extraordinary men. He uttered this last sentence with such a strange tone of immediacy that I had a feeling he had already identified his two extraordinary men.
I was about to question him further when he exclaimed urgently, “Hush, my ’Nkosan. Here comes the little-killer-of-great-fish.”
I looked up. Thor Larsen was striding towards his ship with that strange balancing walk of his. He was already dressed in his Sunday best, and his square figure, dark against the evening glow, was coming towards us fast as if engaged in some anthropoidal walking race.
He saw me before he reached the gang-plank and called out loudly, the rasp in his voice harsher for frustration, “There you are, Eyes! Damn time too! Just when I Thor Larsen need you, you come back late. Why?”
It is true my train had been some three hours late, which was not unusual on so long a journey from the interior. It had happened before and occasioned no comment. Why had it suddenly become so important?
I was to know almost at once. Although more reconciled to ’Mlangeni ever since the episode of the sperm tooth, Thor Larsen had continued his strange dislike of seeing us together. He still could not resist finding reasons for separating us. This Saturday evening was no exception. I hardly had time to explain my delayed arrival before, ignoring ’Mlangeni, he ordered me to follow him below.
In the saloon he made at once for his tantalus, lifted it easily and quickly on to the table and poured the glass waiting for it half full of schnapps.
“You sit here, Eyes, and listen.”
The gesture was as peremptory as the words, his spirit as always being in a hurry. He was silent only long enough to swallow his gin in five long mouthfuls and to pour another great measure into the glass. But it was long enough for me to tell how the season in the Antarctic had stressed and re-stressed the writing of strain and tension, of constant seeking and killing, in and between the lines of his dark seemingly moon-pocked face.
A quick sum of mental arithmetic told me that it was the beginning of the eleventh year since the Captain had last had a break from whaling, during which time he had packed twenty full seasons, going continuously from one killing to the other. Yet his deep eyes, searching my own over the tumbler shining like a fortune-teller’s crystal that he held in both broad hands in front of his wide chest, had the same expression in them as on the day when I had first met him. For them there had been neither time nor season; only one dark, forever empty “now”.
However, suddenly the glow of excitement showed in them and he announced: “Today, Eyes, I met a hunter of elephants. Today, for two hours, he sat where you sit trying to talk. Only now I come back from walking with him to tram. Only we not understand much. Why you not here to translate for us? Why, Eyes, why?”
Putting the tumbler down, he searched in his waistcoat pocket, drew out a piece of paper and threw it on the plush tablecloth, saying: “Look! This is name of the hunter of elephants. For two hours, Eyes, he talk and talk and talk, I think, about elephants, whales, the Bible, Job and again elephants. Only I know not clearly how and what.”
He slapped a hand to his forehead as if to relieve it of its daze.
I hastened to pick up the paper and saw printed on it in tentative careful block letters: “Herklaas de la Buschagne, ‘Ailsa Craig’ Private Hotel, Promenade, Port Natal.”
Had I tried, I could not have suppressed my astonishment. ‘Herklaas’ was the Afrikaans from the original ‘Hercules’. De la Buschagne was one of the many Huguenot surnames to be found among my countrymen and had been known to me ever since I could remember. He had long been a legend among us up-country as one of our greatest living white hunters.
Thor Larsen, of course, immediately observed my astonishment and exclaimed: “Ah, you know him, my Eyes. This hunter, you know him?”
“I know of him, sir,” I corrected, and went on to explain, adding: “He is as famous among the Africans of the interior as among my own people. They all call him ‘One-Bullet’.”
One-Bullet! The Captain got the meaning at once. “Ah! So he never needs more than one bullet to kill.”
The thought depressed him for a while, I think because he remembered how often it took more than one harpoon to kill a whale. Then he said: “But elephant is so much smaller than whale, not, Eyes? And earth does not heave and lift like Kurt Hansen at sea, not, Eyes? Sometimes take two, three harpoons for kill. But if ever harpoon come near one-harpoon gunner, I Thor Larsen am such a man.”
He celebrated so gratifying a conclusion with a huge swig of gin and then told me the story of the stranger. Like ’Mlangeni, he had been immediately interested in the sight of the man, Convinced that there must be something special about a man who was interested in the whaling fleet, if not the Kurt Hansen.
To be convinced was to act, and he had gone up on deck to discover what the stranger was after. After this followed Thor Larsen’s bewildering account of what had passed for conversation between them. Three things alone remained certain in my mind at the end of the Captain’s explosive description of their talk. The stranger had referred Thor Larsen to certain chapters and passages in the book of Job. He wanted Thor Larsen to give him the chance to hunt whales. The Captain had told him about me and promised to send me to his lodgings as soon as possible to arrange another meeting between them so that they could, with my help, understand one another better.
“So now, my Eyes,” Thor Larsen concluded with his hatred of the inconclusive, “you to go at once to this address and tell him I want him here eleven o’clock tomorrow.”
Characteristically, it was an order, and I could not help smiling to myself at the thought of what the reaction of ‘One-Bullet’ de la Buschagne might be if I were tactless enough to render it to the letter.
So, soon after my arrival on board and against my inclination, I was on my way to the promenade to do the Captain’s bidding.
I had no difficulty in locating the boarding house, or private hotel as these establishments were euphemistically called. It was a grey three-storied building, with a deep L-shaped verandah, its red tin roof supported on massive pillars at the corners and at either side of the narrow steps leading up from the street. A thick balustrade ran all along its edge, while some hundreds of yards away the long swell of the Indian Ocean broke ceaselessly against the rigid concrete promenade that the citizens of Port Natal had built across the curved fringe of the wide foreshore. The windows of “Ailsa Craig” were small, deep-set and covered with lace, as if someone had fallen out of love with the sun and light. From the dark front door, down a dimly lit passage, came a smell of fried fish and Indian curry to spoil the salt sea air outside. It was obvious to me that the people in the “Ailsa Craig” would be summoned to instant meals by an imperious bell and had already, judging by the stale smell, finished their Saturday supper.
I looked over the men and women on the verandah for someone resembling the stranger ’Mlangeni had described to me but saw none. I had to go inside and, after some trouble, found an Indian waiter who told me to go up a green linoleum-covered staircase, turn left and go down a corridor, at the end of which I would come to room fifteen where Mr. de la Buschagne would be.
I did as directed and went down the bleak corridor to the sound of “Bye-bye, Blackbird” being played loudly on a gramophone from one of the rooms.
The music stopped and the sound of the sea I loved filled the silence to overflowing.
I stood hesitant in front of a door painted a dirty brown with the number fifteen in khaki figures upon it.
“What on earth possesses you,” I thought marvelling at my hesitation. “You’ve let ’Mlangeni influence you too much.”
But I did not relish the meeting and had to force myself, so that I knocked on the door far louder than was necessary or perhaps polite.
Almost at once the door was opened with speed and decision and de la Buschagne, tall and spare, stood before me, as authentically and unmistakably of Afrikaans Africa as biltong. Two unusually brilliant eyes were looking me over while from long narrow lips between neat moustache and well-trimmed pointed grey beard, came one clipped Afrikaans word: “Ja?”
I explained nervously that I was from the Kurt Hansen.
That was enough for Herklaas de la Buschagne to interrupt me, step aside, and invite me to enter the room, calling me Cousin in the courteous old-fashioned Afrikaans way as he did so.
The room was what these rooms usually are, furnished sparingly with the cheapest furniture, glossy with excessive varnish to hide the lack of grain in the wood. What was unusual in it was a large stink-wood ox-wagon chest, placed across one corner of the green painted wall, and obviously de la Buschagne’s portmanteau. A bandolier full of cartridges lay on it and a gun in a brown leather cover stood behind it in the corner. One look at the cartridges and shape of the cover made me certain it was a nine millimetre Mauser and obviously the owner’s favourite weapon, since he had been unable to be parted from it even in Port Natal where he could never use it.
I had barely taken all this in when at the open doorway of the room giving on to a balcony appeared a girl. Behind her and beyond the balcony, stiff as if in corsets, rose the walls of more private hotels, their small curtained windows translucent with amber, transmitting just light enough to show the space between the windows filled with drainpipes and iron fire escapes. Such a poor view was in itself proof enough that the room in which I stood was one of the cheapest in the “Ailsa Craig” and, combined with the ugly furniture, imparted a Cinderella quality to the impression that the beauty of the girl made on me.
She was not tall but slender, and in the dress she wore, falling to her ankles in the up-country fashion, she looked taller than she was. The dress was of blue linen, slightly waisted, three-quarter sleeves, edged with silk of an astringent green, and a high collar of the same material was pinned to the smooth throat of a long elegant neck by a dark ruby brooch. Her head was shapely; her hair, thick and yellow, fell to her waist in one long thick plait, tied with a green ribbon. Her eyes were large, slightly slanted, and as full of light as her father’s, but contemplative, as of a person whose young life had been spent alone, so that she had become accustomed to think thoughts instead of speaking them. The bones beneath the smooth skin were surely drawn, and the oval face was an exciting compound of positive assertion and subtle implication.
As she stepped into the centre of the room to stand under the white electric light overhead, I saw that she, too, must have lived long in places far hotter than Port Natal, for the sun’s reflection had left the slightest darkening on her clear skin, like the fine dusting of pollen shaken by the wind.
“My daughter, Laetitia,” de la Buschagne said to me, his tone strictly factual. Then he added: “Lets, the Cousin has come from the Captain of the whaling ship that I’ve told you of.”
I thought at that the look in her eyes suddenly became somewhat disapproving. But she gave me a young hand and in a clear voice greeted me with a polite: “How do you do, Cousin?”
“How do you do, little Cousin?” I replied and saw at once that the term, perhaps because the diminutive in Afrikaans is so often used for endearment, had been a mistake.
“Won’t you sit down, Cousin,” she said coolly and pointed to an empty chair.
I declined politely, saying that I had to get back to the ship at once. I had really only come to bring an invitation from Thor Larsen for Uncle Herklaas (as I called him in deference to the polite form of the old-fashioned Afrikaans that he had used), to visit him in the Kurt Hansen at eleven the next morning.
For the first time since I had met him some sign of feeling showed in de la Buschagne’s face, though his voice was taut as ever.
“Thank your Captain, Cousin, and tell him I’ll be there,” he replied.
“But Vader!”fn3 the girl protested with some dismay. “Vader can’t be there at eleven. We shall still be in church by then, as Vader will remember we promised the predicant we would be!”
From the way she addressed her father in the third person, a habit I was to find she never varied, I knew how great was his hold over her and I guessed that perhaps she was also afraid of him.
“If the calf should fall in the pit on a Sunday, daughter,” he told her, “Our Lord himself gave us permission to haul it out.” He turned to me and repeated: “Tell your Captain I shall be there at eleven.”
At this Laetitia looked so dismayed that I took it upon myself to say, with some daring, since Thor Larsen would be most annoyed if he discovered I had proposed an alteration in his command: “I’m certain, Uncle, that if it would be more convenient for you to come somewhat later, the Captain wouldn’t mind. He never leaves the Kurt Hansen on Sundays until four in the afternoon.”
Looking at me with some annoyance, de la Buschagne proclaimed instantly: “No, Cousin. I shall do as your Captain asked. I’ll be there at eleven.”
There was a rebuke in his voice of “your Captain” which left me unmoved, so gratified was I by the change in the look his daughter gave me. She was obviously touched by my attempt to help her. This was confirmed a moment later when, already in the passage below on my way out, I heard quick light footsteps on the staircase behind me, turned round, and saw her hastening towards me.
“Please, Cousin, I have no time to explain,” she begged, putting her hand on my arm and whispering, her face close to mine. “Please do not let my father go to sea in that ship. Tell your Captain not to take him. Please.”
She pressed my arm gently, and without waiting for an answer turned swiftly about to go back up the staircase as fast as she had come down it, and on the whole I was glad she did not wait for my answer.
I could only have told her, if I had been honest, that nothing would make Thor Larsen change his mind about taking her father to sea should he wish to do so, as already I was convinced he did. I doubted even if I had had either the courage or conviction to argue the issue with my Captain, despite a lively desire to help the girl. It would be a brave as well as, perhaps, a foolish man who would try to make Thor Larsen deny the very quality which made him so powerful. Instinct as well as a lively sense of fairness rejected such a course.
The only hope was for the girl to try to change her father’s mind but I saw no prospect of that either. I suspected that two such minds as her father’s and Thor Larsen’s united on any issue could only be changed by some act of God. The thought overawed me. But then, urging myself to a more reasonable attitude, I concluded that the girl was making too much of the whole thing, for what harm could there possibly be in her father taking a trip out to sea in a whaler?
When I told him the news later on, even ’Mlangeni’s obvious disapproval of the fact that de la Buschagne was coming to visit the Captain the next day, far from making me reappraise my attitude, oddly irritated me. Perhaps I should have known then that something in me was protesting overmuch.
I was on deck with Leif and ’Mlangeni on that limpid Sunday morning when de la Buschagne arrived. Our Norwegian crew dressed in their rough navy-blue serge had not long gone ashore to church. Gorgeous had just vanished round the corner of a warehouse, a suitcase of new records in hand, on his way to a whole day of music before his dedicated audiences in his apartment. Thor Larsen, already on deck several times pretending to examine his ship but clearly on the look-out for his guest, had just gone below again.
Then, on the stroke of eleven, we saw de la Buschagne rounding the corner of a warehouse, its outline trembling in the bright winter sun like a rock under silver water. He was walking fast, with a long easy and resolute step.
The moment he saw him, ’Mlangeni made a noise of disapproval, excused himself with a “’Nkosan, I’ve work to do,” and hurried below.
De la Buschagne had not long turned the corner when his daughter appeared, walking with an ease and grace that were a delight to watch. I imagined that the fact that she walked some distance behind him was evidence of the disagreement between them. But that, though it still existed, was not the explanation. I discovered later that during her long years alone with her father in the bushveld and jungles of Africa she had always been made to follow him out of regard for her safety, as well as the necessity for the man with the gun always to walk at the head of his line. I was right, however, in concluding that her presence there could only mean that she still hoped to influence her father’s purpose with my Captain.
They made straight for the Kurt Hansen’s gang-plank and, though in their best up-country clothes, they looked an old-fashioned if not archaic sight.
That her father had eyes for nothing but the Kurt Hansen did not surprise me. He after all had been there before. But I was amazed that she could appear so uninterested in the line of ships which never failed to excite me, for she followed in her father’s wake with her eyes on the ground.
De la Buschagne started up the gang-plank to come on board.
“Good morning, Uncle,” I called out politely.
“Day, Cousin,” was the perfunctory response.
At that moment the Captain appeared on deck. He was just in time to see the girl put a foot on the gang-plank.
Ignoring his visitor for the moment, a roar broke from him. “Back, you woman there!” he shouted. “I’ll have no woman in Kurt Hansen. Who told you come on board, not?”
He turned as if by instinct to look first at me, then to de la Buschagne and then back to the girl, now standing still on the edge of the plank and trembling.
“Back! You hear? I, Thor Larsen, say back!” he shouted again, almost out of control.
I expected de la Buschagne to explain that it was his daughter and to protest against the Captain’s brutal way of addressing her. Instead, he merely looked over his shoulder and spoke to her. I heard and understood every word of his clipped Afrikaans.
“I told you, daughter, this was no place for a woman, let alone a young one like you. It’s man’s talk we are about to have and you had better go back to the hotel to wait for me.”
The phrase “man’s talk” was a common and, to me, an irritating one in my African world, implying, as it did, an inferiority of the opposite sex. I was not surprised, therefore, that it caused de la Buschagne’s daughter to obey, turn about, her head half-bowed, and so withdraw ashore.
I knew also, of course, that many sailors of my day were superstitious about allowing women in their ships because they thought it would bring them bad luck. “Look, Eyes,” Svend Johansen had once told me in this regard. “A ship is a woman. If you let another woman on board the two will fight one another for the men in her. Sooner or later they make men in ship mad.” Gorgeous also had told me that Thor Larsen was more superstitious than most on this regard. Even so, I had not thought him capable of such lack of manners to a mere girl.
I remembered the strange and tender concern for her father that I had heard in her voice the night before. Something in me gave way. As de la Buschagne stepped on deck, I dashed past him for the gangway.
“Where you going, Eyes? I want you!” Thor Larsen shouted as I went by him.
“That was his daughter you’ve been shouting at, even if he appears to have forgotten it,” I snapped back at him, noticing the surprise on his expression at my first rebellion.
“Eyes! I say, Eyes!” he shouted fiercely, seeing me disappear down the ship’s side without any other effort at explanation.
I ignored his cry and ran after the girl whose slender back was now turned to the ship. Reaching her, I took her by the arm and stopped her saying: “Hullo, little Cousin! How are you?”
“Oh, it’s you, Cousin,” she answered and, turning, looked straight at me.
Her eyes were bright with unshed tears of despair as I thought. But I was wrong. They were tears of anger.
As I tried to soften the impact of Thor Larsen’s behaviour by telling her it was an unwritten law that no woman was ever allowed in the Kurt Hansen and that the Captain, of course, had to set the example, concluding “I promise you, little Cousin, he was shouting at himself rather than at you. He’s an awfully decent fellow, really” she interrupted me.
“If he’s so decent,” she responded with spirit, “he ought to know better. I’ve never met so rude a man before”—she used the Afrikaans word “onbeskof”, which is stronger than rude. “I’ve never been spoken to like that by anyone and I won’t allow it. I’ll have it out with father at once—”
She broke off, perhaps realising what little influence she could have on her father in this matter. All I know is that the tears of anger became tears of distress and rolled bright down her cheek.
“Look, little Cousin?” I said pressing her arm hard. “Don’t take it so badly. Sailors all sound a rough lot but they’re quite decent really. But they don’t see much of women, you know. The Captain’d be awfully upset if he knew he’d hurt you. He was merely giving you an order just as he gives us orders. Come along with me and I’ll show you what to do until your father comes back.”
The Captain’s shout interrupted us. “Eyes, you to come here at once!”
“Presently,” I called back with a courage that, when I thought it all over later, made me shiver at the risk I had run of estranging Thor Larsen for ever. “Later!” I turned my attention to the girl again. “Come with me please, little Cousin.”
Still holding her arm, I began walking her to the purple Royal Mail ship just ahead of us.
She came reluctantly. “Cousin, you’d better go back or that terrible little man will be angrier than ever. I’ve caused enough trouble—”
“Just come with me,” I told her firmly, and after a moment she began to step out more willingly at my side.
I had in the years behind me made friends of most of the people working regularly in the dock area. I knew all the watchmen employed by the rich Royal Mail Steamship Company to relieve their crews of guard duty while their ships were in port. The watchman on duty on this particular Sunday was a favourite of mine, a retired old Army pensioner, and I had no hesitation in walking the girl up the wide gangway on to the mail ship’s gleaming deck, introducing her to him and asking him as a special favour to let her see all over the ship and if necessary wait on one of the benches on deck in the sun until I could fetch her again.
“You’ll find this ship more welcoming than the Kurt Hansen,” I told her with a grin. I turned to the watchman. “They like women in these great passenger ships, don’t they?”
He, clearly impressed by the girl’s beauty, responded: “Pleased to meet you, Missie, and happy to have you on board.”
Relieved, I hastened back on board the Kurt Hansen where the Captain, de la Buschagne beside him, stood rigid and silent, staring at me in a way that frightened me. I stepped fast past Leif, who was looking at me with a new interest, and straight up to Thor Larsen.
I spoke to him with both the courage and cunning of fear: “I’ve made your guest’s daughter comfortable in the mail ship, sir, as I thought you’d wish me to. They’re used to women in those ships.”
Thor Larsen glared at me. Heretically, the thought came to me that perhaps we’d be a better ship if we did allow women on board.
Then suddenly, in his unpredictable way, comprehension came to him.
“Damn you, Eyes,” he told me, his eyes betraying his curse. “Damn you—you not my Eyes for nothing! Come! We three go below!”
I followed Thor Larsen and his guest below. To my surprise Leif came behind, his hand warm on my shoulder, to ask the Captain whether he would like some coffee and cake for his guest?
Soon the three of us were alone in the tiny saloon. Thor Larsen sat at the head of our small triangular table, his tantalus of spirit, tumbler of gin, and his sperm tooth in front of him, his intense eyes determinedly fixed on his guest. I sat on the bench nearest to him and beside me on my right ‘One-Bullet’ de la Buschagne, so tall that, even sitting down, his head nearly touched the metal ceiling. He had taken a yellow calabash pipe out of his pocket, stuffed it full of tobacco from a small cotton bag which he wore looped around the ends of black braces underneath his ample jacket. The tobacco was dark and so springy that when lit he had to clamp it down with a metal cap fitted to the pipe to prevent it from curling over the bright yellow bowl. His wide hat lay on the table within reach, and to this day I remember how my eyes would go time and again from its puff-adder band curled round the hat, the strangely futuristic pattern of the diamond markings of the snake as vivid as if it were there alive, to the lone sperm tooth showing up in the deep plush of the cloth in front of the Captain like the tip of an iceberg on a velvet sea. They became more and more heraldic as if they were the seals under which two warriors fought an ancient fight.
For two hours we sat there thus, with me interpreting and the air in the saloon turning so blue with smoke from calabash pipe and cigarillos that I could hardly see the gold lettering on the Lloyd’s Manual of Shipping in the bracket opposite me. Only once were we interrupted when Leif, without speaking a word, brought in a huge pot of coffee, two cups and a plate of cake for our guest and me. He would have left as silently had not a request from the stranger made me stop Leif to ask him for some salt.
“Salt?” He queried the request, clearly mystified.
I looked at de la Buschagne for verification.
He nodded and added: “Always take salt in coffee and like it black. Never take sugar into the bush with me. It’s heavy to carry and useless stuff. In any case the Kaffirs always steal it before you can use it.”
All this had to be translated for Thor Larsen and served only to increase his respect of his guest as a man of unique character like himself.
Slight as the incident was, it was a sign of how de la Buschagne, like Thor Larsen, had formed tastes and character down to the minutest detail not so much out of tradition but each out of his own experience of life.
Something of what de la Buschagne’s own life had been came out during the conversation that followed.
It began by Thor Larsen wanting to know what he had meant the day before with all these references to the book of Job? Thor Larsen thought he had got the drift of most of their talk: but what had Job to do with it all?
De la Buschagne took the pipe out of his mouth whenever he answered and, elbow resting on the table, held it out steadily in front of him, the mouth-piece almost level with his eyes, which constantly moved from it to Thor Larsen’s attentive face and back again to the stem.
He had mentioned Job to the Captain, de la Buschagne asked me to explain, because on the very night of the day he had first seen that elephant of which he had spoken to the Captain, he had opened his Bible at random in camp to read a chapter of it after the evening meal to his daughter as their unvaried custom was, and found his eyes at once on the lines: “Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a hook?”
Yes, yes, Thor Larsen nodded vigorously as he interrupted in his impetuous way, he had understood the lines and had confirmed their content by looking them up in the ship’s Bible afterwards.
The guest replied that he had understood the Captain’s response, for how could a man be the Captain of a whaler without having “drawn out Leviathan with a hook” many times?
“Yes, yes!” exclaimed Thor Larsen, but what had Job or Leviathan or both to do with the elephant?
The answer was of such import to de la Buschagne that he paused too long for Thor Larsen’s liking, who interrupted again at random.
“Ask him, Eyes, how many elephant he kill?”
The question appeared so remote from what was in de la Buschagne’s mind that he answered it casually, as if brushing it from his thought like a mere fly from his forehead. “Sixteen hundred and three . . . perhaps four. I have never been absolutely sure of that last one.”
“Sixteen hundred and three!” Thor Larsen exclaimed, astonished. For the moment he was also downcast, as I well knew, because he could not have killed anything like that number of whales. But irrepressible, he brightened again, for I heard him muttering to himself: “But then elephant much smaller than whale.”
At that he turned to me, aggressive in his regained confidence: “Ask him, Eyes, what biggest elephant he ever shot? What weight? What tusks? What height? What every damn thing else, not?”
“Rarely more than six ton. But I did shoot one once between seven and eight,” de la Buschagne answered reluctantly, as if these questions were irrelevant to his thought. “Close on thirteen feet high at the shoulder: the right tusk, ninety-seven pounds three ounces; the left, ninety-one pounds eleven ounces. All together one hundred and eighty-eight pounds fourteen ounces.”
My Captain broke in to answer triumphantly: “Tell him, Eyes, even if he shoot sixteen hundred and four elephant and they all weigh eight tons each, he only shoot a hundred and sixty and two-fifths whales of eighty ton each, and I kill more whales than that!”
Trying hard not to grin at the idea of what two-fifths of a whale might be, I told our guest all this. For the first time he gave the Captain a long, hard, critical look as if he were wondering whether he had been wrong in holding him in such respect.
“Does the man think I’m trying to compete with him, Cousin?” he asked me, proudly on his dignity. “Ask him then how many whales he has killed?”
I translated the last part of his question only.
“Oh, many, many more. I know not exactly how many.” Unaware of the tension in his guest, Thor Larsen evaded a precise answer.
That was one of the strange things about the Captain. He must have known the number of whales he had killed because of his exact records, but he would never, not even to me who had often asked him, say exactly how many whales he had killed, nor indeed let anyone look at his records. Was it because all whales were one to him? Or because he had a conscience in the matter, after all? Or was it because, with his vast appetite for hunting whales, any number, however great, must appear insignificant? I never knew the real answer but the middle explanation was never as convincing a possibility to me as the others.
“I see,” de la Buschagne remarked in the voice of a man who naturally tends to make mole-hills out of mountains. “I wonder whether he realises that every elephant I shot could have killed me had I missed or just wounded it? Were his whales ever so dangerous?”
I would have preferred not to translate any of this and get back to the original trend of the conversation. But neither man would have been content had I done so. I therefore gave my Captain a bowdlerised version of de la Buschagne’s retort.
It was enough to reach Thor Larsen’s heart. Fundamentally fair and helped by his own still unexplained interest in elephants, he admitted somewhat crestfallen: “He is right, Eyes. Hunting whales today not so dangerous. But,” his eyes flashed again, “there’s a danger enough always for small ships, in high seas and ice and wind. But please to come back to elephant and Job.”
That suited de la Buschagne too, for he immediately fell back into the flat, deliberate tone normal to him, and resumed where he had left off. He had been going to say that, big as was the biggest elephant he had ever shot and just described to us, the elephant that he had come across on the day on which he’d read the text from Job round the camp fire, was even bigger.
At this I could hardly repress a whistle of astonishment. The elephant already described to us was so much more than any I had ever heard of that I was near to doubting him. Had it not been for his reputation and his obvious love of cold fact, I would have given him the lie. When he now spoke of an elephant still bigger, I was unconvinced.
The man was instantly aware of my reaction. It was really rather alarming having to sit there as a go-between for two such sharp, observant, intuitive and immensely experienced men. In any case they were both men already predisposed to assume themselves falsely or at best inadequately interpreted.
“Yes, Cousin,” I was informed sternly. “This elephant is the biggest in the whole of Africa.”
Thor Larsen took this in avidly and exclaimed eagerly, “Ach, I see. The Caesar of elephants! I knew it. You know him as I well know the Caesar of sperm when I meet him!”
I translated all this, adding an explanation of what the Captain meant by Caesar, as I knew it would otherwise have puzzled the Afrikaaner. He nodded his head vigorously.
Completely restored in his initial conviction that he and the Captain were uniquely outsize by nature, he went on to say that this Caesar of elephants was a lone bull elephant, and he knew that it was the biggest in Africa because he recognised it from the descriptions of the animal that white men and black men from far and wide had given him. Even if he had not seen it with his own eyes, he would have recognised the bull from his spoor.
As a young hunter, it had been his ambition to shoot it. Scores of hunters had tried and failed. Their excuse was always that the elephant was indefatigable and too intelligent and fast for any man ever to catch up with it. Unlike other elephants, it seemed to have no favourite stamping ground, no regular habits or routes, that one could use for its undoing. Like the wind, it came and went from all directions travelling up and down and across the length and width of the land as no other elephant had ever been known to do.
“Ah, a true Caesar indeed!” Thor Larsen exclaimed, his interest soaring and his spirit full of fellow feeling for his companion. “All of the Seven Seas is one for the real Caesar. He travels them all like the winds of change and storm. Thor Larsen know, for all my life I seek him too.” He paused and then conceded with a certain reluctant generosity, “This Africa of yours too is great enough to be land-sea, not? But if no man ever catch up with elephant, where his description come from?”
Hunters, de la Buschagne admitted, had never seen the elephant. That was the strange thing about it, he stressed, a certain superstitious awe for the first time inflecting his voice. The elephant seemed always to know whenever there were armed men after it.
“That will not surprise you, Cousin, perhaps?” De la Buschagne spoke directly to me as if he wanted me to help bring home to the Captain’s understanding a difficult point. “You must know since you too live in the interior. Animals often seem to be perfectly aware whether man is armed or not armed; whether he is after them or not.”
I nodded. “They even seem to know the difference when one is carrying a gun for protection and not for hunting. I remember Oom Piet le Roux told me this too.”
“Piet le Roux!” His exclamation of surprise interrupted me. Intense interest appeared in his cool blue eyes as he looked at me. “You knew him?”
“Yes,” I told de la Buschagne first and then Thor Larsen. “Oom Piet always told me that out in the bush the intentions of man inevitably communicated itself to the day and its natural children. It did not matter, he said, how secret man kept his design, or lack of design, on animals, nature always knew which it was and broadcast it accordingly.”
“Just like the whale: above all the sperm!” Thor Larsen took up the point at once. “But then how you ever kill animals in Africa if this so?”
“Oom Piet used to say,” I answered, “that animals, like men, become ‘inattentive to life’s messages’.”
That was so, de la Buschagne agreed. He was certain this elephant owed its long life to its capacity for vigilance and readiness to read and accept the messages of nature. The result was that no hunter, as far as he knew, had ever seen him until the day some months ago, when he, Herklaas de la Buschagne, had had the honour of at last finding him.
Yet old men, he continued, unarmed and alone in the bush between one village of bee-hive huts and the next, women working in the fields, children herding their goats, fat-tailed sheep, and humped and brindled cattle, had seen the elephant over and over again. All their descriptions agreed that it was the biggest and the blackest elephant there had ever been. There were some old men who believed that it was the spirit of that great bull elephant slain in the beginning of things by the founder of the great Amangtakwena nation of the interior.
De la Buschagne broke off, quick to notice the excitement this reference to my beloved ’Takwena had produced in me, to say, “You evidently know the story, Cousin.”
“I know it well,” I said. “I know how before this killing the ’Takwena say that all things—stars, earth, sea, animals, men, plants, were all persons and at one. Then the great hero Umdinizuwayo came, stole a coal of fire from the great thunder-bird, and all except men rushed away from him and his fire to set themselves up in the separate places that they occupy today. I know how afterwards the morning star appealed to Umdinizuwayo to take up his spear and bow and go into the heavens where a giant bull elephant, at war against the new fire, was trampling out the stars. He found it in the middle of the Milky Way and killed it. Where it fell, to this day, there is the black hole in the Milky Way marking the gap that his killing left in the universe.” I added, almost to myself, “Even now I never shoot an elephant without a black hole appearing in the bright day in front of my eyes. At one moment there is so much life: then suddenly there is nothing.”
Both Thor Larsen and his guest fidgeted a bit at this, rather like Gorgeous after one of Leif’s discourses.
“So you’ve shot elephant already, Cousin!” said de la Buschagne, surprised.
“Yes,” Thor Larsen, grasping at this, announced proudly. “He is elephant hunter too but—” he added this quickly in case he might be belittling his guest by the comparison, “only a learner hunter. But please to go on.”
De la Buschagne went on quickly to say that this elephant made so great an impression on everyone who saw it that they felt compelled to try to name it. Though nicknames given to the elephant were various, one most generally used was “Sway-Back”.
We had to consider, he continued, that the animal stood high on long legs which were as unusually slender as their pads were uncommonly broad. It had immense, curved tusks, possessed a very high forehead, a long large trunk with a pink tip forever turning and curling, catching and analysing the whiffs of smell that came to it from afar and brought it news of the life out of reach of its sharpest vision. Its ears were enormous and never still, moving incessantly to fan its great body both against the heat of the sun and the fiery furnace of life within.
A wild fanatic glare I had not seen before now flashed in de la Buschagne’s eyes, and an unimagined passion gave him an eloquence I would never have suspected. I began to have an inkling of the cause of ’Mlangeni’s disquiet about the man.
Yes, he went on, he was convinced that if one could put one’s ear to the flank of the wild African elephant one would hear the flames roaring inside it. So much was this elephant life on the boil that you could hear its stomach rumbling in the bush hundreds of yards away.
“Pity I not hear whale stomach rumbling or I too shoot over a thousand of him,” Larsen exclaimed, determined not to lose advantage now that he had had to concede that his guest’s vocation was more dangerous than his own.
De la Buschagne went on as if he had not heard the Captain’s interruption, saying that, remarkable as all the features of this remarkable elephant were, the most remarkable thing about him was his walk. He walked with an immense long supple stride and as he walked, he had the strange rolling motion—here he paused to look up from his pipe’s stem to the Captain—that he had been told was characteristic of the sailor, and indeed not unlike the Captain’s own manner of walking.
Had de la Buschagne deliberately set out to flatter his host, he could not have succeeded more. Thor Larsen came near to being shy with the pleasure that the comparison gave him. He held his head like a war-horse that, after many a winter, had just heard military music again.
So high, de la Buschagne continued, was the elephant’s great black back that, watching it move above the sparkling bush, not only did the bush seem to sway with it but also the earth beneath the watcher’s feet felt as if it too were rocking. Once a man had seen the elephant and experienced just this effect, one realised that Sway-Back was the only possible name for him. Until then one could not help underrating the significance of the elephant’s name—as he himself had done until the other day.
To realise what that meant, he would like to reiterate to the Captain that for forty years now on and off he had been on that animal’s spoor. Here was, he stressed, an unusual fact in the relationship between hunter and hunted that had to be understood. The lives of all the other lovely, vivid, jewel-bright animals of Africa were frighteningly brief, passing before the eyes of the hunter like shooting stars through the night. But the elephant was the only animal in Africa whose life-span was longer, perhaps, than that of the hunter. The life of the elephant, therefore, was long enough for him and his hunters to have a continuity of relationship. That had been so with him and Sway-Back: and of course he, de la Buschagne, had not gone yet.
He could hardly remember a time when he had not known about Sway-Back, first as an unusually wild, reckless young bull for whom everyone predicted a violent, untimely end, but slowly changing over the years into an animal that was held in awe if not reverence. He had said earlier he would have known it from its spoor alone. He did not want the Captain to think that he was pretending to be as good a tracker as the best African hunters who could tell the spoor of any animal from all others of its kind. But he himself was good enough to tell the exceptional from the average, and he had mentioned his recognition of Sway-Back’s spoor because it was the best way of showing how long he had known him and how often he had followed him.
At this point the look in de la Buschagne’s eyes was most impressive. Much of the reserve and criticism I had felt for the man were themselves rebuked, and I myself was made aware of my youth and inexperience as never before. I knew just enough of the interior and hunting to realise how great and dedicated in his strange way Herklaas de la Buschagne must have been. This new respect I am certain communicated itself through a change in my manner of interpretation to my Captain, who was listening now to de la Buschagne like a child to its first fairy tale.
Yet, he went on, he was nearly thirty before he made his first serious attempt to hunt Sway-Back, although he had already known almost all there was to know about him years earlier. Nearly forty years ago he had come across Sway-Back’s spoor at about nine in the morning and recognised it instantly. He wished he could convey how impressive an experience this recognition was. Somehow the innermost quality of the animals of Africa was described in their spoor on the earth. For instance, the pug marks of the lion spoke clearly of power and also, subtly, the bite of sharp claws into the red earth belied by the soft, round imprint of the purple pad imposed behind them. The great hoof of the buffalo lay in the track as if carved with iron, and the savage hole punched behind it by the afterclaw in its heels was the dagger with which it finished off its enemies.
But how different was the spoor of the elephant, shaped like a graph tracing the course of the earth round the sun that de la Buschagne once had seen depicted on the blackboard of his school. It was a world on its own, directed at no one, without menace or warning. At the same time it spoke gravely of great power of being, for within the horizon of its foot the ground had been subjected to such pressure that it had disintegrated into the finest powder and shone like silk wherever the elephant had stepped.
So there he was, forty years ago, deep in the bush, the dew still on the grass, a halo of yellow pollen above it where his feet and those of his bearers had shaken it, looking once more as he had already done so many times before at the greatest elephant spoor in the world shining like satin in the dark red earth of a clearing, while one by one around him the fever-birds began their exhortations of praise. The spoor was fresher than he had ever seen it, and as he knelt down beside it to examine it closely, the exclamations of astonishment from his bearers told him that they had recognised it too.
The spoor could only have been minutes old, and a voice from within that he had not heard before spoke to him saying: “This is the chance you’ve been waiting for all these years! Follow him, quick!”
He was, he would like the Captain please to understand, not a man of impulse. He was a man of sense and reason. He made his living by hunting and had never been interested in shooting for world records, as the English were so prone to be. But this new voice was so powerful that he obeyed it. When some five minutes later he found the olive dung steaming beside the shining spoor he was certain the voice had been right. A week later when he had not yet caught up with the elephant, was short of food, and his hungry and exhausted bearers were threatening to desert, he thought how wrong the voice had been too.
He gave up and returned to his normal business, determined never to be fooled by it again. But the next time he came across Sway-Back’s spoor, and the next and the next, year in and year out for forty fiery seasons, the voice gathering in authority would set him off after the elephant, with its imperious “Now!” only to leave him disillusioned days, sometimes weeks, later with a bleak “Not yet”.
Here Thor Larsen, with an upsurge of sympathy that I had never seen in him before, interrupted.
“Tell him, Eyes,” he commanded me, “I, Thor Larsen, also know this damn ‘Now’ which is also ‘Not yet’. This voice which speaks two meanings with one tongue! But Thor Larsen damn certain one day other way round. ‘Not yet’ become one damn big ‘Now’, not?”
I was not at all certain what my Captain meant by all this but de la Buschagne seemed to know, for he nodded, thanked Thor Larsen and said quietly the “Not yet” had already become his “Now”, as he would soon show us.
Strangest of all, he continued, on the rare occasions when he refused to obey this voice, he found that his own proved ways of hunting would fail him. He would not weary us with repetition but the point was that he would have to return, sooner or later, to the spoor of Sway-Back, follow it to the point of exhaustion and utter disillusionment, in order to put himself right with his luck. It was as if defeat and failure in the greater were inextricably bound up with success and triumph in the lesser pursuit of his life.
So it had gone on until a few months ago. He was then engaged in what was his last hunting expedition. He was determined at the end of it to retire for good, buy a farm out of the money he had set by and make a proper home for his daughter. She had been born in the bush and, except for a few years at a Mission school while his wife was still alive, had lived his hunter’s life with him. When his wife had died five years before, she had instantly left school at the age of twelve and, young as she was, had come to look after him. Now, although physically strong enough to continue hunting, he felt it was not right to make her live without companionship of her own kind.
De la Buschagne mentioned this all in perfunctory fashion, while my Captain just looked back at him as if he were glad he had not got himself into the position where women could interfere with his whaling.
I myself had a different reaction. Considering the emotion and even eloquence which de la Buschagne had allowed himself about his elephant, I was incensed by this austere way of referring to his daughter. This brought my original reservation alive in me so keenly that I was afraid they would both notice it. But both were now only too eager to get on with the story to be interested in my reactions.
So, there he was then, near the end of his last hunter’s journey in one of his favourite areas in the great bushveld beyond Fort Herald. It had been perhaps his most successful expedition ever and he had no reason to be discontented except that, as the end came nearer, a profound and melancholy discontent possessed him. An urge to give himself just one more hunting season tempted him as he had never been tempted before. But he had pledged himself that this would be the end and, whatever else he had done wrong in his life, he had never broken a pledge. The temptation clearly was from the devil and so strong that it kept him awake at nights and drove him to pray for deliverance from it.
The night before this fateful day had been particularly hard for him. He had been exceptionally restless for hours. The stars were so sharp and quick that even lying under his mosquito net with shut eyes they felt like needles ceaselessly probing his eyelids until his temples ached. Bush-babies and baboons were whimpering and moaning all night long like children in the grip of their first fear. The leopard’s cough for once, even in its native dark, was strangely discreet. From star-rise until an hour before first light a lion roared continuously not in defiance or triumph but as warning to something. Even the bush-bucks’ bark for once sounded blurred with apprehension. As for the hyenas and the jackals, never had he heard them wail and whimper so. Even his daughter, who slept always with the innocence of a tired child, had startled him by crying out in some nightmare of her sleep.
He had tried every device known to him for inducing sleep: prayed; sung hymns to himself; finally gone over in his mind every elephant hunt he had ever undertaken. Yet he was still awake near morning. Suddenly the whole bush went quiet and a heavy silence fell around him. So dramatic was it, in fact, that he held his breath.
A dead branch somewhere on the ground near by broke with the sound of a rifle shot. Immediately the bush noises flared up again high to the night. Obviously some great beast was about, so close that he tumbled out of his mosquito net, and dashed for the fire which had sunk low onto its scarlet cushion of coals. As fast as he could, he threw dry wood on it and soon had the flames crackling and flickering high in the centre of the camp. He stood there for perhaps half an hour listening intently, but no repetition of that abrupt violent sound reached him. Yet he was convinced that somewhere in the bush, even if he could not hear it, something overwhelming was taking up position.
At first light he was up and, cup of coffee in hand and his nine millimetre Mauser on his left shoulder, he had gone as was his invariable practice to examine the ground near by for spoor: to read, as he put it, the latest text in the night’s Bible.
The dawn that day, he said, was a particularly beautiful one, and it filled him with sadness that he would soon be living a life where he would have to be looking at it through a window or from the shelter of some stoep. When it had blossomed from a sky of rose into the mounting blue of greater Africa, he perceived that well-known satin spoor shining in the red earth within the radius of Sway-Back’s expansive foot. Carefully examining each imprint, he followed the spoor and found that Sway-Back in a bare hundred yards had made a full circle of the camp, to stop where he had begun. There he had obviously stood for a very long time watching the camp before turning about and walking back in the direction he had come. Immediately behind the place where he had turned lay a long dead branch of purple wood. It had snapped clean under the weight of Sway-Back’s foot to make that rifle-shot of a sound, which had brought de la Buschagne out of his mosquito net. It had been already clear to him from the spoor that Sway-Back had turned about slowly and reluctantly, in a preoccupied manner. Yes, he reiterated as he saw the surprised, questioning look on my Captain’s face, preoccupied was the word. His reactions to the study of the spoor had convinced him that for hours Sway-Back had circled the camp, standing there silent in the dark, thinking as he had never thought before.
It was a mistake not to recognise that all animals had some mind of their own. The hunter who did not take the animal mind into consideration was never a great hunter. The most formidable intellectuals among animals were the individuals who either lived life out alone, like Sway-Back, or formed their own little units of life around them, like the great apes, baboons and cats. Apes perhaps were intellectually the most adroit of all, but with this limitation—that their lives were short and their intelligence dominated by the most apprehensive imagination to be found among animals and one almost entirely devoted to survival. They had a pronounced sense of mischief, but no gaiety or sense of play. In Africa they were the supreme example of the animal living out of fear by their wits.
How different the cats, particularly the lion. It had perhaps the greatest natural intelligence of all, rendered more formidable by the fact that it was free from fear: consequently there was no animal in the bush who loved play, enjoyed the sun and found life as good as did the lion. There were, however, two great limitations to the lion’s intelligence: much of it had to go into the study of killing and it had no time therefore to mature because, like that of the apes, the lion’s life was short. The elephant had none of these limitations. It had a great natural intelligence, was totally without fear, possessed no instinct or need to kill except in self-defence, lived long and was able to match its thinking with its experience. Also it was the greatest traveller among African animals. A favourite African saying was “He who travels much, doubts many things.” So with the elephant and as a result of all these qualities he had developed the most methodical and logical mind. He had evolved not just habits and customs, but what de la Buschagne was inclined to call a tradition of life. The elephant behaved indeed as if he had a kind of system of reflection. Even when forced to kill, however violent and nimble his first charge might be, the elephant would complete the destruction of his enemies according to a well-thought out plan. He was the one animal in Africa capable not merely of fighting a quick battle but of conducting a whole campaign.
Knowing all this, de la Buschagne had returned to his camp that morning deep in thought, not knowing what interpretation to give events. In fact, after putting down his empty cup of coffee he had gone back and followed Sway-Back’s spoor into the bush for another reading. He discovered that Sway-Back, made cautious by his error in stepping on that dead branch, had silently done a second round at greater distance from the camp. This all was so out of character, as the elephant was most adroit at evading contact on the first intimation of any hunter, that de la Buschagne was puzzled as he had never been before.
Then three possible explanations came to him. First, the pace of the spoor showed clearly that Sway-Back was getting old. Secondly, his reluctance to move on indicated that, feeling himself to be old, he had come, as elephants did who lived long enough, to make his stand and live out his last years in the environs where he had been born. Finally, Sway-Back’s interest in the camp, incredible as it may seem, showed that he had recognised de la Buschagne’s presence.
At this Thor Larsen’s excitement, which had long since been on the boil, boiled over.
He wanted to know if this was the legendary elephant’s burial ground to which Sway-Back had returned and—
De la Buschagne stopped him there, shook his head and said he knew the legend and had all his life looked for proof of it in the dark continent but he had never found any. All he could say was that he had a feeling that elephants returned to the scene of their beginnings when they felt that the circle of their lives was closing.
This clearly disappointed the Captain but did not silence him. He wanted to know then how, on so black a night at so great a distance, Sway-Back could have recognised de la Buschagne? He had gathered from what I had told him that as a species the elephant’s sight was poor. He then added by way of instinctive placation that “the whale’s, even sperm’s, sight not good either.”
De la Buschagne reprimanded me with a look which implied that only my youth and inexperience could excuse so shallow and brash an over-simplification of a complex issue. The flash of fanatical obsession with elephants in general and Sway-Back in particular was brilliant again in his eyes as he said sternly that the elephant’s eyes were quite good enough for their purpose. What need had the elephant of eyes like those of the animals of the open plains that could pick up the flash of the sun on the point of a gun a mile away? In the bush, in which the elephant lived, his eyes were quite efficient enough as he, who had faced a thousand elephant charges, had cause to know. What the elephant needed in his world of circumscribed vision were good smell and good hearing, and in those he was superbly equipped.
To my relief, his eyes left me as he turned to the Captain, saying with great deliberation that Sway-Back, of course, had recognised him by his smell. The moment the long sensitive trunk had recognised it, that methodical brain brought out from the great archives of his memory all the other occasions on which, spread over forty years, a particular man, determined to kill him, had clung to his track like the sunset shadow to his own swaying form.
De la Buschagne was certain that, pondering all this out there alone in the dark under the quick analytical stars of the blackest night that he had ever experienced, Sway-Back not only had recognised him but had come to the conclusion that he and whoever owned that scent were inexorably linked together and ultimately destined to meet face to face.
Sway-Back, he was convinced, was no longer going to avoid him. He was, come what may, going to live out his last days there on his native ground. He, the man, could avoid or meet him as he chose. But Sway-Back himself was no longer going to take part in the chase.
De la Buschagne said that the realisation that at last he had his chance of shooting perhaps the most formidable elephant the world had ever known, made the hair at the back of his head rise. But almost as soon as he realised it it was spoilt for him by that instinctive voice which had set him on Sway-Back’s spoor forty years before. Would not the Captain too, he asked, in a similar situation, have expected such a voice to echo, “Now”? Instead, however, the voice astonished him with a “Not yet” as imperative as had been its original “Now”.
Well, like Sway-Back, he too was getting old and about to return to the scene of his beginnings. The burning random years had taught him the futility of going against the voice: he was not prepared to argue with it at so late a day.
So he set about pursuing a normal hunter’s day as if nothing unusual had happened. Yet he had not been hunting long before he knew that he was shooting badly. First he missed an easy shot at a buffalo; then shot so badly at another easy target that he wounded the buffalo and had to do what all hunters disliked most, go after it in thick bush. The wounded buffalo got well behind him and stalked its tracker in turn so cunningly that only one of the quickest and luckiest shots of his career, fired on a fast round-about turn, delivered him from certain death. Such incidents convinced him that the day was out of pattern and that he, in some manner, had gone against the natural order of things. Perhaps he should have another look at Sway-Back’s spoor and more would come of it?
As he asked himself these questions, the day stood at high noon, the sun directly overhead. His bearers, having disembowelled the huge buffalo, had left the skinning and cutting up for later, and as was their custom were resting in what passed for shade in that world of light and fire. He too should have joined them or, having decided not to do so, should have taken one of them along with him, for in such country it was better not to walk alone. Yet defying all his own carefully established precedents, he went alone to look for Sway-Back’s spoor.
The bush at that hour was silent, of course, except for the mopani beetles. They were to the high noon and the sun what crickets after rain were to midnight and the moon. With quicksilver voices they sang a hymn to the sun that flashed like a mirror with light and shimmered like that passion of sickness called fever mounting to a climax in man’s own hissing blood. He loved it as did all the birds, animals, insects and plants of Africa and normally would have allowed it to be for him, for them, a cradle-song of afternoon sleep. So strong and old was his association of rest with the beetle music and the hour that he felt like a man walking in a dream of deepest sleep. This should not surprise the Captain if he knew, as de la Buschagne did, that for its aboriginal children noon and not midnight was the hour in Africa when graves opened and ghosts walked.
He turned to me for confirmation as he had done once or twice before, not only I fancy because I knew, as he did, something of the African mind, but also because he thought my youth would have preserved me against cynicism.
I agreed quickly that my native Africa believed that too. I then added for good measure that I had read somewhere that the ancient Chinese had a saying to the effect: “At noon midnight is born.”
That was sense to de la Buschagne because he made the point at once that the sky at noon in Africa was often so blue that it became a kind of black. People spoke of midnight blue; but he thought often of Africa’s noonday black. It was that colour on this fateful day, and the slumber of nature around him was more profound than any he had ever experienced. If sleep at night was natural, sleep at so brilliant and seething an hour was supernatural. For instance, he walked by a black mamba coiled on the edge of the narrow track like the spring of a great clock. His foot had come down not a yard from the head of this most vigilant of snakes. Yet so deep was its sleep that not a quiver went through it, and to his relief he had had no cause to awaken this world of noonday slumber with a shot from his gun.
So he continued slowly through a silence composed of that simmering shimmer of silver sound without movement of air or life of any kind. Even the sun above seemed to stand still for a rest on the summit of its compelling sweep, and the shadows contracted to a tight blurred blot around the base of trees and shrubs. He called them shadows purely for want of a better word, because so brilliant was the day, so great and intense the reflection of light from the patches of scarlet earth, the leaves of trees scintillating like fish scales in the sea of the sky, and the barley-sugar trunks of mopani trees aglow and translucent as segments of amber, that shade was in reality only a tinted sunlight. Never on the darkest night had he known so eerie a moment as this hour when the great wheel of the sun was poised for its roll down the steep slope of the day into abysmal night.
Despite his training, he found himself constantly looking over his shoulder feeling himself to be followed, and not concentrating enough on the ground ahead. Yet it was as well he did so, because there came a moment when, turning to look over his right shoulder, something to the east of him caught his eyes. He stopped and with the utmost care turned slowly to face east, his rifle ready.
A bare twenty yards away, he saw the high, broad forehead of an elephant, an enormous pair of ears moving slowly and ceaselessly like fans held in invisible hands in the bush below. Since the animal stood at a slight angle to him he could see also the dark line of a vast back. Prepared as he was by all he had heard over forty years of the proportions of this elephant, even the little that he could see of it surpassed any picture he had been able to imagine. It was Sway-Back, of course, and with recognition of the elephant, his rifle was at his shoulder and his finger on the trigger, since knowing the animal’s reputation he expected it either to whirl about and make off at high speed, or charge. But the great head, still and immovable as some giant bust from the Valley of the Kings carved by a sculptor of Rameses the Great out of black granite, and the long dark back, remained still and immovable. Only the immense ears rhythmically fanned the melted platinum air.
Sway-Back, too, was fast asleep.
Had he moved at all, even just to shift his weight from one foot to another, de la Buschagne was certain he would have shot for, quite apart from his forty years’ longing to get this elephant and his tusks, he could not take any risks or chances with an animal of Sway-Back’s reputation. But Sway-Back just remained fast asleep.
Nothing, it seemed, could have proved so conclusively how right de la Buschagne’s reading of Sway-Back’s spoor and behaviour had been. Sway-Back had made his final pact, his last peace treaty with life. No more evasion, no more travail or travel. Whatever was to come, he was back home where he had begun, to accept all. Sleep, the daily surrender to the will of life, the greatest act of trust possible to its doubting and questing children, was there to demonstrate the completeness of Sway-Back’s acceptance. And what a sleep it was! Indeed so much of life was there asleep in the gun-metal being of this, the greatest animal on earth, so deep and so heavy was he with it, that de la Buschagne felt he was looking at the still, immovable centre of a vortex in the stream of existence, drawing all around it from far and wide, down, down, down, like flotsam and jetsam in the maelstrom of a deep sea, to a depth of dreaming never before attained.
He found himself so hypnotised by this colossal example of sleep that even his own eyelids dropped, his gun wavered and his head felt like lead about to drop on his chest. For the first time he experienced what African hunters had often told him, that animals protected themselves by inducing sleep in their hunters; and the greater and more dangerous the animal, the more powerful the temptation to sleep in the hunter. This, they had stressed, was the moment of extreme peril for the hunter as it invariably preceded the charge of the hunted. The thought brought de la Buschagne wide awake with such a start that his finger nearly pressed the trigger of his gun. But Sway-Back had not moved. He still stood there, the greatest monument to sleep ever erected, and so trusting and so innocent that de la Buschagne might as well have been asked to shoot a sleeping child. Then suddenly he understood. His forty years’ quest might be over and his reward was there for the asking; yet he could not take it. The “Not yet” and the “Now” were one.
De la Buschagne was evangelically solemn as he said this, looking from me to my Captain and back again like some kind of a nomad who has suddenly found revelation in the realisation that the wasteland of his spirit and the desert around him are one. Hunted and hunter, he said, seemed to have arrived at the same conclusion. In some way that he could not explain, Herklaas de la Buschagne and Sway-Back were one in spirit. For him to kill Sway-Back would have been a kind of suicide.
And as his mind came out of this long forty-year-old tunnel and he regarded Sway-Back for the first time in his life with eyes free from design of any kind, a most extraordinary thing happened. He would ask my Captain to remember that he could see only the head, ears and part of the back of Sway-Back but the trunk, flanks and legs were hidden by the bush. Against this extraction of the gigantic whole, the bright, molten platinum air was lapping like wavelets of burning water and made what was visible of Sway-Back into the outline of a great sleeping fish, the enormous ears transformed into fins, fanning the livid water to keep the head in the main current of life. The more he looked, the more vivid this impression became. No matter how hard his mind worked to declare it all an absurd illusion, for he was not a fanciful man, to him at that moment Sway-Back looked like a colossal fish. Then, stranger still—for he would ask the Captain to remember that where he stood in the heart of Africa he was a thousand miles from the nearest sea and he, de la Buschagne himself, had not yet ever seen the sea—it occurred to him that Sway-Back was presented to him like that because he had been hunting the wrong quarry. He should have been seeking not the greatest animal on earth but the greatest animal life had ever produced. And that, he knew, was the whale.
De la Buschagne paused. I noticed that his grip on his yellow pipe had tightened so that the black stem, the familiar focus of his brilliant eyes, was trembling like a tuning-fork with the last reverberations of the true pitch struck from it. He had, both the Captain and I knew, reached the climax of his purpose that Sunday morning in the Kurt Hansen. But we had both become so involved with his own drama that neither of us would have interrupted, however long the pause.
In fact I was holding my breath. I had never come so near to liking this strange, taut, driven old man, as when he told us of his moment of realisation that he could not shoot Sway-Back. There was a quality of greatness in such renunciation in so dedicated a hunter. Ideally I would have liked Herklaas de la Buschagne to end his story there. But I realised that there was more to come, and I was fearful of it and once more wary of the man. The sharp, high-pitched squeak of strained steel from the Kurt Hansen lifting herself uneasily to the movement of the water beneath sounded like the voice of a bat at nightfall. In fact the movement of my beloved ship, the day on fire against the porthole and the pattern of white light latticed with bars of shadow of the ripples of sea-water trembling on the low metal ceiling of the saloon, made an impact on my imagination as if I had myself just seen Sway-Back and he had sent my senses reeling with that hypnotic movement of his. The Captain, however, obviously did not share my reserve. If ever there was a man’s face hungry for more, his was it.
De la Buschagne paused: then slowly he resumed his tale, his voice now tightly under control. How long he had stood there he did not know. Judging by the displacement of the pale shadows of the bush around him, it was long. Yet to him it seemed only seconds before he tucked his gun under his left arm and turned. Before he left, on an impulse which we sitting here in comfort fifteen hundred miles away in such different circumstances would probably judge to have been as absurd as it was unnecessary, he took off his hat to Sway-Back. He bowed deeply, hat in hand, to Sway-Back, feeling that he was saying an unique hail and farewell to him for ever. Only then did he swing about to go away as silently as he could in order not to break up the greatest sleep he had ever encountered.
He stopped embarrassed, certain that if not I, then Larsen, would have judged his behaviour preposterous. Actually I had never liked anything more in the man than this last gesture. My Captain’s reaction I thought to be more complex. Perhaps he was asking himself whether, in similar circumstances, he would have been able to act in a similar way? But I am certain that he found nothing absurd in de la Buschagne’s behaviour.
Indeed one look at our faces was enough to reassure our guest, and immediately he went on to say he had left the scene so obsessed with this new image of a great fish swimming, as it were, in the vast sea of his imagining that he could do no more hunting that day.
What on earth could it all mean? He had no inkling until that night, after the evening meal in his camp, when he opened the great Bible, on the front pages of which were the names of all the de la Buschagne men and their children from the first Herklaas who had fled from la Rochelle at the time of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 to make his home in Africa. There on the opened page, by the light of his camp fire, he had read the provocative sentence: “Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a hook?”
He knew then that Sway-Back, assuming the startling shape of a great fish, had posed a question which could not be ignored.
He had never yet met a question of any importance in his not uneventful life which he had not answered with action. Here, his whole life informed him, was a question that called for deeds. And this question was related to others. He hoped the Captain had looked them up in the book of Job as he had suggested. Questions like “Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea? Or hast thou walked in search of the depth? Have the gates of death been opened unto thee? Or hast thou seen the doors of the shadow of death?”
All the predicants with whom he had discussed the book of Job had always held these questions were asked of Job to make him realise how great and inscrutable were the ways of God and how powerless and insignificant was man without Him. He, de la Buschagne, had been bold enough to differ with them. His reading of life was that the great unknown, the seemingly impossible, were created to provoke man into greater effort to know and to master more. As he understood them, the words were uttered as a reproach to Job for living contentedly in rich well-being and not striving to extend his knowledge and mastery of the unknown forces of life. This really was the reason for Job’s afflictions. The manifest unfairness of God to so loyal a servant as Job was, de la Buschagne believed, a deliberate act of provocation to stir Job into revolt against his own unawareness.
The predicants all reprimanded him severely for such “presumption”—he used the word with a certain desiccated sarcasm. His daughter, much as she honoured and obeyed him, was inclined to agree with them.
Here Thor Larsen could restrain himself no longer. This over-simplified interpretation of Job and the unfortunate use of the word “rich” was exactly cut to the measure of his own mind. He had already been nodding his head vigorously in agreement. It now only needed the mention of a mere girl to make him interrupt.
Forgetting how recent and how scant was his reading of that great enigmatic book of Job, he declared: “You damn right! Parsons, like all rich men and woman, all damn fools. I know because me too, always they criticise. No to listen to them, not?”
Nevertheless de la Buschagne had listened to them carefully, and taken all that they had said into serious consideration. But he had neither agreed with them nor changed his mind. That was why he was sitting there and talking to the Captain. He was convinced it was God’s will that, before his end, he should also have the experience of what it meant to “draw Leviathan out with a hook”.
He paused and instinctively drew his breath before he turned to me, in direct supplication for any help I could give him.
“Ask him, please, Cousin,” he implored, “if he will take me in his ship and give me the chance to shoot just one whale. I have not many years more to live—”
He broke off and fumbled in the great pockets of his ample coat, not noticing that Thor Larsen must have long since anticipated this unusual request, so little was he surprised.
“Tell him, Cousin,” he went on before the Captain could reply, “I’m willing to pay well for the privilege. I am not rich but I have enough to live on in comfort and can spare this.”
With that he produced four bags, like the one in which he carried his tobacco, two from each pocket, undid the noose and poured their contents on one heap on the table. It was the biggest pile of gold sovereigns I had ever seen, each coin the deep marigold yellow of our rich soft, African metal and the whole charged with sullen fire.
Thor Larsen, who had been about to speak, stopped himself, to stare astonished at the gold. He can never have seen more gold in such a heap in the Kurt Hansen’s saloon. Soon his astonishment gave way to a certain distaste, for he quickly looked away from the gold to his sperm-tooth paper-weight.
I myself had a distinct reaction of my own. I think gold is a lovely metal but I have always been somewhat shocked by it as money. Copper and brass, and silver, yes, they appear ready-made for exchange. But gold has such beauty in its metal that it seems to lift it above commercial exchange. Judas’s betrayal for thirty pieces of silver is more shocking than it would have been had it been done for gold. Gold would have brought an extra dimension of temptation into the matter, tending to make betrayal more understandable. Accordingly the pile of gold aglow on the saloon table between the three of us shocked as much as it surprised me.
I lifted my eyes from it to the Captain. In a moment oddly Faustian, there was something strangely Mephistophelean about him too. And how loudly the steel in the Kurt Hansen squeaked!
Thor Larsen was the first to break the silence.
He waved his broad hand in a gesture of dismissal at the gold and turned to me. “Tell him, Eyes,” his gruff voice ordered me, “I no want his gold, not? Tell him, Eyes. Quick!”
I told de la Buschagne this.
His eyes darkened with disappointment, as if assuming that his mission was about to fail. He started drawing the gold towards him but I felt certain that he was searching fast for an alternative. He would not be the man who had remained undismayed by forty years of failure on Sway-Back’s spoor if he accepted defeat there and then.
“Tell him quick, Eyes,” Thor Larsen hastened to add, as the first coins clinked in the bottom of the bag. “It’s good to put gold away, not? I give him the whale but not for gold. He give me something else.”
I could feel deeply that now my Captain in his turn was nervous. In our small saloon there was not just one climax of a personal process of long standing to be reckoned with but two.
“Something else, Cousin?” de la Buschagne’s eyes came off his gold, a new expression of eagerness on his face. “Tell him he can have anything I have. But what would he like from me?”
Thor Larsen, aware, I believe, of the enormity of the price he was about to exact from his guest, made a grimace out of an unfamiliar smile intended to ingratiate.
He laughed too loudly as he said, “Tell him, Eyes . . .” He paused again while he and de la Buschagne eyed each other like two wrestlers about to engage. “Tell him,” he resumed, his voice reduced almost to a whisper: “I give one damn big whale if he promise to give me Sway-Back.”
I was prepared to see the dialogue between the two hunters end abruptly there and then. After the moving account de la Buschagne had just rendered, I could not see how he could let my Captain “have Sway-Back”. It would be an act of betrayal of which so austere and upright a spirit would be incapable. In fact I expected an immediate rejection.
However, to my amazement I heard de la Buschagne exclaim involuntarily: “Has he been after the wrong quarry too?”
“What’s that, Eyes? Quick!”
Thor Larsen, alarmed that his bargain had proved unacceptable, wanted to know the worst at once as was his custom.
However, before I could tell him the Afrikaaner stopped me: “Just tell him I am considering, Cousin.”
“Tell him to consider this too,” Thor Larsen ordered me, relieved. “Tell him I give him Caesar for Sway-Back.”
Nor did he stop there. Encouraged by the gravity with which de la Buschagne was pondering his proposal, he went on to enlarge on the reasons why he offered not the whale of the greatest size but one which, in his opinion, was peerless and the whaler’s most precious quarry. “And, Eyes,” Thor Larsen concluded, “tell him remember this about sperm: he may not be heaviest whale. Heaviest is blue whale and heaviest blue whale always is female not male. But in sperm, bull always bigger than cow. He not she master of the sea!”
As I told de la Buschagne all these things about the sperm that the Captain had told me so many times, his interest increased until finally it was transformed into a brilliant lust.
Even Thor Larsen sat back, clearly convinced that with this last observation he had dangled the most attractive bait in front of his guest’s strange appetite. Yet even so he watched de la Buschagne anxiously.
He did not have to wait long, however, for suddenly de la Buschagne, having pocketed the last bag of gold, leant forward and held out his hand. Thor Larsen’s own rushed out to meet it. They shook hands vigorously and long, while the guest affirmed: “One Caesar for Sway-Back. I promise. But tell him, Cousin, he is getting the best of the deal.”
I did as I was told, sadder at heart than I could explain. I had been the go-between in an act of elemental betrayal, and I was filled with a strange desire to rush out of the Kurt Hansen for ever. In fact I don’t know how I got through the next half-hour interpreting for those two men. There was something obscene about it. Our saloon, that respectable fisherman’s parlour, was transformed into a kind of counting-house where things were put up for sale that no human being had the right to sell.
Yet I got through it, and when de la Buschagne got up to go at one o’clock it was all arranged that I would call on him at the “Ailsa Craig” as soon as possible and give him the Captain’s detailed proposals for his venture into whaling. I believe Thor Larsen would have offered to take him out with us that very night, were it not his first excursion into the whaling grounds that year. Professional in the highest degree, he declared firmly he wanted to see first what whales were about so as not to waste his guest’s time.
All that agreed, I dashed out ahead of the pair following behind me. I did so in order to call on de la Buschagne’s daughter and break the news to her, which I was convinced I would do more gently than her father. I knew how greatly distressed she would be by it.
She was just coming out of the main entrance to the first-class quarters of the mail ship when I appeared on deck. Her eyes were large with excitement.
Before I could say anything, she had me by the arm saying, “Oh, Cousin: that was wonderful, I can’t thank you enough. I’ve never seen anything so lovely. It was like a fairy tale. I’d love to travel everywhere in so beautiful a ship!”
I was happy that I could share her enthusiasm to the full. I too was still fresh enough to such ships. At one with her in her delight, and she still holding my arm, I led her down the broad ladder on to the quay and began to walk her slowly towards the Kurt Hansen because I was in no hurry to end the experience.
She was just describing some details of the ship when she saw her father and Thor Larsen standing side by side at the head of the Kurt Hansen’s gang-plank.
She broke off, dismayed, and her grip on my arm tightened. “Oh, Cousin, what has happened? What have they decided?”
I looked into her wide, green-blue eyes. They were full of fear. Indeed, before I could answer her, she spoke: “You needn’t tell me. Father is going with that dreadful little man of yours, is he not?”
“Yes,” I answered quietly.
“What are they getting out of all this?” she asked with passion. “What price is father paying your Captain? Don’t tell me that little man is doing it just for love of a stranger he never met before?”
I would have liked to tell her she was doing Thor Larsen an injustice. But I had no time as her father, his mission complete, was now anxious to go and was impatiently beckoning his daughter to him.
All I had time to say was: “They’ve swapped a whale for an elephant.”
Despite her father’s imperious signal, she stopped dead in her tracks and asked in a voice sharp as a knife: “Swopped a whale for an elephant, Cousin? You speak as if they’ve been trading stamps! Pray, any elephant? Or one particular one?”
“Sway-Back, I fear,” I answered bluntly, taken aback by her tone.
“I feared so too,” she answered. Suddenly a different emotion overcame her and her eyes filled with tears. “Oh, Cousin, how perfectly dreadful!” she exclaimed. “May God forgive him, for he doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
With that she went forward, a look of an extraordinarily mature resolution upon her, to come to a halt at the foot of the gang-plank.
Without looking at Captain Larsen she said, “Here I am, Vader.”
De la Buschagne didn’t answer. He just shook Thor Larsen once more vigorously by the hand, then walked down the gang-plank and as he passed his daughter said curtly, without even turning his head: “Come along, Laetitia.”
So incensed was I at his casual manner that I wanted to run after them and hit him. But I stood there humiliated in the powerlessness of the young. My feelings were not improved by the fact that, as Laetitia was about to round the corner of a warehouse in the wake of her father, she turned round as if half expecting to find me following her. Seeing that I had not, she looked in my direction and raised her hand in farewell.
My evening session with Leif, Gorgeous and ’Mlangeni did nothing to help remove the disagreeable feeling that the morning’s events had left in me. Gorgeous said nothing at all when I told them what had happened in the saloon between the three of us. He couldn’t really follow the detail of the dialogue but I knew that he instinctively disliked its conclusion. Leif listened intently. He interrupted only once and that was when I described de la Buschagne’s unorthodox interpretation of Job.
“He certainly has a point there,” he declared. “But he seems to have forgotten the devil that exists in argument. Doesn’t he know yet how dangerous it can be just to make one’s own point and nothing more?”
I was not quite certain what he meant. All the same I shook my head and went on with my account to the end.
“D’you really mean, Pete,” he said, “that the Captain and this old man really agreed to exchange one lone sperm for this remarkable elephant?”
“I do,” I answered distressed.
“Who do they think they are to play give and take with life’s greatest creatures? They’re not theirs to barter. Those two men aren’t gods. Have they forgotten that they too are flesh and blood? I doubt that any good can come out of this.”
’Mlangeni, his massive head bowed, muttered sombrely, “ ’Nkosan, tell them that at Icoco we have the saying: ‘One kraal cannot follow more than one ’Nyanga without coming to harm.’”
I told them, and on that note we dispersed to go below for some rest before leaving Port Natal, as was Thor Larsen’s custom in the early hour of the morning.
I was to begin my fourth whaling season in the Kurt Hansen.
fn1 Plural of ’Nyanga: witch-doctor.
fn2 Ancient name of the ancient Zulus.
fn3 Afrikaans for Father.