1972 - A Story Like the Wind (61 page)

With that François gently rustled the grass beside the spider. For all its inert appearance, the spider at once shot sideways into its hole with such speed that Luciana’s eyes could barely follow it. At one minute it had been there like a jewel: the next, it had gone down that close-fitting cylinder of velvet, the lid pulled down on top of it with such force that a tiny trace of dust stood in the track to mark the place where it had disappeared. Without that pool of light and dust smoking in the track, she would not have known where the spider lived, because the uppermost part of that beautifully silk-lined lid was made of dried mud, looking exactly like the rest of the ground around it.

She found herself holding her breath, overcome by the weight of the mystery of things pressing upon her. For the first time, perhaps, she fully understood François’s deference, if not reverence, for the life of the bush, which perhaps, not surprisingly with her metropolitan background, had at times appeared exaggerated. Standing there with the day exploding in flame and dew-smoke around them, the coming of light welcomed by a bird-hymn of glittering intensity and volume, the mysteries of life acquired new dimensions. It was no longer confined to sky and bush where she could eagerly acknowledge it, but was suddenly shown to be also deep in the darkness of the earth out of which that little spider had issued as an ambassador of another world. Yet all belonged together as did also both she and François.

So great and sudden was the extension of awareness and so vast the view disclosed that she was apprehensive, and in order to stifle her fear, she resorted to the next best thing. Her eyes on the place where the spider had vanished, she raised her hand as François had raised his to Adonis. In an almost joking manner that sometimes comes to people who are fearfully in earnest she called, ‘Oh brave and most excellent little housekeeper. I have seen you and I greet you.’

Quickly, still keeping her face averted from François for she was shy of what he might see in her eyes just then, she tried to speak normally, ‘Oh blast! I would never have thought I could find anything so revolting as a spider quite so beautiful.’

The frontiersman in François was still young enough to recognize the moment when others arrived at a new frontier in themselves. He understood what was happening to Nonnie better than she could possibly realize because he had been at just such a place inside himself many times before, and was beginning to know the predicament well. At such moments he knew how much it helped him to recall those who had been there before him.

Therefore he told her quietly: ‘You know, Old Koba told me that the People of the Early Race claimed that they owed the first light in the darkness of the beginning to a female spider. Tonight I will show you the place in the Milky Way where they say she went to sit, and still weaves a great web to catch the light hiding in darkness and to force it to shine so that the people on earth can see the way they had to go. It is the place in the Milky Way which my father’s books on astronomy say is known popularly by many other names, such as the ‘Entrance to Hell’ or the ‘Coal Sack’ and so on. But, according to Old Koba, it’s just a vast female spider sitting there, for ever spinning and re-spinning her web in order to catch all that light doing anything wrong for that horrid little bird to accuse you of it.’

‘No,’ François persisted, ‘I’m afraid it could be me.’

‘But why?’ she asked, puzzled and unbelieving.

‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you exactly why. But I think it’s got something to do with that secret I’ve promised to tell you one day.’

‘Oh nonsense,’ Nonnie answered with immense scorn, ‘the only thing wrong about that secret is that you haven’t shared it with me yet, and the sooner you do that the better it will be.’

Her protestation was spontaneous and clear-cut with anger, and it had an immediate effect on François. But it was not soon enough to prevent her taking, from that moment on, an extreme dislike to the bird, and to compel her, whenever they heard it, to answer it, first by sticking out her tongue at it and then loudly imitating the go-away bird, ordering it, ‘Oh-go-go-go-away!’ The strange thing was that invariably her method worked and promptly the Isala bird would spread its wings and fly away.

The other experience was the encounter with a very rare form of dust-buff African partridge with legs in red hose and feet in yellow running shoes, which is known as francolin. Nonnie and François had flushed many of its kind from the brush in their comings and goings in the bush, but this one was remarkable because it refused to be flushed.

They would not have discovered it at all had it not been for Hintza, who had a ‘thing’ about birds. It was not that he disliked them, but one suspects that he secretly envied them, feeling that if any form of life on earth really deserved wings it was the species of dog in general and the breed to which he belonged in particular. Perhaps he took a particular delight, therefore, in seeing birds earth-bound and, as it were, in his own dimension, so that he could exploit the situation, rushing at them not with any intention to kill but forcing them into the sky as if to say, ‘You’ve got quite enough space of your own up there without coming down here to add to
our
population explosion.’

On this particular day he went rigid in what François called his ‘bird watcher’s stance’, trying to indicate to François, ‘There’s another one of those birds taking liberties down here.’

François stopped Nonnie, and both pairs of eyes searched the bush and grass around them with the utmost care, but saw nothing. Yet it was clear from Hintza’s attitude that there was something and that by the minute he was becoming more exasperated over François’s and Nonnie’s failure to see it too.

In the circumstances François did what he always did and whispered to Nonnie, ‘Come and kneel here beside Hin. And don’t try looking any more. Just sit very still…It’s amazing, but if you wait, you’ll feel not only what he’s feeling but what the thing he’s looking at is feeling, and the two things between them will draw your eyes to it.’

So they sat for perhaps a minute or two on either side of Hintza, each with a hand on his magnetic back, letting the day and its hidden life flow like a stream through them, trying to feel without will or thought, until there came an extraordinary moment when François and Nonnie simultaneously felt and saw, barely ten feet away, deep under a thatched roof of grass, a pair of dark birds’ eyes, bright with terror.

‘Good Heavens!’ François exclaimed softly. ‘I believe it’s a francolin partridge brooding.’

As he said it, he noticed that the grass immediately above the eyes was trembling and knew immediately why. He whispered to Nonnie, ‘Look at that grass over the eyes. Poor little thing. Its heart is beating so fast and so violently with fear that we might discover its nest and kill it, that the grass around is shaken by it…It longs to fly away; there’s nothing in the whole bush so defenceless as a little bird sitting on earth. She’s the mother bird you see, so she’s got to stay and hatch her eggs…I often wonder what I’d do if I felt so threatened. But she’ll never allow herself to be pushed off her eggs. In fact, I’ve found the skeletons of many francolin birds who’ve sat it out to the point of being killed on their nests. If you come quietly with me I’ll show you just why I think birds are the bravest of all things in the bush.’

‘Oh no!’ The protest from Nonnie was immediate. ‘That would be too cruel. You call off Hin and let’s go as quickly as possible.’

François had never seen her so vehement and it compelled him to whisper a command to Hintza and quietly lead the three of them back into the main track. There he was amazed how flushed Nonnie’s face was. Although she thanked him she added with rising emotion, ‘But you must admit, it
would
have been cruel to prolong that poor little thing’s agony.’

This side of it had not occurred to him. He had only wanted to show Nonnie how beautifully the francolin made its nest in the grass; how skilfully it hid itself from its many powerful enemies; how it sat there in a world of danger, with its little head cocked on one side as if it were listening for the first sounds of life stirring within its six white, brown and pink eggs underneath it, and how it would, if necessary, give up its life for the new life growing within them.

He tried to say this to Nonnie but for the first time she dismissed his explanations, saying impatiently, ‘Oh bother you men and all your talk of courage and bravery. You’re just like Fa, always trying to prove to himself how brave he is and that bravery in himself and other things, even fish, is all that matters. Even
you
are always talking to me about fear and courage as if they were the all-important things in life. Why?’

François did not like the comparison with Sir James at all. Besides, he was not without a feeling of guilt for never having thought of the francolin’s side of the matter. All he could finally say was, ‘Nonnie, you misunderstand me. If I talk a lot about fear and courage it’s only because I’m so often afraid myself and badly in need of courage.’

This confession of weakness fired a strange new flame of protectiveness in Luciana. She instantly forgot her own agitation and protested with some remorse, ‘I don’t believe you. If there’s anybody who doesn’t know what fear is I would have thought it was you.’

‘You’re wrong…You couldn’t be more wrong,’ François said in turn with tragic emphasis. ‘I’m so often afraid that I need to look constantly at creatures like old Adonis and that partridge to reassure myself that there’s enough courage in life for all, as Mopani so often tells me. I don’t know what I would have done, perhaps run away to some awful old town long ago, if it hadn’t been for the example of the birds and animals, that are so much less powerful than us. If it were not for them always reminding me, I might forget there’s as much courage as we need, if only we know how to ask for it. Mopani said that the smaller and stiller the voice is within oneself, the more one should listen to them. He says it’s like that with courage too.’

‘Well, Master François,’ Nonnie was driven to banter, dismayed at having produced so serious an atmosphere between them, when at heart she had been feeling so happy, ‘if it’s any help to you, I can tell you that the very next time I’m badly frightened I’m not going to think of your old Adonis, or even that partridge, but of you, to get me out of it.’

The moment when she would need all the examples of courage she could think of, however, came sooner than either of them expected. It came at a particularly delicate moment when both she and François were singularly vulnerable.

On their return they sat on the edge of the stoep outside the kitchen, side by side, Hintza lying happily at their feet in the twilight and !#grave;Bamuthi standing in front of them, tall and indistinct like some dark archaic statue outlined against the west. François was translating questions and answers for Nonnie and !#grave;Bamuthi. François thought he had never seen !#grave;Bamuthi in a more sensitive and solicitous mood. He had just answered Nonnie’s question as to whether he knew that baboons counted up to three, and thought of everything beyond that number as a ‘hell-of-a-lot’, with the oracular reply, ‘And who then is there here who would say that this is not a matter of common knowledge?’

!#grave;Bamuthi would obviously have wanted to elaborate the theme but at that moment the moon rose. He instantly stopped and paused, deep in thought, before he looked at François to say, ‘Little Feather, you always ask me about the singing crested cobra and because you have never seen it, although you have been too polite to say so, I know you have always thought it to be just a tale told by the old women to our children. But if you go, asking with your heart, to that circle of rock beyond the kraals on the edge of the bush on such a night as this, you will have a good chance of seeing the singing crested cobra for yourself because, for some months now, it has been reported that such a cobra has been visiting just that place.’

François translated all this faithfully to Nonnie and told her this singing cobra was the strangest and most persistent legend of the peoples of the bush. Who could imagine a cobra with a plume of feathers and a voice that went beyond a hiss to sing in the irresistible sea-siren way in which !#grave;Bamuthi claimed it sang? He had always longed to see it but had never succeeded. Mopani, too, had encountered the legend all over Africa and tried to find the singing crested cobra but he, too, had failed. There was nothing that François would have liked more than to go now with Nonnie to see whether the mysterious serpent really existed. And Nonnie and Hintza simultaneously sprang to their feet, Nonnie exclaiming, ‘Oh, how exciting—let’s go at once!’

But just at that moment the mongrel watch dogs started to bark furiously and François knew at once that Sir James and Mopani were coming home. It was odd how effectively that barking and the sound of well-shod horses abolished the sense of mystery. The thought of a singing crested cobra somewhere out there on the edge of the bush, serenading the moon on behalf of all the secret life within the earth, was reduced in a flash to what !#grave;Bamuthi had called ‘an old wives’ tale’. For Franpois it was as if some great antique city of wonder and magic had suddenly crumbled to dust around them, just as the walls of Jericho had once fallen to the sound of tocsins.

The detail of what followed is irrelevant. But the one overwhelming fact was that the summons from Sir James’s Government overseas seemed so important to him that he was going away almost immediately and, of course, taking Nonnie and Amelia with him. Mopani had agreed to supervise in general the construction of house and buildings at Silverton-Hill which, since they were being built of stone quarried and cut on the place, would take at least a year to complete. Mopani had also assumed the right (certain that it would help François) to promise that, in between his own visits, François would act as his deputy and inspect the site at least once a week to help the Cape-coloured builders.

François, of course, was as grateful to Mopani as anyone could possibly be in a moment of disaster so brutally and unexpectedly introduced in his life, since he had assumed that in Nonnie, at last, he would have a friend of his own close by, indefinitely. But he was too miserable to give his mind to either the food or the conversation at dinner that evening, and he lay awake for a long time in his room, the hypersensitive Hintza whimpering at odd moments in his sleep as if he, too, knew of the impending separation.