WE HAD HAD such exceptional luck right from the beginning of our first week’s whaling that it looked as if Providence were out to cancel the misgivings which Leif, Gorgeous, ’Mlangeni and I had shared in varying degrees. Besides, being lucky meant we all had to work unusually hard and were too tired in our brief moments of leisure for much self-examination. Then Thor Larsen himself had never been in a better mood. The new members of his crew were as sceptical of the formidable reputation he had among whaling men as they were of the reservations that a few of the Kurt Hansen’s company had about him.
Young as I myself was, I was only too ready to let all this diminish the acute apprehension with which I had begun the season. I was not yet aware of what I now know to be an elementary heresy of the canon of life itself: that success in the daily business of living is proof of Providence’s support of that particular way of life. I should perhaps have had a deeper look into the story of Job when I went to check the passages which had played so significant a role in the exchanges between Thor Larsen and Herklaas de la Buschagne. Had I done so I might have discovered what a sombre warning that book was against so superficial a reading of this deeply enigmatic matter of luck. I might have seen it for what it is—an attack on our all too common presumptuousness, showing that Providence or God or whatever we choose to call the ultimate transcendental reality may well inflict great misfortune even on those whom it loves best and who serve it most. I might then have been more on guard and less inclined to assume that because the Kurt Hansen was daily breaking whaling records our lives in it were on the right course.
Above all I might have been more analytical of the Captain’s new mood and seen how excessive it was. It may well be that our lives need excess, indeed can only achieve proportion and symmetry through the movement of profoundly asymmetrical hearts. At the same time it is true that excess presupposes a kind of unawareness and carries within it the seed of ultimate correction; a form of confrontation, if not fateful retribution, by some dark aspect of itself which has been denied its share of light.
Today I could console myself with the argument that, even had I been fully aware, I would have been unable to influence events, seeing what an impervious character the Captain possessed. But had I, for instance, looked into the immediate cause of the excess, as I could have done by following the spoor of my initial misgiving and then taken my conclusions to Leif, who can say that that wise man could not have changed our Captain’s mind and made him withdraw his invitation to take Herklaas de la Buschagne whaling?
After all, Thor Larsen was not dependent on de la Buschagne for elephant hunting. For three years now he had had an invitation from my family to come hunting with them, and I had rejoined the Kurt Hansen this time with a pressing injunction from my father to bring home at the end of the season “the man who had been so good to me”. All that was necessary was for Thor Larsen to renounce Sway-Back. That really was the heart of the matter. He had not earned the right, as Leif had already implied, to shoot Sway-Back while in a sense de la Buschagne had. But de la Buschagne had no licence from life to harpoon the Caesar for which Thor Larsen had served so arduous and long an apprenticeship. No one could have been better equipped to restore these two excesses to their native proportions than Leif. In fact, of our company, he and ’Mlangeni were the only two whose misgivings kept them indifferent to our success at sea.
I had never known ’Mlangeni so preoccupied and so silent by his fire. As for Leif, in the days that followed he showed by the way he cross-examined me about de la Buschagne and got me to report daily on my conversations with the Captain, how his mind remained exercised over the affair. Moreover my error was not merely one of omission. I found myself actively arguing the point not only with Leif but also against what remained of misgiving in myself. Surely, I would say to him, we were being unreasonable and hyper-critical about our Captain? Did it really matter whether he or de la Buschagne killed another whale when so many other people would do the killing if they did not? The same applied to elephants; and after all, what was it that we feared?
I still remember Gorgeous’s “Hear, hear! Pete!” when I first spoke up on these lines.
But neither ’Mlangeni nor Leif was to be persuaded. ’Mlangeni looked at me sombrely and made me go red with embarrassment by speaking to me for the first time with something of reproval: “Trickster that you are, ’Nkosan! Would you, too, be a little star out of course?”
Leif, quick to suspect from ’Mlangeni’s tone that there was a weight of meaning in this exchange, made it impossible for me not to translate exactly what he had said. As a result the whole story of ’Mlangeni’s uneasiness, from the appearance of the great mamba at Icoco to the seer’s vision of the defection of the stars, came out.
Gorgeous dealt with it characteristically by shrugging his shoulders and vanishing below.
Leif however took it all very seriously—as seriously as I had done before I allowed the matter to become an argument inside myself. That was one of the ironies of it all. If anyone should have continued on Leif’s and ’Mlangeni’s side in the matter, I should have done. That I did not should have shown me how far away I was from my own natural centre, and arguing against them should have warned me how extensive was my own underground of doubt.
Leif, I suspect, knew all this, for he was throughout at his gentlest with me and let me off more lightly than did ’Mlangeni. He told me: “You have a point there but it’s only a point, Pete. I have in mind no particular consequences for us all from this. I just do not like the thing for what it is within itself and that is enough for me. If I tried to look farther than that I am certain I would see less.”
But what should have warned me most, perhaps, was the fact that, like ’Mlangeni, suddenly I became, to use his phrase, “a house of dreams”. Normally I slept too soundly to know whether I had dreamt or not. Yet now not a night passed in which I was not woken up by dreams. Now I dreamed nearly every night and often I woke full of horror.
One morning even the Captain, preoccupied as he was, asked me several times, “You not well, my Eyes, not?”
To which I protested quickly with fierce emphasis and an over-eager smile: “I’ve never felt better in my life.”
But we were all people who were, as Leif often remarked, too busy to live: or, to put it another way, too busy to give ourselves over fully to the processes of our imagination. Yet, to be fair, we were all, right from the beginning of this Thursday, too afflicted with real intrusions to be able to give self-awareness a chance.
The process began with a breakdown in the Kurt Hansen’s engine room. I had only just emerged from one of my nightmares and was still lying awake in the dark, listening to the Captain snoring in the bunk opposite mine, when the beat of the ship’s engines suddenly slowed down to considerably less than its former rate. And even at that slackened pace, knowing the sounds of the reliable ship as well as I did, it sounded to me as if the engines were straining. Whether it was just my young upstart devotion to normal explanations, I argued also against this evidence of my senses. I told myself that nothing could possibly be wrong and that the reduction in speed must be due to the fact that we were close to Port Natal and preparing to wait in the great roadstead for first light, as we always did when we had quarry for the slipway of a factory which worked only by day.
I could have persuaded myself accordingly and gone to sleep again had it not been for Thor Larsen. Professional, even in his sleep, he picked up the change of the engine’s pitch at once. His snoring stopped and at the same moment I heard the rustle of woollen blankets thrown from his bunk. The light switch abruptly clicked on. Thor Larsen was already standing in his long woollen underwear beside his bunk looking unbelievingly at his watch.
“Something damn wrong, Eyes,” he growled when I sat up quickly in my bunk. “What for to slow down when Port Natal still hour steaming away? What for engine make so sick noise. Listen, Eyes.”
I listened, knowing now that he was right. While speaking he had been pulling on his sea-going clothes as fast as he could. I began to follow his example but had hardly shed my pyjamas before, growling to himself, he vanished through the curtains.
Not a quarter of an hour later, he joined ‘Papa’ bosun and me on the bridge. All his good spirits had gone. He might have been the man we knew on Sunday night, after his last glass of gin, heading out to sea, instead of the successful harpooner going home with three great prizes lashed to his ship’s side.
Neither of us dared question him. We just stood there, the laboured pitch of the ship’s engines setting the planking shaking under our feet. At long last he announced in Norwegian to the bosun that the Kurt Hansen was to go straight from the slipway to the quay and that it was possible the crew might have the day off.
“But you, Eyes,” he turned to me, “you to stay in ship. What for, I speak later, not?”
The reason was revealed to me in the afternoon. The whaling company’s chief engineer had been summoned by then, spent an hour below with our engineer, and gone back to his office, to send his second in command and half a dozen mechanics on board. Some of the propeller-shaft fixing had loosened in our engine-room base. Leif informed me that the chief engineer had angered Thor Larsen greatly by insinuating that he had asked too much of his ship and handled it badly.
Both Leif and I, for once, were together on Thor Larsen’s side in the matter. Our Captain was too good and experienced a sailor to have done anything of the sort. We put the chief engineer’s remark down in general to the strange jealousy that exists in all ships between bridge and engine room; and in particular to envy of Thor Larsen’s skill at getting more out of his ship legitimately than any engineer thought possible or found comfortable. But that was all beside the main point. What mattered was that the damage would take at least until Saturday, if not Sunday evening, to repair and that we were lucky not to be put in dry dock for longer. There was no question of any more whaling that week and the crew were duly given leave to go ashore.
When I broke the news to my friends, Gorgeous was delighted. He was one of the first ashore to make as much of this windfall as possible. ’Mlangeni looked hard at me as if he were expecting some sort of admission of error from me. When I did not speak, he shrugged his broad shoulders and asked of himself and the day as much as of me: “Do people still not know then that it takes only one steer to lead a herd of thousand astray?”
“What did he say?” Leif asked.
“He was implying for the umpteenth time that troubles never come singly,” I answered, now thoroughly rattled by what I thought was ’Mlangeni’s obstinacy in making the worst of everything. “And he wonders why I won’t recognise the fact. He’s just like some broody old vulture among us.”
“But Pete!” Leif remonstrated, astonished by such an unusual display of irritability in my manner. “One could just as easily criticise you for refusing to recognise that a comfortable belief in everything being for the best doesn’t somehow prevent the worst from happening.”
“There you go again—really it’s too much,” I exclaimed, turning my back on the pair of them and, without waiting to see how they’d taken it, went below.
For a moment I thought I had gone from the frying-pan into the fire. Thor Larsen was sitting immovable in his place at the head of the table, staring at the steel wall of the saloon in front of him. His game book, shut beside him, indicated that the entry of his latest kill was complete; the state of the decanter and wet empty tumbler showed he had already been drinking. From behind he looked as if he was back in the prison of “nothingness” that was his home when there was no whaling to be done.
My instinct was to take a book and my bathing things and leave the ship at once. I had not yet learnt the futility of trying to get rid of my problems by changing the location in which they were inflicted on me. I was too inexperienced to appreciate their unfailing capacity for following one around. I was therefore about to slip quietly through the plush curtains into the cabin to collect my things when, without turning, the Captain spoke.
“Ah, there you are, my Eyes.” How he knew I was there seemed most mysterious to me. Even more amazingly his voice was cheerful and warm. “I want you to fetch Elephant Hunter, now! Quick! Hear?”
He turned his head and shoulders sharply to look at me as if convinced that there was nothing more certain in human beings than their inability to get the simplest of orders straight. His eyes were astonishingly clear and after a long, searching look they warmed with anticipation.
He spoke again, almost teasing me: “Not to stand staring, my Eyes, but quick to go at once, not?”
I was delighted to find him in so positive a mood and also glad to have something definite to do. I was half-way to the “Ailsa Craig” before I thought of the full significance of the change in him. For change of a startling kind it was. Normally, even with his schnapps to help him, just the regular weekend break in whaling was as much as he could bear. Now he had his break more than doubled, his ship crippled, and he himself insulted by his owner’s engineers as well. Yet not a trace remained of the depression which seemed to threaten us in the early hours of the morning when he came up from the engine room to join ‘Papa’ bosun and me on the bridge.
Why? The question forced itself on me, and the answer when it came moved me deeply since it showed me, as nothing else had yet done, how deprived his life had been, how bleak a price he had paid for such all out dedication to his calling.
Now, for the first time in his life he could look forward to something beyond whaling. He had Sway-Back. I knew the answer from a certain child-like expression poignant in his time-creased, wind-stained face. I knew that look well, because I had seen it so often on the faces of new boys at school when after the long grim months of their initiation they realised that at last their first vacation was near. The strange unexplained interest in elephants had suddenly found a point and possibly of expression in Sway-Back. The sense of wonder, man conceived as a hunter on the spoor of infinite mystery from which the searching heart derives its meaning had been reinforced by Sway-Back. Caesar, casting a phosphorescent glow in the darkness of his spirit, was no longer alone but had company in the burning bush of Africa.
I think it was this realisation that impressed me though it did not cure me of misgiving. The Captain might well be doing something wrong, as Leif and ’Mlangeni believed. Perhaps no one should step outside his proper shape as the Captain and de la Buschagne were preparing to do, even if Thor Larsen had earned the right to make his own mistakes. I was not to be shaken in this conclusion and it became the anchor on which I swung in the storm to come.
How genuine it was I knew from my reaction to the sight of de la Buschagne’s tall, gaunt figure standing on the corner of the verandah of the “Ailsa Craig” where he could watch the junction of the promenade with the main street which ran along the side of the hotel. Even from afar I had the impression of taut alertness, so quick were the movements of his head from side to side. No person or vehicle passed him without being inspected by his pale blue eyes, as if he were a custom’s officer on a strange frontier searching travellers for contraband. On that crowded verandah, with people all around him, untidy, dishevelled, slack and relaxed in their chairs, he was the only one on his feet, meticulously dressed. A few days before, seeing him thus, all the alarm bells in me would have been set ringing. But now, as a result of the conclusion which I have just mentioned, I went relatively unperturbed to our meeting.
The moment he saw me he turned swiftly about and came to the verandah steps to meet me. Because of the unusual eagerness with which he shook my hand and the way he took my mission for granted, I believe he had been on the watch for me ever since we had last parted.
He gave me no chance even to explain why I had come. “Day, Cousin,” he announced. “I am all packed up and ready. I’ll just tell that coolie to get my things and we’ll go.”
I disliked instantly his use of the word “coolie”, for the overworked Indian porter, just visible, stood listlessly beside the narrow desk in the dark hallway behind him. De la Buschagne had been there long enough to have learnt the man’s name. It was just another example of our colonial aversion to making our relationships with our coloured countrymen specific. Making them specific would have meant humanizing them, but we preferred to limit our recognition of them to convenient categories. There was, however, more to it than just prejudice in de la Buschagne’s attitude. He had, almost to the point of arrogance, the inability of the utterly dedicated to achieve personal relationships of any kind. He tended to value people not for what they were, but for the extent to which they could serve his dedication. Even I, who was young and of the same people, remained an unspecified Cousin to him, though he knew well the name by which I went in the Kurt Hansen.
“We’re not going to sea just yet,” I answered. “We’re in harbour for repairs. The Captain has merely sent me to ask if you would be good enough to join him in his ship.”
“Repairs, Cousin?” Disappointment filled his pale blue eyes. Yet as a man who had had often to endure frustration of his most cherished desires, he wanted to know the worst immediately. “Does it mean that your Captain will have to call our expedition off?”
“Not at all, Uncle!” I told him quickly. “We hope to be ready for sea again by Sunday, at the latest. The Captain would just like to see you again.”
“I’ll come at once then,” he answered, relieved, pulling his hat on his head and ready immediately to walk off the verandah.
“But your daughter, Uncle?” I assumed that, since he did not know Larsen well, he could not possibly realise that he would most likely be gone for hours. “Should you not . . .”
I got no further, and stopped confused and uncertain, expecting the reproof I saw on his face to come out in short, sharp words. But he just stood there in silence looking hard at me, knowing, I am certain, with all the experience and cunning of the old that the weapon of silence is deadly against the young.
I began to stammer out an explanation: “Captain Larsen, Uncle, I’m certain is expecting . . . rather he’s hoping—you’ll spend some hours with him—I thought—at least, I wasn’t sure—I mean to say I’m sorry I didn’t make that clear at the beginning—”
“I see,” he interrupted me curtly. “But there’s no need to be concerned about my daughter.”
He turned his back resolutely on the hotel and quickly went down the verandah steps onto the crowded pavement.
There was something so compulsive about his air of authority that I would have followed him meekly if a sense of unfairness had not been joined by indignation at this casual disregard of a daughter whom he must have known was already in a state of anxiety about him.
Impulsively I hastened to the desk in the dim hall of the hotel. “Please,” I asked the Indian porter, “tell Mr. de la Buschagne’s daughter, when she comes in, that her father has gone to the whaling ship in the harbour and will be away some hours.”
The porter smiled at me and said: “I’ll tell her right away, master. She’s only just gone upstairs.”
I thanked him and hurried outside to join de la Buschagne. He was standing on the pavement, waiting. I fully expected him to ask what had delayed me. But he was immediately back on the track of his main preoccupation.
“Come, Cousin,” he told me briskly. “We mustn’t keep your Captain waiting.”
Without consulting me, he beckoned to a ricksha-man in the stand opposite the hotel. The man had immediately spotted de la Buschagne as a stranger to Port Natal and therefore a potential customer for any of its novelty. When I arrived on the pavement, he was already importuning de la Buschagne by blowing a series of urgent blasts on a football whistle held firmly between his teeth. Blowing it, he leapt to fantastic heights between the slender shafts of his ricksha. It was a common enough sight in Port Natal and yet I had never become used to it. So strange indeed was the complex of feelings aroused that I had determined never to use a ricksha and until this moment never had done so.
Even the way these ricksha-pullers were dressed seemed utterly unrelated to our brash, busy, colourless and European day. This man’s head-dress, for instance, was made of tall feathers dyed green, blue, red, yellow and black in colour. From it protruded the horns of a great steer, so polished that they shone like warm Baltic amber in the sun. His broad shoulders and chest were covered with a canvas tunic, falling to his knees and worked over with beads of the same uncompromising colours arranged in precise geometric patterns. His arms were bare but the wrists flashing and jingling with bracelets of copper, steel and outsize brass curtain rings. His legs below the knee were painted white, but his ankles again were bright and shining with more circlets of metal and bone. As he blew his glittering whistle, his teeth would show a dazzle of white against his black skin, and whenever he came down from the peak of one of his great leaps, the glass and metal jewellery upon him resounded like some percussion of antique music. His jewellery did not sit upon him like decoration imposed from without, but seemed as natural as painted feathers are on a bird of paradise. Even the spokes of the wheels of his ricksha were hidden behind cardboard disks bright with harlequin colour, and the passenger seat was covered with leopard skins. He looked like some messenger from the court of time, and indeed his vehicle might have come straight from Bacchus to fetch us to some harvest festival of great summer. Instead it was the cheapest form of transport available in a modern city. Today I wonder at the iron limitations of our awareness that prevent us from seeing how great the heart, and how heroic the spirit, that can make carnival of so mean a trade.
De la Buschagne had hardly begun his imperious gesture before the ricksha-man dashed across the promenade towards us. Throwing the shafts down, he jumped nimbly over them, unslung from his wrist the straps of a fly-whisk made of a gnu’s tail, and deftly brushed the skin on the seat with it.
“Father of fathers,” he addressed de la Buschagne with the exaggerated names of praise a sense of occasion in him demanded, in a voice that could be heard all over the front. “Chief of chiefs! Bull followed by a thousand heifers! Elephant darkening this place of a hundred thousand fires with your shadow! King of kings, behold your wagon!”
He stood on one side and de la Buschagne stepped magisterially into the ricksha as if he had done that sort of thing all his life.
“Tell him where to go, Cousin, and to be quick,” he called to me over his shoulder.
I did as I was told, politely. I was deeply incensed because now I found myself trapped into using a ricksha for the first time in my life. I resented the knack de la Buschagne seemed to possess of throwing me into battle against myself.
I did not know then that the battle of the universe is made specific for us in the small and has to be fought out not only in heroic issues, but in a trivial series of choices during our daily round. Had I recognised this then, I might have had the heart to dissociate myself from de la Buschagne; instead, I conformed, and even the ricksha-man helped me on the road to self-betrayal by being so pleased at hearing himself addressed in his own language.
I shifted uneasily into position beside de la Buschagne, before expressing my resentment obliquely by remarking: “You may not know it, Uncle, but ricksha-pullers don’t live long.”
“Really? Why?” he replied in a tight, matter of fact way.
“Because they strain their hearts pulling such heavy loads as us about Port Natal all day.” I spoke sharply. “Because day after day they pull us about until the sweat runs like water off them. Then for hours they have to stand about in wet clothes waiting for another heavy load. As a result they develop weak chests and either die like flies in winter of pneumonia, or get consumption.”
“How do you know all this?” de la Buschagne asked, unconvinced.
“The whole of Port Natal knows it,” I retorted, bitter now over my own feelings of complicity in the matter. “Everybody talks about it but nobody does anything to stop it. They go on using rickshas just the same and making money out of the licences and taxes they impose on these poor devils.”
But de la Buschagne might not have heard a word of my outburst. “People!” he exclaimed with scorn. “They’d say anything, Cousin. If you ask me, this “Ou Nasie”fn1 is a good deal tougher than you think. Look, this fellow is enjoying it no end!” Then, dismissing the matter, he added: “But tell me about your ship.”
Indeed our ricksha-puller was giving a convincing imitation of someone who felt himself to be inordinately privileged and happy in his work. He soon managed to work up into a run taking, despite his load, the stride of a lone, long-distance runner. Every now and then he would leap high into the air, calling out a battle cry as he did so before coming down with the growl of a warrior giving his enemies their coup de grâce. Every time this happened the shafts of the ricksha flew up, and de la Buschagne and I were thrown so far back that we were made to clutch the sides of the vehicle for safety. In the process our heads jerked and our bodies shook like those of puppets manipulated by the dark archaic runner in front of us. We resembled caricatures of human beings in motion. There was no doubt that all the manifest honour of the occasion was with the ricksha-man; the mockery was ours. My own face felt hot with a mixture of self-consciousness and guilt. But de la Buschagne looked indifferent to the world and utterly content in the knowledge that he was covering the distance to the Kurt Hansen faster this way than he could have walked it.
I longed to point out the signs of increasing strain in our ricksha-puller, the sweat running down his legs, the dark wet stains spreading all over his glittering tunic, his laboured breathing. Above all I wanted de la Buschagne to realise how the man never slackened his pace, giving nothing but the utmost of his capacity. But de la Buschagne gave me no chance. He asked so many questions about the Kurt Hansen, her mishap, work, crew and Captain, that I had not answered them all by the time we pulled up sharply at the Kurt Hansen’s side.
Thor Larsen was standing at the head of the gang-plank waiting for his visitor. I think our method of arrival pleased him greatly because of his Norse associations with ricksha-men which he had revealed to me that placid Sunday afternoon when we first met those long three years before. I suspect he found a certain rough poetic fitness about it and was inclined to accept it as a good omen.
He called out: “Good, my Eyes, good! You take Viking transport to Viking ship, not?”
He laughed aloud and then addressed de la Buschagne in a voice as anxious to please as ever I had heard him use. “To step on board please, Mr. Hunter, my friend!”
De la Buschagne had already taken out a leather purse with the intention of paying the ricksha-man. In fact he was unlatching its flap with a deliberation which convinced me that he was going to bargain hard over the price.
But Thor Larsen stopped him with a loud, “No, no, Mr. Hunter. Eyes to pay now. Thor Larsen pay after! You my guest, not? Please to step on board now.”
De la Buschagne seemed only too ready to do as he was told, for without protest he went on board and disappeared below with my Captain.
I was left alone with the man for a moment. He stood between the shafts of his ricksha, unsteady with exhaustion, his chest heaving. Yet his eyes, big, dark and clouded with fatigue, were steady on mine, without demand or expectation in them.
I was moved by his silence and found myself thinking of a Sindakwena saying: “The journey makes the stranger at dawn a neighbour beside the fire at night.” I added a thought of my own: “And he who shortens his life for another should be a brother forever.”
Suddenly everything in general and this episode in particular felt so wrong, and I felt so helpless to do anything about it, that I had to force myself to some sort of control.
I looked at the panting, sweaty man and I longed for a new kind of coin that would enable him to buy back the wastage of vivid flesh and blood, the portion of his scant ration of time and reality that he had just used up on de la Buschagne and me. But all I could do was to empty my pockets into the two black hands held out so politely towards me. Paying money can be the easiest evasion of a human debt, yet, had he not been so exhausted, I believe he would have danced his gratitude over such an unexpected weight of silver in his hands. All he could do was to call out a profound “Auck, my ’Nkosan. Auck!” Then he called out that untranslatable “Kenon!” of his people.
Twice more he repeated the sound, looking up at the blue winter sky as if that were the direction from which his reward had come. Then he looked straight at me and announced: “Where you go, ’Nkosan, I go.”
I shook my head sadly, thanked him and said, “I fear our road together ends here.”
Nevertheless, he has travelled space and time with me ever since.
“But the ’Nyanga?” he asked, startling me back into immediate reality by calling de la Buschagne a “witch-doctor” as frankly as ’Mlangeni had done. “Surely the ’Nyanga will have need of someone to take him back to his hotel?”
“He may be many hours,” I told him.
“I’ll wait for the ’Nyanga, ’Nkosan,” he answered swiftly and pointed to the empty ricksha stand by the harbour gates.
He was already in position there sitting by his ricksha when I looked back just before ducking through the entrance to the Kurt Hansen’s saloon. I think he was expecting that for, tired as he was, he jumped up and raised his hand high above his head in a kind of heraldic salute. I knew that nothing would now make him break the pact thus passed between us.
fn1 Paternalistic Afrikaans term for Africans.