he does not like him,” said John.
“Yes, he does so, or he wouldn’t keep him on.”
“My girl,” said John, “I know why Chakata keeps on Old Tuys. You know. Everyone knows. It isn’t because he likes him.”
They moved on to join the other children. Daphne wondered why Chakata kept on Old Tuys.
They scrounged a lift to the dorp. The Coates family were uninhibited about speaking Afrikaans, chatting in rapid gutturals to people they met while Daphne stood by, shyly following what she could of the conversation.
They were to return to the car at five ôclock, and it was now only half-past three. Daphne took her chance and slipped away from the group through the post office and out at the back yard where the natives were squatting round their mealie-pot. They watched her with their childish interest as she made her way past the native huts and the privies and out on the sanitary lane at the foot of the yard.
Daphne nipped across a field and up the steep track of Donald Cloete’s kopje. It bore this name, because Donald Cloete was the only person who lived on the hill, although there were several empty shacks surrounding his.
Donald Cloete had been to Cambridge. Indoors, he had two photographs on the wall. One was Donald in the cricket team, not easily recognizable behind his wide, curly moustache and among the other young men who looked so like him and stood in the same stiff, self-assured manner that Daphne had observed in pictures of the Pioneer heroes. The picture was dated 1898. Another group showed Donald in uniform among his comrades of the Royal Flying Corps. It was dated 1918, but Donald behind his moustache did not look much older than he appeared in the Cambridge picture.
Daphne looked round the open door and saw Donald seated in his dilapidated cane chair. His white shirt was stained with beetroot.
“Are you drunk, Donald,” she inquired politely, “or are you sober?”
Donald always told the truth. “I’m sober,” he said. “Come in.”
At fifty-six his appearance now had very little in common with the young Cambridge cricketer or the RFC pilot. He had been in hundreds of jobs, had married and lost his wife to a younger and more energetic man. The past eight years had been the most settled in his life, for he was Town Clerk of the dorp, a job which made few demands on punctuality, industry, smartness of appearance, and concentration, which qualities Donald lacked. Sometimes when the Council held its monthly meeting, and Donald happened to stagger in late and drunk, the Chairman would ask Donald to leave the meeting, and in his absence propose his dismissal. Sometimes they unanimously dismissed him and after the meeting he was informed of the decision. However, next day Donald would dress himself cleanly and call in to see the butcher with a yarn about the RFC; he would call on the headmaster who had been to Cambridge some years later than Donald; and after doing a round of the Council members he would busy himself in the district, would ride for miles on his bicycle seeing that fences were up where they should be, and sign-posts which had fallen in the rains set upright and prominent. Within a week, Donald’s dismissal would be ignored by everyone. He would relax then, and if he entered up a birth or a death during the week, it was a good week’s work.
“Who brought you from the farm?” said Donald.
“Ticky Talbot,” said Daphne.
“Nice to see you,” said Donald. And he called to his servant for tea.
“Five more years and then I go to England,” said Daphne, for this was the usual subject between them, and she did not feel it right to come to the real purpose of her visit so soon.
“That will be the time,” said Donald. “When you go to England, that will be the time.” And he told her all over again about the water meadows at Cambridge, the country pubs, the hedging and ditching, the pink-coated riders.
Donald’s ragged native brought in tea in two big cups, holding one in each hand. One he gave to Daphne and the other to Donald.
How small, Donald said, were the English streams which never dried up. How small the fields, little bits of acreage, and none of the cottage women bitchy for they did their own housework and had no time to bitch. And then, of course, the better classes taking tea in their long galleries throughout the land, in springtime, with the pale sunlight dripping through the mullioned windows on to the mellow Old Windsor chairs, and the smell of hyacinths …
“Oh, I see. Now tell me about London, Donald. Tell me about the theatres and bioscopes.”
“They don’t say ‘bioscope’ there, they say ‘cinema’ or ‘the pictures’.”
“I say, Donald,” she said, for she noticed it was twenty-past four, “I want you to tell me something straight.”
“Fire ahead,” said Donald.
“Why does Uncle Chakata keep on Old Tuys?”
“I don’t want to lose my job,” he said.
“Upon my honour,” she said, “if you tell me about Old Tuys I shan’t betray you.”
“The whole Colony knows the story,” said Donald, “but the first one to tell it to you is bound to come up against Chakata.”
“May I drop dead on this floor,” she said, “if I tell my Uncle Chakata on you.”
“How old are you, now?” Donald said.
“Nearly thirteen.”
“It was two years before you were born – that would make it fifteen years ago, when Old Tuys …”
Old Tuys had already been married for some time to a Dutch girl from Pretoria. Long before he took the job at Chakata’s he knew of her infidelities. They had one peculiarity: her taste was exclusively for Englishmen. The young English settlers whom she met in the various establishments where Tuys was employed were, guilty or not, invariably accosted by Tuys: “You committed adultery with my wife, you swine.” There might be a fight, or Tuys would threaten his gun. However it might be, and whether or not these young men were his wife’s lovers, Tuys was usually turned off the job.
It was said he was going to shoot his wife and arrange it to look like an accident. Simply because this intention was widely reported, he could not have carried out the plan successfully, even if he did, in fact, contemplate the deed. Certainly he beat her up from time to time.
Tuys hoped eventually to get a farm of his own. Chakata, who knew of his troubles, took Tuys on to learn the tobacco sheds. Tuys and his wife moved into a small house on Chakata’s land. “Any trouble with the lady, Tuys,” said Chakata, “come to me, for in a young country like this, with four white men to every one white woman, there is bound to be trouble.”
There was trouble the first week with a trooper.
“Look here, Tuys,” said Chakata, “I’ll talk to her.” He had frequently in his life had the painful duty of giving his servants a talking-to on sex. At the Pattersons’ home in England it had been a routine affair.
Hatty Tuys was not beautiful: in fact she was dark and scraggy. However, Chakata not only failed to reform her, he succumbed to her. She wept. She said she hated Tuys.
Donald
