The Seed and the Sower

Contents

Cover

About the Book

About the Author

Also by Laurens van der Post

Title Page

A Bar of Shadow

Christmas Eve

The Seed and the Sower

Christmas Morning

The Sword and the Doll

Christmas Night

Copyright

About the Book

This is war as experienced in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in Java in 1942, but, above all, war as experienced in the hearts and souls of men.

This is the story of two British officers whose spirit the Japanese try to break. Yet out of the terrible violence and hardship strange bonds of love and friendship are forged between the prisoners – and their gaolers.

This is a battle for survival that becomes a battle of contrasting wills and cultures as the intensities of the men’s relationships develop.

About the Author

Laurens van der Post was born in South Africa in 1906, the thirteenth of fifteen children in a family of Dutch and French Huguenot origins. Most of his adult life was spent with one foot in Africa and one in England. His professions of writer and farmer were interrupted by ten years of soldiering in the British Army, serving with distinction in the Western Desert, Abyssinia, Burma and the Far East. Taken prisoner by the Japanese, he was held in captivity for three years before returning to active service as a member of Lord Mountbatten’s staff in Indonesia and, later, as Military Attaché to the British Minister in Java.

After 1949 he undertook several official missions exploring little-known parts of Africa, and his journey in search of the Bushmen in 1957 formed the basis of his famous documentary film and The Lost World of the Kalahari. Other television films include All Africa Within Us and The Story of Carl Gustav Jung, whom he met after the war and grew to know as a personal friend. In 1934 he wrote In a Province, the first book by a South African to expose the horrors of racism. Other books include Venture to the Interior (1952), The Heart of the Hunter (1961), and A Walk with a White Bushman (1986). The Seed and the Sower was made into a film under the title Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, and, more recently, A Story Like the Wind and A Far-Off Place were combined and made into the film A Far-Off Place.

Sir Laurens van der Post was awarded the CBE in 1947 and received his knighthood in 1981. He died in 1996.

Also by Laurens van der Post

In a Province

Venture to the Interior

The Face Beside the Fire

Flamingo Feather

The Dark Eye in Africa

The Lost World of the Kalahari

The Heart of the Hunter

Journey into Russia

The Hunter and the Whale

The Night of the New Moon

A Story Like the Wind

A Far-Off Place

A Mantis Carol

Jung and the Story of our Time

First Catch Your Eland

Yet Being Someone Other

A Walk With a White Bushman

About Blady: A Pattern Out of Time

The Voice of the Thunder

Feather Fall

The Seed and the Sower

Laurens van der Post

Et venio in campos et lata

Praetoria memoriae.

St Augustine

And I come to the fields and wide palaces of memory.

The book as a whole to my wife

INGARET GIFFARD

for editing this Christmas trilogy with such concern for its meaning;

A Bar of Shadow, as it was when first published, to

WILLIAM PLOMER

Note

Grateful thanks are due to the Editor and Publishers of The Cornhill, in which A Bar of Shadow first appeared. for permission to reprint it.

A Bar of Shadow

Christmas Eve

A Bar of Shadow

AS WE WALKED across the fields we hardly spoke. I, myself, no longer had the heart to try and make conversation. I had looked forward so eagerly to this Christmas visit of John Lawrence and yet now that he was here, we seemed incapable of talking to each other in a real way. I had not seen him for five years; not since we said good-bye at our prison gates on release at the end of the war, I to return to my civilian life, he to go straight back to the Army on active service. Until then for years he and I had walked as it were hand in hand with the danger of war and endured the same bitter things at the hands of the Japanese in prison. Indeed, when our release came we found that our experience, shared in the embattled world about us, fitted like a measured garment to the great and instinctive coincidence of affection we felt for each other. That moment of rounded nearness had stayed with me. There was no separation in it for me, no distance of purple leagues between him and me. I knew only too well the cruel and unnecessary alliance (unnecessary because either one of them is powerful enough) that time and distance contract for waging their war against our brief and brittle human nearnesses. But if I had managed to stay close, why should he have been set so far apart? For that is precisely what I felt. Although he was so near to me that I had but to half-stretch out a hand to take his arm, never in five years of separation had he seemed so far away as now.

I stole a quick glimpse of him. The suit of pre-war tweeds, which still fitted him perfectly, sat on his tall broad frame more like service uniform than becoming country garments and he was walking like a somnambulist at my side, with an odd unconscious deliberation and purposefulness, a strange, tranced expression on his face. His large grey eyes, set well apart under that fine and wide brow in a noble head, were blue with the distance between us. Even the light of that contracting December afternoon, receding from the day like the grey tide of a stilled sea from a forgotten and forlorn foreshore fuming silently in the gathering mists of time, glowed in his eyes not like a light from without so much as the fading tones of a frozen wintry moment far back in some calendar of his own within. Their focus clearly was not of that moment and that place and the irony of it was almost more than I could bear without protest.

I don’t know what I would have done if something unknown within me, infinitely wiser and more knowledgeable than my conscious self marching at his side in bitter judgement over this resumption that was not a resumption of our relationship, had not suddenly swept into command and ordered me to ask: ‘You have not by any chance run into “Rottang” Hara again?’

The question was out before I even knew I was going to ask it and instantly I felt a fool at having put it, so irrelevant and remote from that moment did it seem. But to my amazement, he stopped short in his tracks, turned to me and, like someone released from an emotion too tight for him, said with obvious relief:

‘It is curious you asking me that! For I was thinking of him just then.’ He paused slightly and then added with an apologetic laugh, as if he feared being misunderstood: ‘I have been thinking of him all day. I can’t get him out of my mind.’

My relief matched his, for instantly I recognized a contact that could bridge his isolation. Here was a preoccupation I could understand and follow a long way even if I could not share it to the end. Just the thought of Hara and the mention of his name was enough to bring the living image of the man as clearly to my senses as if I had only just left him and as if at any moment now behind me that strange, strangled, nerve-taut, solar-plexus voice of his which exploded in him when he was enraged, would shriek ‘Kura!’ – the rudest of the many rude ways in Japanese of saying: ‘Come here, you!’

At the thought the hair on the back of my neck suddenly became sensitive to the cold air and involuntarily I looked over my shoulder as if I really expected to see him standing at the gate by the Long Barn beckoning us with an imperious arm stretched out straight in front of him, and one impatient hand beating the air like the wings of a large yellow butterfly in its last desperate flutter before metamorphosis into a creeping and crawling thing on earth. But the field behind us, of course, was empty, and the great, grey piece of winter, the tranquil and tranced benediction of a rest well earned by eager earth long wooed and well-beloved by man, lay over the tired and sleeping land. The scene indeed in that gently shrinking moment of daylight stood over itself as if it were an inner dream in the inmost sleep of itself, as if circumstances had contrived to make it conform absolutely to that vision which had made England a blessed thought of heaven on earth to us when we were in prison under Hara, and a rush of bitterness, rudely brushing aside the relief I had felt, went straight to my heart that Hara’s twisted, contorted shape should still be able to walk this intimate and healing scene with us.

I said ‘in prison under Hara’ for though he was not the Commandant he was by far the greatest of the powers that ruled our prison world. He himself was only a third-class sergeant in His Imperial Japanese Majesty’s forces and nominally we had a young subaltern in charge, but that slight young man more resembled an elegant character out of the novels of the great Murasaki or the pillow book of her hated rival than a twentieth-century Samurai. We seldom saw him and his interest in us seemed focused only on the extent to which we could add in variety and number to his collection of wrist-watches. John Lawrence, who had once been assistant military attaché in Tokyo, said he was certain our Commandant was not born in the great hereditary military classes of Japan but was probably a second-class Custom’s official from Kobe or Yokohama who could therefore not be dishonoured as a real soldier would have been by an ignominious appointment to command a camp of despised prisoners of war. But Hara, he said, was the real thing, not of the officer class, but the authentic feudal follower, unhesitatingly accompanying his master and overlords into battle. He had served his masters long and well, had fought in Korea, Manchuria, China, and this unexacting job now, presumably, was his reward.

I don’t know how right Lawrence was, but one thing stood out: Hara had no inferiority complex about his officer. One had only to see them together to realize which was authentic, predestined military material and which merely deriving colour and benefit from war. Scrupulously correct as Hara was in his outward behaviour to his officer, we had no doubt that inwardly he felt superior. He never hesitated to take command of a situation when he thought it necessary. I have seen him on inspections walk rudely in between the Commandant and our ranks, haul out someone who had unwittingly transgressed his mysterious code of what was due on these occasions, and in a kind of semi-conscious epilepsy of fury beat the poor fellow nearly to death with anything that came to hand, while his disconcerted officer took himself and his refined Custom-house senses off to a more tranquil part of the parade-ground. No! Not he but Hara ruled us with a cold, predetermined, carefully conditioned and archaic will of steel as tough as the metal in the large, two-handed sword of his ancestors dangling on his incongruous pre-historic hip.

It was he, Hara, who decided how much or rather how little we had to eat. He ordained when we were driven to bed, when we got up, where and how we paraded, what we read. It was he who ordered that every book among the few we possessed wherein the word ‘kiss’ or mention of ‘kissing’ appeared, should be censored by having the offending pages torn out and publicly burned as an offence against ‘Japanese morality’. It was he who tried to ‘purify’ our thinking by making us in our desperately under-nourished condition go without food for two days at a time, confined in cramped and over-crowded cells, forbidden even to talk so that we could contemplate all the better our perverse and impure European navels. It was he who beat me because a row of beans that he had made my men plant had not come up and he put the failure down to my ‘wrong thinking’. It was he who, when drunk, would babble to me endlessly about Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich whose faces haunted him. He who questioned me for hours about Knights of the Round Table, ‘606’, Salvarsan and the latest drugs for curing syphilis. He mounted and controlled our brutal Korean guards, gave them their orders and made them fanatical converts, more zealous than their only prophet, to his outlook and mood. He made our laws, judged us for offences against them, punished us and even killed some of us for breaking them.

He was indeed a terrible little man, not only in the way that the great Tartar Ivan was terrible but also in a peculiarly racial and demoniac way. He possessed the sort of terribleness that thousands of years of littleness might seek to inflict on life as both a revenge and a compensation for having been so little for so long. He had an envy of tallness and stature which had turned to an implacable hatred of both, and when his demon – an ancient, insatiable and irresistibly compelled aspect of himself that lived somewhere far down within him with a great yellow autonomy and will of its own – stirred in him I have seen him beat-up the tallest among us for no other reason save that they were so much taller than he. Even his physical appearance was both a rejection and a form of vengeance on normality, a vaudeville magnification and a caricature of the Japanese male figure.

He was so short that he just missed being a dwarf, so broad that he was almost square. He hardly had any neck and his head, which had no back to it, sat almost straight on his broad shoulders. The hair on his head was thick and of a midnight-blue. It was extremely coarse and harsh in texture and, cut short, stood stark and stiff like the bristles on a boar’s back straight up in the air. His arms were exceptionally long and seemed to hang to his knees but his legs by contrast were short, extremely thick and so bowed that the sailors with us called him ‘Old Cutlass-legs’. His mouth was filled with big faded yellow teeth, elaborately framed in gold, while his face tended to be square and his forehead rather low and simian. Yet he possessed a pair of extraordinarily fine eyes that seemed to have nothing to do with the rest of his features and appearance. They were exceptionally wide and large for a Japanese and with the light and polish and warm, living, luminous quality of the finest Chinese jade in them. It was extraordinary how far they went to redeem this terrible little man from caricature. One looked into his eyes and all desire to mock vanished, for then one realized that this twisted being was, in some manner beyond European comprehension, a dedicated and utterly selfless person.

It was John Lawrence, who suffered more at Hara’s hands than any of us except those whom he killed, who first drew our attention to his eyes. I remember so clearly his words one day after a terrible beating in prison.

‘The thing you mustn’t forget about Hara,’ he had said, ‘is that he is not an individual or for that matter even really a man.’ He had gone on to say that Hara was the living myth, the expression in human form, the personification of the intense, inner vision which, far down in their unconscious, keeps the Japanese people together and shapes and compels their thinking and behaviour. We should not forget two thousand and seven hundred full cycles of his sun-goddess’s rule burnt in him. He was sure no one could be more faithful and responsive to all the imperceptible murmurings of Japan’s archaic and submerged racial soul than he. Hara was humble enough to accept implicitly the promptings of his national spirit. He was a simple, uneducated country lad with a primitive integrity unassailed by higher education, and really believed all the myths and legends of the past so deeply that he did not hesitate to kill for them. Only the day before he had told Lawrence how in Manchuria the sun-goddess had once lifted a train full of soldiers over an undetected Chinese mine laid for them on the track and put them all down again safely on the other side.

‘But just look in his eyes,’ Lawrence had said: ‘there is nothing ignoble or insincere there: only an ancient light, refuelled, quickened and brightly burning. There is something about the fellow I rather like and respect.’

This last sentence was such heresy among us at the time that I protested at once. Nothing Lawrence could say or explain could wash our bête noire blanche or even jaune for that matter, and I would have none of it.

‘The troops do not call him “Rottang” for nothing,’ I had reminded him severely. ‘Rottang’ is the Malay for the kind of cane Hara was seldom without. The troops christened him that because he would at times, seemingly without cause, beat them over the head and face with it.

‘He can’t help himself,’ John Lawrence had said. ‘It is not he but an act of Japanese gods in him, don’t you see? You remember what the moon does to him!’

And indeed I remembered. The attraction, both the keen conscious and the deep, submerged attraction that all the Japanese feel for the moon seemed to come to a point in Hara. If ever there was a moon-swung, moon-haunted, moon-drawn soul it was he. As the moon waxed – and how it waxed in the soft, velvet sky of Insulinda, how it grew and seemed to swell to double its normal gold and mystically burning proportions in that soft, elastic air; how it swung calmly over the great volcanic valleys like a sacred lamp, while the ground mist, mingling with the smell of cloves, cinnamon and all the fragrant spices of Insulinda drifted among the soaring tree trunks like incense round the lacquered columns of a sequined temple – Yes! as this unbelievable moon expanded and spread its gold among the blacknesses of our jungle night, we saw it draw a far tide of mythological frenzy to the full in Hara’s blood. Seven days, three days before and three days after and on the day of the full moon itself, were always our days of greatest danger with Hara. Most of his worst beatings and all his killings took place then. But once the beating was over and the moon waning, he would be, for him, extraordinarily generous to us. It was as if the beating and killing had purged him of impurities of spirit, of madness and evil in some strange way and made him grateful to them. In fact, the morning after he had cut off the head of one of us, I remembered seeing him talking to Lawrence and being struck by the fact that he had an expression of purified, of youthful and almost springlike innocence on his face, as if the sacrifice of the life of an innocent British aircraftman the night before, had redeemed him from all original as well as private and personal sin, and appeased for the time the hungry bat-like gods of his race.

All this passed through my mind like a dream with the speed and colour of a dream and it was almost as a man half-asleep that I heard Lawrence continue: ‘Yes. It is curious that you too should think of him just then; for I have an anniversary of Hara in me today, that I am not allowed to forget, try as I may. Have I ever told you?’

He had not and, eager to consolidate any contact between us, even this grim, precarious bridge, I said quickly: ‘No! Please tell me.’

Well, it was exactly seven years ago, he said, seven years within an hour or so, allowing for differences of Insulinda and Greenwich mean time. He was lying in a dream beyond the deep, raw, physical pain in his bruised and outraged body, when far away, like a bird perched on the daylight rim of a deep well into which he might have been thrown, he heard the first chee-chak call. Yes, that was it: a chee-chak, one of those agile, translucent little lizards that lived in every hut, house and even deepest dungeons in Insulinda. There were two of them in his cell and he loved them dearly. They had shared his solitary confinement from the beginning and in his affection for them he fancied he could tell them apart, the male from the female, just by the sound of their voices. They were the only living things not Japanese or Korean, not an active, aggressive enemy that he had seen for many weeks. So real had they become to him that he christened them Patrick and Patricia. He knew instantly when he heard the sound, that the sound came from Patricia, and at once he was out of the dream that had consoled and drugged his pain, and back on the damp stone floor with his bruised, stiff, aching and tired body, so tired that it could hardly take note even of the dismay which clutched at his heart the moment Patricia called. For she called like that only when it was well and truly dark, only when the jungle outside had closed its ranks and fallen back on its own black shadows between the purple volcanoes, the better to withstand that sheer, utter obliteration of outline and shape brought about by the overwhelming invasion of the moonless tropical night in the valley outside. It was as if then Patricia herself was afraid and wanted Patrick quickly to rejoin and reassure her that this great black nothingness abolished only the vision of the nearness of her mate and not the nearness itself. There! Patrick had answered her, and Lawrence knew his fear was justified. For this was the hour at which the Japanese usually came for him; this was the time of night when they usually did their torturing. Yes, the details of it were not important, he said, but for weeks they had been torturing him, and the interesting thing was they did it always at night.

I might smile and think him fanciful as I did about his belief that Hara was an embodiment of a myth more than a conscious individual being, even though I had seen for myself how moon-swung Hara and his countrymen were. But that was by no means all there was to it. That was only the elementary beginning of it all. The more complete truth was: they were all still deeply submerged like animals, insects and plants in the succession of the hours, the movement of day into night and of the days into their lunar months and the months into their seasons. They were subject to cosmic rhythm and movement and ruled by cosmic forces beyond their control to an extent undreamt of in the European mind and philosophy. He would have more to say of that presently, but all he had to stress at the moment was this: it was only at night that people so submerged in the raw elements of nature could discover sufficiently the night within themselves – could go down far enough with sun and sunlight into that deep, deep pit of blackness in time and themselves to the bottom of their own unlit natures, where torture was not only natural but inevitable, like the tides of the sea. I may not recognize it, he said, but Patricia and Patrick knew in the nerves and very swish of their tidal tails that a moment of great and ancient dread in the movement of the spheres had come. And hardly had they called, when he heard the jack-booted steps, untidy and slurred as if the boots were mounted on an orang-utan and not a man, coming down the corridor towards his cell.

‘Our Father which art in heaven,’ his lips moved instinctively. ‘Once more please be thou my shepherd.’

As he said this prayer for the third time to himself, the door was unlocked and a Korean guard called out, in a mixture of the crudest Japanese and Malay and in the most arrogant and insolent tone: ‘Kura! You there, come here! Lakas! Quick!’

He got up slowly. He could not in his condition do otherwise, but it was too slow for the guard who jumped into the cell, pulled Lawrence angrily to his feet and pushed him out into the corridor, prodding him with the butt of his rifle and saying again and again: ‘Lakas! Lakas!’ and ‘Quick! Quick!’ as well as making other strange irritated abdominal noises at him. In a few minutes he was marched into the Commandant’s office and there sitting at the Commandant’s desk was not that girlish young subaltern, but Hara himself with a section of the guard, hat in hand and rifles at the side standing respectfully behind him. Lawrence, his eyes hurting as if stung by bees in that fierce electric light, looked round the room for the rest of the inquisition as he called them, that expert band from the Kempeitai, the headquarters of the secret-police, who did the real torturing, but there was not a sign of any of them.

For the first time a feeling of hope so keen and unnerving that his conscious mind would not allow it, assailed him fiercely. True, Hara was one of the band but not the worst. He joined in too but only when that deep sense of an almost mystical necessity to participate in all that a group or herd of his countrymen did, forced him to identify himself with what was going on. It was as if they all were incapable of experiencing anything individually; as if a thought or deed in one was instantly contagion to the rest and the fated plague of cruel-doing like a black or yellow death killed their individual resistance in an instant. Hara, after all, was the Japanese of the Japanese among them and he too would have to join in the torturing. But he never started it and Lawrence knew somehow that he would have preferred killing outright to protracted torture. With all this in his mind he looked at Hara more closely and noticed that his eyes were unusually bright and his cheeks flushed.

‘He has been drinking,’ he thought, for there was no mistaking in Hara’s cheeks the tell-tale pink that drink brings so easily to the Japanese face. ‘And that accounts for the glitter in his eye. I had better watch out.’

He was right about the flush in Hara’s cheeks but wrong about the light in his eye, for suddenly Hara said, with a curl of the lip that might have been a smile strangled at birth: ‘Rorensu-san: do you know Fazeru Kurīsumasu?’

The unexpected use of the polite ‘san’ to his name so nearly unnerved Lawrence that he could hardly concentrate on the mysterious ‘Fazeru Kurīsumasu’ in Hara’s question, until he saw the clouds of incomprehension at his slowness, which usually preluded frenzy, gathering over Hara’s impatient brow. Then, he got it.

‘Yes, Hara-san,’ he said slowly. ‘I know of Father Christmas.’

‘Heh-to!’ Hara exclaimed, hissing with polite gratification between his teeth, a gleam of gold sparkling for a moment between his long lips. Then sitting far back in his chair, he announced: ‘Tonight I am Fazeru Kurīsumasu!’ Three or four times he made this astonishing statement, roaring with laughter.

Lawrence joined in politely without any idea what it really meant. He had been lying there in his cell alone, under sentence of death, for so long that he hardly knew the hour of the night beyond the fact that it was normal torture hour, and he had no idea of the date or month; he certainly had no idea that it was Christmas.

Hara enjoyed his announcement and Lawrence’s obvious perplexity so much that he would have gone on prolonging his moment of privileged and one-sided merriment, had not a guard presented himself at that moment in the doorway and ushered in a tall, bearded Englishman, in the faded uniform of a Group-Captain in the R.A.F.

Hara stopped laughing instantly and an expression of reserve, almost of hostility came over his features at the sight of Hicksley-Ellis’s elongated frame in the doorway.

I could see Hara clearly, as Lawrence spoke; could see him stiffen at the R.A.F. officer’s entrance, for of all of us he hated the tall, lisping Hicksley-Ellis, I think, by far the most.

‘This Air-Force Colonel,’ he told Lawrence in Japanese, waving his hand disdainfully at the Group-Captain, ‘is Commander of the prisoners in my camp; you can go with him now.’

Lawrence hesitated, not believing his ears, and Hara, confirmed in his own sense of the magnanimity of his gesture by the unwilled expression of disbelief on Lawrence’s face, sat back and laughed all the more. Seeing him laugh like that again, Lawrence at last believed him and walked over to join the Group-Captain. Together, without a word, they started to go but as they got to the door, Hara in his fiercest parade voice called: ‘Rorensu!’

Lawrence turned round with a resigned despair. He might have known it, known that this transition was too sudden, too good to be true; this was but part of the torture; some psychologist among the secret police must have put the simple Hara up to it. But one look at Hara’s face reassured him. He was still beaming benevolently, a strange twisted smile, between a quick, curling lip and yellow teeth framed in gold on his twilight face. With an immense, hissing effort, as he caught Lawrence’s eye, he called out, ‘Rorensu: Merry Kurīsumasu!’

‘Merry’ and ‘Fazeru Kurīsumasu’ were the only English words Lawrence ever heard him use and he believed Hara knew no others. Hara went pinker still with the effort of getting them out, before he relaxed, purring almost like a cat, in the Commandant’s chair.

‘But he knew something about Christmas, all the same,’ I interrupted Lawrence. ‘It was most extraordinary, you know. When the Padre, Hicksley-Ellis and I, thought of organizing some celebration of our first Christmas in gaol, we never thought for a moment a thug like Hara would allow it. But the curious thing was when we asked him, he exclaimed at once, so our interpreter said: “The feast of Fazeru Kurīsumasu!” When the interpreter answered “Yes”, Hara agreed at once. No argument or special plea was needed. He said “Yes” firmly, and his orders went out accordingly. In fact, he was himself so taken by the idea that he went to the other camps that were also in his officer’s command, camps with non-Christian Chinese, animistic Menadonese and Moslem Javanese in them and forced them all to celebrate Christmas whether they liked it or not. The interpreter told us, in fact, that Hara even beat up the Chinese commandant. When Hara asked him who Fazeru Kurīsumasu was, the unsuspecting man quite truthfully said he had no idea. Whereupon Hara called him a liar, a crime in his code equal to “wrong thinking” and “wilfulness”, said all the world knew who “Fazeru Kurīsumasu” was, and at once flew into one of his frenzies. It was odd, very odd, the value he attached to Christmas; we never found out where he got it from. Did you?’

‘I am afraid not,’ Lawrence answered, ‘but odder still it saved my life.’

‘You never told us!’ I exclaimed, amazed.

‘No, I did not, for I didn’t know it myself at the time, though I expected it of course from my own sentence. But I saw my papers after the war and they were actually going to kill me on December 27. But your putting the idea of Christmas into Hara’s head saved me. He substituted a Chinaman for me and let me out as a gesture to “Fazeru Kurīsumasu.” But to continue . . .’

He had followed Hicksley-Ellis out of Hara’s office and joined up with me again in the common prison. Suddenly he smiled at me, a gentle, reminiscent and tenderly grateful smile as the relief of his release came back to him. Did I remember the moment? He could not but be amused in his recollection, for although we were all incarcerated in a Dutch colonial gaol for murderers and desperate criminals, so relative had our concept of freedom become, that we rushed up to him and congratulated him on his liberation without a trace on our part, or a suspicion on his, of the irony implicit in it.

Then not long afterwards Hara suddenly left us. He was put in charge of a draft of R.A.F. officers and men under Hicksley-Ellis, and sent to build aerodromes in the outer islands. We did not see him again until near the end, when he returned with only one-fifth of the original draft left alive. Our men looked like ghosts or drought-stricken cattle when they arrived back. We could see their shoulder-blades and ribs through their threadbare tunics. They were so weak that we had to carry most of them in stretchers from the cattle-trucks wherein they had travelled, trucks which stank of urine and diseased excretions. For not only were they so starved that just a faint pulse of life fluttering with a rapidly regressive spirit was left in them, but also they all had either dysentery, malignant malaria or both. One-fifth was all that remained; the rest were dead and Hicksley-Ellis had terrible things to tell of their treatment by the Japanese officers and N.C.O.s and their Korean underlings, and above all about Hara. Again, Hara was at the centre, the primordial Japanese core of this weird inspiration of distorted circumstances. It was he who was again de facto if not de jure ruler of their world; he who beat dying men saying there was nothing wrong with them except their ‘spirit’, their ‘evil thinking’, their ‘wayward wilfulness of heart’ which made them deliberately ill in order to retard the Japanese war effort. It was he, Hara, who cut off the heads of three Aircraftmen because they had crept through a fence at night to buy food in a village, and after each head rolled on the ground brought his sword to his lips thanking it for having done its work so cleanly. It was he who day after day in the tropical sun drove a horde of men ailing and only half alive to scrape an aerodrome out of coral rock with inadequate tools until they were dying and being thrown to the sharks in the sea at the rate of twenty or thirty a day. But Hara himself appeared untouched by his experience, as if he had foreseen and presuffered it all in his mother’s womb, as if life could neither add to nor diminish the stark wine in his legendary cup. He came back to us burnt black by the sun; that was all. For the rest he naturally took up the steely thread of command where he left it as if he had never been away, and drove us again with the same iron hand.

Even at the end when the prison was full of rumours and the treacherous, unstable Korean guards, scenting a change in the wind of time, were beginning to fawn and make-up to our men for past misdeeds, were even whining to them about their own suppression under the Japanese, when the ground under the feet of Hara’s war lords was cracking and reverberating from the shock of the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and when the legendary twilight of the submerged racial soul of Japan must have been dark and sagging under the weight of the wings of dragons coming home to roost, Hara never trembled nor wavered once. He must have known as well as anybody what was going on, but in that tide of rumour and wild emotion running free before the wind of change, he stood like a rock.

Only three days before the end there was a terrible scene with Lawrence. Lawrence had found a Korean sentry, one of the worst, prodding a dying man with his bayonet, trying to make the Aircraftman stand up to salute him. Lawrence had seized the sentry’s rifle with both hands, pushed the bayonet aside and forced himself between the sentry and the sick man. He was immediately marched off to the guardroom, arriving there just as Hara returned from a tour of inspection. The sentry told Hara what had happened and Hara, much as he liked Lawrence, would not overlook this insult to the arms of his country. He beat-up Lawrence with his cane over the face and head so thoroughly that I hardly recognized him when he joined us again.

Three days later the end came and we all went our inevitable ways. Lawrence did not see Hara again for nearly two years. When he saw Hara then it was in dock at his trial. Yes! Hadn’t I heard? Hara was sought out and brought to trial before one of our War Crimes Tribunals. It was largely Hicksley-Ellis’s doing of course. I could have no idea how bitter that mild, lisping, sensitive fellow had become. It was understandable, of course, after what he had suffered, that he should be truly, implacably and irretrievably bitter and vengeful, and he gave his evidence at the trial with such a malign relish and fury that Hara never had a hope of a mitigated sentence, let alone acquittal. But what was not so understandable was the bitterness of the official prosecution, for bitter as Hicksley-Ellis was, his temper was more than matched by that of the war-crimes sleuths.

‘And that,’ Lawrence exclaimed, incomprehension on his broad brow: ‘was very odd to me. After all, none of them had suffered under the Japanese. As far as I know, not one of the particular bunch on Hara’s trail had even been on active service but they were none the less a bloodthirsty lot. They were more vengeful on behalf of our injuries than I myself could ever be.’

He said all this in such a way that I gathered he had tried to plead for Hara and had failed. It certainly seemed highly significant to me that when Lawrence held his hand out after the trial to say good-bye, Hicksley-Ellis had refused to take it and silently turned a neat, tense Air-Force back on him. I could not resist asking therefore:

‘Did you tell the Court that Hara saved your life?’

‘Indeed I did,’ he replied, surprised that I should have found the question necessary. ‘I did that and the judge-advocate looked me up and down over a pair of the most unmilitary glasses and said in a slow, precise voice, each syllable as distinct and pointed as a letter pen-pricked on a blank sheet of paper, a trace of ponderous irony, for which I can’t blame him, in his voice: “That, of course, Colonel Lawrence, is a valuable consideration – most valuable, indeed hardly less valuable to this court than it must be to you; but it must not be overlooked that there are many others for whom life would have been no less valuable who are not here today as a direct result of the accused’s actions.”’

No, there was obviously nothing to be done. Hara was inevitably condemned to be hanged.

‘How did he take it?’ I asked with the memory of the way others had marched to the fall of Hara’s keen two-headed sword on the backs of their necks as fresh in my mind as if it were a picture painted that morning.

‘Without a tremor or change of expression, as you would have expected,’ Lawrence said. ‘After all, he had pleaded guilty from the start, said, as that hopelessly inadequate interpreter told the Court: “I am wrong for my people and ready to die!” He made no effort to defend himself except to say that he tried never to do more nor less than his duty. He called no witnesses, asked no questions even of me, and just went on standing silently and rigidly to attention in the box right to the end. Besides, all that too had been foreseen.’

‘Foreseen?’ I asked, surprised.

Yes! He explained Hara had never expected anything except death of some kind in the war. In fact, in an unconscious way, perhaps he had even longed for death. I must please not be too sceptical but try and follow what he was trying to say with intuition rather than with conscious understanding. This was the other half of what he’d been trying to say in the beginning. It was most important, most relevant and the one foundation whereon his understanding either stood erect or fell. . . . He had always felt even when he was in Japan that the Japanese were a people in a profound, inverse, reverse, or if I preferred it, even perverse sense, more in love with death than living. As a nation they romanticized death and self-destruction as no other people. The romantic fulfilment of the national ideal, of the heroic thug of tradition, was often a noble and stylized self-destruction in a selfless cause. It was as if the individual at the start, at birth even, rejected the claims of his own individuality. Henceforth he was inspired not by individual human precept and example so much as by his inborn sense of the behaviour of the corpuscles in his own blood dying every split second in millions in defence of the corporate whole. As a result they were socially not unlike a more complex extension of the great insect societies in life. In fact in the days when he lived in Japan, much as he liked the people and country, his mind always returned involuntarily to this basic comparison: the just parallel was not an animal one, was not even the most tight and fanatical horde, but an insect one: collectively they were a sort of super-society of bees with the Emperor as a male queen-bee at the centre. He did not want to exaggerate these things but he knew of no other way of making me realize how strangely, almost cosmically, propelled like an eccentric and dying comet on an archaic, anti-clockwise and foredoomed course, Hara’s people had been. They were so committed, blindly and mindlessly entangled in their real and imagined past that their view of life was not synchronized to our urgent time. Above all they could not respond to the desperate twentieth-century call for greater and more precise individual differentiation. Their view of life refused to be individual and to rise above their own volcanic and quaking earth, as if there was always a dark glass or the shadow of the great dragon’s wings of their submerged selves between them and the light of individual mind, a long blackness of their own spinning globe between them and the sun, darkening the moon for which they yearned so eagerly, and some of the finest stars. He was sorry if it sounded fantastic but he could put it no other way. Unless . . .

He paused and looked at the simple spire of the village church just appearing in a dip in the fold of the fields in front of us, as if its precise and purposeful shape presiding so confidently over the trusting and sleeping land, rebuked the shapeless, unformed and dim-lit region wherein his imagination moved so like a lone sleep-walker at midnight. Thereupon, he broke off the apparent continuity of his thought at once and asked me if I knew how the Japanese calculated the age of an individual? I said ‘No’ and he explained that at birth they added nine months to a person’s life, counted in all the days between his conception and emergence from the womb. Didn’t I see the significance of that? Didn’t I realize that such a system of reckoning life was not just an artless and naïve accident of minds more primitive than ours? If I paused to reflect how biology clearly establishes that we recapture and relive in the womb the whole evolution of life from amoeba to pithecanthropus erectus, surely I too would recognize implicit in this system of reckoning a clear instinctive acknowledgement of the importance of the dim past to the Japanese character. He certainly looked at it that way and until now he had been forced to think of them as a people whose spiritual and mental umbilical cord with the past was uncut; as a people still tied by the navel to the mythical mother and begetter of their race, the great sun-goddess Ama-terasu. Even in that they were characteristically perverse, reverse and inside out, for to most races in the past the sun was a bright and shining masculine deity, but to them only a great, darkly glittering mother. While the moon, so beloved and eternally feminine to the rest of mankind, was male and masculine to them. Perhaps it was that inside-out, upside down subjection to the past which gave them their love of death.

If I had ever attended a feast of the dead in Japan as he had often done I would not be surprised at his use of so strange a word as love to illustrate his meaning. That feast was the gayest and most cheerful of all Japanese celebrations. Their dead were happy, cheerful, contented and benevolent spirits. Why? Because the living, one felt, really preferred dying to living as they had to live; not only preferred it but also thought it nobler to die than to live for their country. Not life but death was romantic to them and Hara was no exception. He had all this and more, deeply ingrained in him, underneath and beyond conscious thinking; he had more because above all he was a humble, simple and believing country fellow as well.

‘I shall never forget one night in prison,’ Lawrence continued, picking up yet another thread of our prison yesterdays, and weaving it as if it were something new and freshly made into this pattern of Hara in his mind until my heart was heavy that so much should remain for him apparently immune to time. ‘Hara sent for me. He had been drinking and greeted me uproariously but I knew his merriment was faked. He always behaved like that when his heart and mind were threatening to join in revolt against his long years of exile from Japan. I could see that the drink had failed to blur the keen edge of nostalgia that was like a knife-stab in the pit of his stomach. He wanted someone to talk to about his country and for some hours I walked Japan from end to end with him through all four of its unique and dramatic seasons. The mask of cheerfulness got more and more threadbare as the evening wore on and at last Hara tore it from his face.

‘“Why, Rorensu,” he exclaimed fiercely at last. “Why are you alive? I would like you better if you were dead. How could an officer of your rank ever have allowed himself to fall alive in our hands? How can you bear the disgrace? Why don’t you kill yourself?”’

‘Yes. He asked me that too once,’ I interrupted, more with the object of letting Lawrence know how closely I was following him than of telling him something he didn’t know. ‘In fact he taunted us all so much with it that in time the Koreans picked up the habit, too, but what did you say in reply?’

‘I admitted the disgrace, if he wished to call it that,’ Lawrence replied. ‘But said that in our view disgrace, like danger, was something which also had to be bravely borne and lived through, and not run away from by a cowardly taking of one’s own life. This was so novel and unexpected a point of view to him that he was tempted to dismiss it as false and made himself say: “No! no! no! it is fear of dying that stops you all.” He spat disdainfully on the floor and then tapping on his chest with great emphasis added: “I am already dead. I, Hara, died many years ago.”

‘And then it came out, of course. The night before he left home to join the army at the age of seventeen, that is after nine months in the womb and sixteen years and three months on earth, he had gone to a little shrine in the hills nearby to say good-bye to life, to tell the spirits of his ancestors that he was dying that day in his heart and spirit for his country so that when death came to claim him in battle it would be a mere technicality, so that far from being surprised he would greet it either like a bosom friend, long expected and overdue, or merely accept it as formal confirmation of a state which had long existed. To hear him one would have thought that this bow-legged boy, with his blue-shaven head, yellow face and shuffling walk, had gone to report to his ancestors his decision to enter one of the grimmer monastic orders like the Grande Chartreuse, rather than to announce his banal intention of joining a regiment of infantry. But you see what I mean, when I say the end too had been foreseen?’

I nodded silently, too interested to want to speak, and Lawrence went steadily on. Even that evening in prison Lawrence was conscious of a content, a sort of extra-territorial meaning to the moment that did not properly belong to it. It was as if Hara’s end was drinking his wine with him, as if far down at some inexpressible depth in their minds the ultimate sentence was already pronounced. Looking back now, he found it most significant that, towards the end of the evening, Hara began to try his hand at composing verses in that tight, brief and extremely formal convention in which the popular hero of the past in Japan inevitably said farewell to the world before taking his own life. He remembered Hara’s final effort well: roughly translated it ran:

‘When I was seventeen looking over the pines at Kurashiyama, I saw on the full yellow moon, the shadow of wild-geese flying South. There is no shadow of wild-geese returning on the moon rising over Kurashiyama tonight.’

‘Poor devil: as I watched and listened to him trying to break into verse, suddenly I saw our roles reversed. I saw as if by a flash of lightning in the darkness of my own mind that I was really the free man and Hara, my gaoler, the prisoner. I had once in my youth in those ample, unexacting days before the war when the coining of an epigram had looked so convincingly like a discovery of wisdom, defined individual freedom to myself as freedom to choose one’s own cage in life. Hara had never known even that limited freedom. He was born in a cage, a prisoner in an oubliette of mythology, chained to bars welded by a great blacksmith of the ancient gods themselves. And I felt an immense pity for him. And now four years later, Hara was our kind of prisoner as well and in the dock for the last time, with sentence of death irrevocably pronounced.’

So unsurprised, so unperturbed was Hara, Lawrence said, that as his escort snapped the handcuffs on him and ordered him to step down to his cell below, he stopped on the edge of the concealed stair, turned round with the utmost self-composure, sought out Lawrence and Hicksley-Ellis who were sitting side by side next to the prosecuting officer. When his eyes met theirs, he raised his manacled hands above his head, clasped them together like those of a boxer who had just won the world championship and waved gaily to the two of them, grinning a golden smile from ear to ear as he did so.

How clearly I saw him do it: that gesture was all of a piece with the character also as I knew it, for whatever it was that held Hara together, I too knew that he could never fail it. Suddenly I was glad, almost grateful to him that he had taken it like that, gone from our view with a gay, triumphant gesture of farewell, for somehow, I imagined, that would make it easier for us now to have done with his memory.

‘So that was how he went,’ I remarked, not without a certain unwilled relief, ‘that then was Hara’s that.’

‘No, not at all,’ Lawrence said quickly, a strange new ring in his voice, a passionate and surprisingly emotional undertone for so calm and contemplative a person. ‘That by no means was his “that”. As far as I am concerned “that” was only the end of the beginning of the “that” . . .’

It came out then that the night before he was hanged, Hara got a message through, begging Lawrence to come and see him. Hara had made the request – his last – many days before but it was not surprising to anyone who knew the ‘usual official channels’ as well as we did that the request did not reach Lawrence until ten o’clock on the night before the morning set for the execution. Lawrence got his car out as fast as he could; his chivalrous nature outraged by the thought that the condemned man would now most certainly have given up all hope of seeing him, and be preparing to die with the bitter conviction that even his last slight request had been too much. Hara’s prison was on the far side of the island and he could not, with the best of luck, get there before midnight.

The evening was very still and quiet, rather as if it had caught its own breath at the beauty and brilliance of the night that was marching down on it out of the East like a goddess with jewels of fire. An immense full moon had swung itself clear over the dark fringe of the jungle bound, like a ceremonial fringe of ostrich plumes designed for an ancient barbaric ritual, to the dark brow of the land ahead. In that responsive and plastic tropical air the moon seemed magnified to twice its normal size and to be quick-silver wet and dripping with its own light. To the north of the jungle and all along its heavy feathered fringes the sea rolled and unrolled its silver and gold cloak on to the white and sparkling sand, as lightly and deftly as a fine old far-eastern merchant unrolling bales of his choicest silk. The ancient, patient swish of it all was constantly in Lawrence’s ears. But far out on the horizon, the sea too went dark, seemed shrunk into a close defensive ring, in face of the thunder and lightning hurled against it by curled, curved and jagged peaks of cloud which stood revealed on the uttermost edge by the intermittent electric glow imperative in purple and sullen in gold. It was the sort of night and the kind of setting in a half-way moment between the end of one day and the beginning of the other, in which Lawrence’s articulate knowledge seemed to hold the same urgent, spasmodic and intermittent quality as the electricity and lightning quivering along the horizon; yet his inarticulate, inexpressible awareness of the abiding meaning, beauty and richness of life was as great as the vast, eager-footed and passionate night striding overhead like a queen to a meeting with a royal lover. All that we had been through, the war, the torture, the long hunger, all the grim and tranced years in our sordid prison, he found light and insignificant weighed in the golden scales of that moment. The thought that yet another life should be sacrificed to our discredited and insufficient past, seemed particularly pointless and repugnant and filled him with a sense of angry rebellion. In this mood and manner he arrived at the prison just before midnight. He found he was expected and was taken at once to Hara’s cell.

Like all condemned persons Hara was alone in the cell. When the door opened to let Lawrence in, although there was a chair at hand Hara was standing by the window, his face close to the bars, looking at the moonlight, so vivid and intense by contrast to the darkness inside that it was like a sheet of silver silk nailed to the square window. He had obviously given up all idea of visitors and was expecting, at most, only a routine call from one of his gaolers. He made no effort to turn round or speak. But as the guard switched on the light he turned to make a gesture of protest and saw Lawrence. He stiffened as if hit by a heavy blow in the back, came to attention and bowed silently and deeply to his visitor in a manner which told Lawrence that he was moved beyond words. As he bowed Lawrence saw that his head had been freshly shaven and that the new scraped skin shone like satin in the electric light. Lawrence ordered the sentry to leave them for a while, and as the door once more closed he said to Hara who was coming out of his low bow:

‘I’m very sorry I am so late. But I only got your message at nine o’clock. I expect you gave me up as a bad job long ago and thought I’d refused to come.’

‘No, Rorensu-san,’ Hara answered. ‘No, not that. I never thought you would refuse to come, but I was afraid my message, for many reasons, might not be delivered to you. I am very grateful to you for coming and I apologize for troubling you. I would not have done so if it hadn’t been so important. Forgive me please, but there is something wrong in my thinking and I knew you would understand how hard it would be for me to die with wrong thoughts in my head.’

Hara spoke slowly and deliberately in a polite, even voice, but Lawrence could tell from its very evenness that his thought was flowing in a deep fast stream out to sea, flowing in a deeper chasm of himself than it had ever flowed before.

‘Poor, poor devil, bloody poor devil,’ he thought, ‘even now the problem is “thinking”, always his own or other people’s “thinking” at fault.’

‘There is nothing to forgive, Hara-san,’ he said aloud. ‘I came at once when I got your message and I came gladly. Please tell me what it is and I’ll try and help you.’

From the way Hara’s dark, slanted, child-of-a-sun-goddess’s eyes lit up at the use of the polite ‘san’ to his name, Lawrence knew that Hara had not been spoken to in that manner for many months.

‘Rorensu-san,’ he answered eagerly, pleading more like a boy with his teacher than a war-scarred sergeant-major with an enemy and an officer, ‘it is only this: you have always, I felt, always understood us Japanese. Even when I have had to punish you, I felt you understood it was not I, Hara, who wanted it, but that it had to be, and you never hated me for it. Please tell me now: you English I have always been told are fair and just people: whatever other faults we all think you have; we have always looked upon you as a just people. You know I am not afraid to die. You know that after what has happened to my country I shall be glad to die tomorrow. Look, I have shaved the hair off my head, I have taken a bath of purification, rinsed my mouth and throat, washed my hands and drunk the last cupful of water for the long journey. I have emptied the world from my head, washed it off my body, and I am ready for my body to die, as I have died in my mind long since. Truly you must know, I do not mind dying, only, only, only, why must I die for the reason you give? I don’t know what I have done wrong that other soldiers who are not to die have not done. We have all killed one another and I know it is not good, but it is war. I have punished you and killed your people, but I punished you no more and killed no more than I would have done if you were Japanese in my charge who had behaved in the same way. I was kinder to you, in fact, than I would have been to my own people, kinder to you all than many others. I was more lenient, believe it or not, than army rules and rulers demanded. If I had not been so severe and strict you would all have collapsed in your spirit and died because your way of thinking was so wrong and your disgrace so great. If it were not for me, Hicksley-Ellis and all his men would have died on the island out of despair. It was not my fault that the ships with food and medicine did not come. I could only beat my prisoners alive and save those that had it in them to live by beating them to greater effort. And now I am being killed for it. I do not understand where I went wrong, except in the general wrong of us all. If I did another wrong please tell me how and why and I shall die happy.’

‘I didn’t know what to say.’ Lawrence turned to me with a gesture of despair. ‘He was only asking me what I had asked myself ever since these damned war-trials began. I honestly did not understand myself. I never saw the good of them. It seemed to me just as wrong for us now to condemn Hara under a law which had never been his, of which he had never even heard, as he and his masters had been to punish and kill us for transgressions of the code of Japan that was not ours. It was not as if he had sinned against his own lights: if ever a person had been true to himself and the twilight glimmer in him, it was this terrible little man. He may have done wrong for the right reasons but how could it be squared by us now doing right in the wrong way. No punishment I could think of could restore the past, could be more futile and more calculated even to give the discredited past a new lease of life in the present than this sort of uncomprehending and uncomprehended vengeance! I didn’t know what the hell to say!’

The distress over his predicament became so poignant in this recollection that he broke off with a wave of his hand at the darkening sky.

‘But you did say something surely,’ I said. ‘You could not leave it that.’

‘Oh yes, I said something,’ he said sadly, ‘but it was most inadequate. All I could tell him was that I did not understand myself and that if it lay with me I would gladly let him out and send him straight back to his family.’

‘And did that satisfy him?’ I asked.

Lawrence shook his head. He didn’t think so, for after bowing deeply again and thanking Lawrence, he looked up and asked: ‘So what am I to do?’

Lawrence could only say: ‘You can try to think only with all your heart, Hara-san, that unfair and unjust as this thing which my people are doing seems to you, that it is done only to try and stop the kind of things that happened between us in the war from ever happening again. You can say to yourself as I used to say to my despairing men in prison under you: “There is a way of winning by losing, a way of victory in defeat which we are going to discover.” Perhaps that too must be your way to understanding and victory now.’

‘That, Rorensu-san,’ he said, with the quick intake of breath of a Japanese when truly moved, ‘is a very Japanese thought!’

They stood in silence for a long while looking each other straight in the eyes, the English officer and the Japanese N.C.O. The moonlight outside was tense, its silver strands trembling faintly with the reverberation of inaudible and far-off thunder and the crackle of the electricity of lightning along the invisible horizon.

Hara was the first to speak. In that unpredictable way of his, he suddenly smiled and said irrelevantly: ‘I gave you a good Kurīsumasu once, didn’t I?’

‘Indeed you did,’ Lawrence answered unhappily, adding instinctively, ‘You gave me a very, very, good Christmas. Please take that thought with you tonight!’

‘Can I take it with me all the way?’ Hara asked, still smiling but with something almost gaily provocative in his voice. ‘Is it good enough to go even where I am going?’

‘Yes: much as circumstances seem to belie it,’ Lawrence answered, ‘it is good enough to take all the way and beyond . . .’

At that moment the guard announced himself and told Lawrence he had already overstayed his time.

‘Sayonara Hara-san!’ Lawrence said, bowing deeply, using that ancient farewell of the Japanese ‘If-so-it-must-be’ which is so filled with the sense of their incalculable and inexorable fate. ‘Sayonara and God go with you.’

‘If so it must be!’ Hara said calmly, bowing as deeply. ‘If so it must be, and thank you for your great kindness and your good coming, and above all your honourable words.’

Lawrence stood up quickly not trusting his self-control enough to look at Hara again, and started to go, but as he came to the doorway, Hara called out: ‘Rorensu!’ just as he had once called it in the Commandant’s office after Lawrence’s weeks of torture. Lawrence turned and there was Hara grinning widely, faded yellow teeth and gold rims plainly showing as if he had never enjoyed himself more. As Lawrence’s eyes met his, he called out gaily: ‘Merry Kurīsumasu, Rorensu-san.’

But the eyes, Lawrence said, were not laughing. There was a light in them of a moment which transcends lesser moments wherein all earthly and spiritual conflicts tend to be resolved and unimportant, all partiality and incompletion gone, and only a deep sombre between-night-and-morning glow left. It transformed Hara’s strange, distorted features. The rather anthropoidal, prehistoric face of Hara’s looked more beautiful than any Lawrence had ever seen. He was so moved by it and by the expression in those archaic eyes that he wanted to turn back into the cell. Indeed he tried to go back but something would not let him. Half of himself, a deep, instinctive, natural, impulsive half, wanted to go back, clasp Hara in his arms, kiss him good-bye on the forehead and say: ‘We may not be able to stop and undo the hard old wrongs of the great world outside, but through you and me no evil shall come either in the unknown where you are going, or in this imperfect and haunted dimension of awareness through which I move. Thus between us, we shall cancel out all private and personal evil, thus arrest private and personal consequences to blind action and reaction, thus prevent specifically the general incomprehension and misunderstanding, hatred and revenge of our time from spreading further.’ But the words would not be uttered and half of him, the conscious half of the officer at the door with a critical, alert sentry at his side held him powerless on the threshold. So for the last time the door shut on Hara and his golden grin.

But all the way back to town that last expression on Hara’s face travelled at Lawrence’s side. He was filled with great regret that he had not gone back. What was this ignoble half that had stopped him? If only he had gone back he felt now he might have changed the whole course of history. For was not that how great things began in the tiny seed of the small change in the troubled individual heart? One single, lonely, inexperienced heart had to change first and all the rest would follow? One true change in one humble, obedient and contrite individual heart humble enough to accept without intellectual question the first faint stirring of the natural spirit seeking flesh and blood to express it, humble enough to live the new meaning before thinking it, and all the rest would have followed as day the night, and one more archaic cycle of hurt, hurt avenged and vengeance revenged would have been cut for ever. He felt he had failed the future and his heart went so dim and black on him that abruptly he pulled up the car by a palm-grove on the edge of the sea.

Sadly he listened to the ancient sound of the water lapping at the sands, and the rustle of the wind of morning in the palms overhead travelling the spring world and night sky like the endless questing spirit of God tracking its brief and imperfect container in man. He saw some junks go out to sea and the full moon come sinking down, fulfilled and weary, on to their black corrugated sails. The moon was now even larger than when he had first seen it. Yes. Now Hara’s last moon was not only full but also overflowing with a yellow, valedictory light. And as he was thinking, from a Malay village hidden in the jungle behind there suddenly rang out the crow of a cock, sounding the alarm of day. The sound was more than he could bear. It sounded like notice of the first betrayal joined to depravity of the latest and became a parody of Hara’s call of’ Merry Christmas’. And although it was not Christmas and the land behind was not a Christian land, he felt that he had betrayed the sum of all the Christmases.

Quickly he turned the car round. He would get back to the gaol, see Hara and atone for his hesitation. He drove recklessly fast and reached the gates as the dawn, in a great uprush of passionate flaming red light, hurled itself at the prison towers above him.

‘But of course I was too late,’ Lawrence told me, terribly distressed. ‘Hara was already hanged.’

I took his arm and turned with him for home. I could not speak and when he went on to ask, more of himself than of me or the darkening sky, ‘Must we always be too late?’ he asked the question, without knowing it, also for me. It hung like the shadow of a bar of a new prison between us and the emerging stars and my heart filled with tears.

The Seed and the Sower

Christmas Morning

1 The Morning After

THE CHRISTMAS MORNING after John Lawrence told me about Hara, I woke very early to find my mind not on the day but obsessed with the memory of Jacques Celliers. I rose quietly before it was light, before even our two children were awake, and went downstairs to my study. I unlocked the one compartment in my desk where I keep the things that mean most to me and took out seven cardboard folders. I opened the top one quickly to make certain the contents were intact and was instantly reassured to see Celliers’s tense thrusting hand writing on the coarse yellow sheets of toilet paper which was the only paper the Japanese would allow us in our prison. Although the edges of the frail paper were frayed and partially rotted from damp under the stone floor of the prison cell wherein they had lain wrapped in a remnant of an army groundsheet, the hand was remarkably fresh and clear, as if it had only just penned the description of events instead of some eight years before. Just for a moment as I held this slim parcel of writing between my hands my fingers tingled as if with shock at the miracle which had enabled it to survive not only the heavy damp of the dark Javanese earth but also the fanatical search by our captors. Finally, years after the end of the war, the Javanese civilian mason who had found it had even been moved with enough wonder to take it to an official. And the official happened to have known me. When this man saw my name and address in England written on the outside and read the entreaty that it should be delivered to me he ignored the normal formalities, not without some risk to himself, and posted it off to me at once.

I sat there for a while, thinking deeply again as I had done so often since I received it, how strange it was that Celliers should have chosen me as his recipient. There must have been many people in his own country who had known him far better. Indeed for some months I wondered why he had not sent it to the brother who figures so disturbingly in his narrative. But when I myself went to his old home I discovered how little that would have helped, though it deepened the strangeness of his action by an implication of a clear fore-knowledge of events still to come. But perhaps strangest of all to me, sitting there in the silence of the still Christmas dawn, was the fact that it should be there safe in my hands to show to John Lawrence. What he had told me about himself and Hara the evening before made me feel that Celliers might have written the document not for himself, not for me, not even for his brother, but specifically for Lawrence. I could hardly wait for full morning to come, to break away from the excited children, get out of church and, immediately after breakfast, to draw Lawrence to one side and ask:

‘D’you remember Jacques Celliers?’

As he looked puzzled I hastened to add: ‘Surely you must! That tall good-looking South African officer who was with me on my first raids behind the lines in North Africa and afterwards with the 51st Commando in the Western Desert? He used to dine with me in our mess from time to time.’

‘Good heavens!’ Lawrence exclaimed, his grey eyes quickening with interest: ‘Of course I remember him. He was a remarkable soldier. And apart from that he was almost the only man I’ve ever met whom one could call beautiful. I can see him now . . . walking about . . . almost like an animal, always on his toes and loose in the ankles. Had the guts of a lion too, and the endurance of a camel! That’s the man you mean, isn’t it? And didn’t he have some nickname . . . ?’

I nodded. ‘That’s Celliers all right: “Straffer Jack” the troops called him.’ I gave Celliers the name he was popularly known by all along the precarious Libyan front in 1941.’

‘D’you know,’ Lawrence went on: ‘I’ve thought of him a great deal lately. Only yesterday I found myself wondering what had become of him. I always had a feeling, he’d never come through alive. I never knew him as you did, of course, and as you know he never said much, at least to me. Indeed for a person who could talk so well when he wanted to I remember him as an oddly silent man . . .’ He paused. ‘But he seemed to me to behave sometimes as if he wanted to get himself killed.’

‘Perhaps you’re not far wrong,’ I said quietly.

‘Did he get himself killed then? What happened to him? Why d’you ask me now if I remember him?’ Lawrence questioned quickly, his imagination plainly aroused.

‘Look!’ I said. ‘I’d rather you first read this document that he wrote before I answer your questions. What we talked about last night made me feel that you, rather than I, should be its keeper. Read it. It won’t take long. And then we can talk.’

I left him alone sitting with his fine head and responsive face on which time had written its own meaning with such intimacy, bowed over the yellow paper. Behind him the soft, grey Christmas Day was lifting over the accepting fields which, in prison, had haunted my memory like a vision of heaven on earth. This, then, is what Lawrence read.

2 A Brother

I HAD A brother once and I betrayed him. The betrayal in itself was so slight that most people would find ‘betrayal’ too exaggerated a word, and think me morbidly sensitive for so naming it. Yet as one recognizes the nature of the seed from the tree, the tree by its fruit, and the fruit from the taste on the tongue, so I know the betrayal from its consequences and the tyrannical flavour it left behind it in my emotions. That is one of the fundamental things about betrayal, and which perhaps is better set down here, beyond doubt, right at the beginning. Though I say it without pride or humility but merely as a fact of my life, I speak now as an expert in this matter. And as such I can assure you that one of the most significant characteristics of betrayal is that it is neither spectacular nor presumptuous in origin. Indeed those treacheries destined to reach furthest in their consequences prefer not to be obvious or dramatic in their beginnings but rather to wait, humbly and unostentatiously, until they are ready to bear their bitter fruit in maturity. They seem to favour presenting themselves to the unguarded heart selected to become their own private seed-bed as trivialities in the daily routine of life, as insignificant occurrences so self-evident that no question of a choice and so no chance of rejection arises out of their appearance on the familiar scene of everyday events. In fact betrayal behaves as if it were worth no more than the miserable thirty pieces of silver that were paid for the greatest and most meaningful betrayal of all time. That I suggest is not only a fundamental but also one of the most frightening aspects of it. Contrast betrayal, for instance, with something else which also grows great out of very little, namely faith. No matter how far awareness pursues faith, even if it is to the outermost ends of being, faith still stands positively on the threshold of the world. There faith still will move mountains provided it has some substance in the heart. But betrayal has no need of anything particular in order to exist. It can begin most effectively as a mere refusal to be, a casual negation, as the insubstantial pollen of the deadly nightshade of nothingness. Like the geometric point in the intuitive heart of Euclid betrayal needs neither magnitude nor size for its existence but only position. Here then is the moment, the place and the circumstances; here the position in my own life of the betrayal of which I wish to speak.

There were four of us children in my family. I was the first, then came two girls and lastly my brother. But both my sisters died in one of those typhoid epidemics which were inflicted upon our remote African world, like one of the plagues of Egypt, before each of our fanatical droughts. So my brother and I were left, as my mother one day put it under an emotion that I was too young to share, not only to be brothers but also sisters to each other. I mention this here not out of a belated recognition of what she must have felt but because I had reason to remember the remark many years later. Between my brother and myself there was a difference of seven years and these seven years now had a difference of their own because of the tender flesh and blood so brutally extracted from them. They moved lean and hungry in my memory with the slow, mediumistic pace of the famished out of the river-bed of time, like the gaunt herd in Pharaoh’s dream which warned Joseph of the great hunger and thirst to come. This, then, added a particular stress to this separation in age between my brother and myself, making it a difference not only of life but of death as well. However, this was only one of the many differences between us, all of which I have to mention because they contribute to my story.

To begin with I was born fair with dark blue eyes. I was well made, and I grew up tall and strong without hurt or impediment to assail the physical confidence implicit in my step and carriage. My body was at home in the wide physical world about us, and my person at ease with the people in it. I seemed to move as appropriately to my environment as does a gilt-edged fish with its silky swish in an amber sea. From an early age I played, rode, shot and worked with the best of my childhood peers. In my response to the challenge with which the disdainfully cunning and infinitely experienced old earth of Africa teased and provoked the life it contained, I’m told that I was tireless and fearless. I was also well spoken and good-looking. In fact this last sentence is so much of an understatement of something which had an important effect on my character that I ought really to enlarge on it.

The truth is that from an early age most people found my looks disturbing and many of them were strongly attracted to me on account of my appearance. This again is one of those things I say without pride or humility, without vanity or self-satisfaction. I have long since come to the diamond point of the tumult within myself where facts alone, and nothing but the facts, accurately observed and truly interpreted, can move me. I know that only facts can save me and I long passionately to be able, from the facts of my being, to forge a weapon strong enough to enable me to fight back against the power and pomp of unreality which is marching so boastfully against both me and the spirit of my time. But over this matter of my appearance if I do recognize any other emotion in myself it is one of subtle and pervasive distaste. Perhaps this sounds ungrateful to life which has conferred such favours on me? Yet the truth remains. Part of me strongly resented my looks and blamed them too for what became of me. We had a neighbour who was born a dwarf and, as a child, whenever I saw him I used to pity him and feel grateful that I had not been given his shape. Yet today I am not sure that I should not have envied him. I simply do not know which constitutes the greatest danger to the integrity of being: to attract or to repel; to incur the dislikes or likes of one’s fellow men. The dwarf, after all, had only pity to fear and, men being what they are, that is never excessive. But I had their instant, magnetic liking for my enemy and before I knew where, or even who I was, I had become a prisoner of the effect I had on them. The dwarf was firmly shackled to his deformity. But I was shackled not so much to my good looks as to what people, after seeing me, first imagined and then through their imaginations compelled me to be. I know now that from my earliest age the effect that I had on those about me enticed me away from myself, drew me out of my own inner focus of being, and left me irrevocably committed to the role that my admirers and the obscure laws of their magnetic attraction automatically demanded of me. To this day I shiver at the recollection of the cold impersonal power and efficiency of the mechanisms of this compulsion, both in me and others, which forced me to lend my little measure of irreplaceable flesh and blood to the shadowy desires, phantom wishes and unlived selves of those around me. Slowly but surely I grew into a bitter estrangement from myself: a prodigal son in a far country of famished being, without any inkling of the dream that could have worked on my errant raw material. I suffered, as it were, from the curse of Helen whose face ‘launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Ilium’, that Helen whose image still haunts the eyes of men wherein she was held prisoner for so long.

Yet I was not Narcissus-bound to any lilied reflection of my physical body. I never saw myself as good-looking. I have stared often enough in mirrors and shop windows but not with pride, only furtively, as if afraid of seeing also in the reflection what I felt myself to be. For, despite the plausible object evidence to the contrary, I have known always that I was also an ugly person. I knew that what others found so attractive was only an outer aspect of something greater to which both it and this other ugliness were equally and irrevocably joined. In some mysterious way I was conscious that there was never one but always a pair of us, always a set of Siamese twins sitting down nightly to sup at the roundtable of myself, a pair of brothers designed to nourish and sustain, yet also inexplicably estranged and constantly denying each other.

Yes, despite all provocations, I could never see myself as others saw me. The reflection that has become my master-reflection is not silver-quick in the crystal light of a modern mirror but is somewhat withheld, like the slow gleam behind the glassy surface of a particular pool which used to lie in our black bush-veld wood like a wedding ring in the palm of a Negro’s hand. Oh, how clearly I remember that pool and that far distant dawn when I first dismounted from my horse to quench our thirsts at its golden water. I was kneeling down, my right hand held out to scoop up the burning water and my left holding the reins of the steam-silver horse beside me as, before drinking, it carefully blew the dawn-illumined pollen of spring in a rainbow smoke across the flaming surface. And suddenly, there, beyond the rose-red bars of the rhythmical vibration set up by my horse’s fastidious lips, I saw my own reflection coming up out of the purple depths of the pool to meet me. I could not see clearly. The reflection remained shadowy, very different from my bright morning figure bent low over it. It stayed there, a dark dishonoured presence straining in vain for freedom of articulation against that trembling, dawn-incarnadined water as if the corrugations on the surface were not the bars of a natural vibration but rather those of a cage contrived to hold it forever prisoner. At the time it made me sad. It would have been better, perhaps, if it had made me angry. Who knows? Certainly not I.

But to return to the differences between my brother and myself. In appearance he was not at all like me. He was very dark in accordance with an unpredictable law which seems to dominate reproduction in both my father’s and mother’s families. His hair was as thick and dark as mine was fair and fine. His skin was a Mediterranean olive and his eyes, which were his best feature, were wide and of an intense radiant blackness. I could never look in them without feeling curiously disturbed and uncomfortable. I wish I could say why, but the discomforts of the spirit are beyond reason. Suffering is only a stroke of Time’s implacable Excalibur dividing meaning from meaninglessness. I am forced none the less, to attempt an explanation. There were moments when those deep eyes of his seemed to me to be unbearably defenceless. They seemed too trusting, too innocent of the calculation and suspicion of our civilized day. And because of this they seemed (though I am never sure regarding the personal emotions or intentions of my brother) to hold a kind of reproach against me and the world wherein I was so conspicuously at my ease.

I wish I could deal more firmly with this subtle discomfort but I cannot. I only know it was there from the beginning and as far back as I can remember it expressed itself from time to time in an involuntary feeling of irritation which, no matter how unreasonable and unfair, no matter what precautions I took to the contrary, would break out impatiently from me. What made it worse was that my brother never seemed to mind. He would take it all quite naturally, almost as part of his own dark, impervious birthright. When I begged his pardon awkwardly, as I invariably did, he would look at me warmly and say quickly, ‘But it was nothing, Ouboet,^fn1 nothing at all. Don’t worry so.’ In fact he would behave as if I had just rendered him some great service, as if my very impatience and irritation had given us both an opportunity which otherwise might never have existed. It was all very mysterious and I have had to make my peace with it by accepting it as something inevitable. But the flaw (if it is a flaw) inflicted by life on me is also, I suspect, incorporated in the master-seed of the being and greater becoming of us all, just as is the infinitesimal flaw that first gave birth to a pearl in the shell. One has said that there is ‘no greater love than that a man should lay down his life for his friends’. Yet is it not, perhaps, as great a love that a man should live his life for his enemies, feeding their enmity of him without ever himself becoming an enemy until at last enmity has had surfeit and his enemies are free to discover the real meaning of their terrible hunger – just as my brother provoked and endured my strange hostility without ever becoming hostile to me? However, I am expert not in love but in betrayal and as little entitled to make points on the specialist’s behalf as he would on mine, so I shall not press the issue unduly. Yet, for the sake of the proportions of my narrative, I must add that I was not alone in my reaction to my brother. He had much the same effect on most people with whom he came in regular contact.

I grew up, as I indicated, tall and gracefully made. He from the beginning was a square, short, awkwardly-shaped person, immensely strong but ponderous and inclined to be clumsy in his movements. He was not, I fear, prepossessing to look at. What magic he had was in his eyes and they, unfortunately, made one uncomfortable. His head was too big even for his broad shoulders, yet his face after such roughness of stature was disconcertingly tender, while his brow, with a double crown of hair at the centre, was from birth deeply furrowed. The effect was of a face profoundly still though darkly withheld. Yet it could become startlingly light, even beautiful, when he laughed and showed his even, white teeth. But unfortunately in public he rarely laughed. Laughter appeared to be something he kept for the two of us when the tension between us lessened. So, as a rule, his face seemed folded, brooding over his nature rather like one of our black African hens over her nest, head cocked slightly towards the earth, senses deaf to the music of the sun stroking the great harp of light in one of our feverish summer days, listening only to the electric expectancy of life within her.

At school I was good in most things, games as well as studies. My brother had great difficulty in scraping through his examinations and could take no interest and acquire no skill in sport. I was fast and a first-rate sprinter; he was slow and an indefatigably plodding walker. I loved animals, the flame-flickering game and sun-fire birds of Africa. He took no great interest in them but from childhood was absorbed in all that grew in the earth. I had no patience for planting and sowing: he loved to plough and to sow. It was remarkable too how successful his clumsy fingers were: whatever he put in the earth seemed to grow and blossom. He used to walk behind his favourite span of roan-purple oxen from dawn to sunset, his deep single-furrow plough turning over waves of Africa’s scarlet earth like the prow of a Homeric blackship the swell of a wine-red morning sea. He would come home in the twilight after a day’s ploughing deep in content. Often I’ve found him resting, silent on the handlebars of his plough. ‘A penny for your thoughts, Boetie,’ ^fn2 I would greet him.

He would never answer at once. Then he’d say slowly, ‘Just smelling the earth. You know, there’s not a flower in the world that smells so good to me as freshly turned-over earth.’

Then I would notice it too, that smell of Titanic perspiration in the glandular earth of the ancient land charging the fiery air all around us like the black quintessential of a magician’s spell. Finally, when the rough old greatcoat of the earth was turned inside out and its antique lining lying velvet in the sun, he would stride across the naked land sowing his first corn like someone in an illustrated New Testament parable. I would watch him bestride the passionate soil noticing his awkward, lumbering gait as if his being always had presupposed this heaving earth beneath his feet even as a sailor’s feet always presupposes the swinging sea. His intuition in regard to the land too was uncannily accurate. As a child I have watched him standing absorbed over a patch of earth for so long that in the end I have exclaimed impatiently: ‘Are you going to stand there all day dreaming? Wake up, for God’s sake!’

‘Sorry, Ouboet,’ he would say equably, ‘I was wondering what we should suggest planting here. It might grow something pretty good. But what?’

‘Well, we’ll have to try before we can know,’ I would reply unmollified.

‘All the same looking does help, Ouboet,’ he would answer mildly, or words to that effect, and despite my sniff of unbelief I had an uncomfortable suspicion that perhaps he was right. In a way that I could not understand he and the earth had their own magnetic exchange of each other’s meanings. When we got home he would suggest a crop to our father and that crop, as often as not, is growing there fruitfully to this day in the course of its lawful rotation.

Besides all this he possessed a remarkable gift of water-divining. I remember so well the day when we first discovered that he possessed this power. I was already almost a man but he was still a boy. Our father, anxious to add to our existing supplies already weakened by a succession of droughts, was looking for new water. Accordingly he had called in the help of one of those water diviners who were always drifting through our land in the service of their strange intuition like Old Testament prophets.

We watched the gaunt old man arrive with a donkey led by a tiny black boy, watched him cut a forked stick from the nearest wild olive tree and strip down the stick from its precise classical leaf. Then he strode down to the selected site like Moses to the rock in the vermilion desert at Horeb. Once there he gripped the fork, a prong placed tightly in the palm of each hand, but the stick itself pointed up at the blue sky like the hands of a pilgrim joined in prayer. Then, with a slow ritualistic step, he walked across the scene from east to west, the fitful whirlpool eddies of the hot afternoon air irreverently flicking his long beard out of the focus of his trance-like movement. When the critical moment came the knuckles of his hands went white from the effort he was making to prevent the prongs of the fork turning in his grasp. But slowly the point of the stick began to vibrate and waver until suddenly, despite all his exertions to prevent it, the point plunged straight down quivering like an arrow in a drawn bow over the earth at his feet. As it happened an involuntary murmur went up from the white people present and a marvellous ‘Ye-bo!’ came from our uninhibited black servants followed by a laugh which was not only a laugh but also a release of tension as if the charge which had mounted so mysteriously in the blood of the old man had welled up unbearably in them, too.

Unperturbed by the reaction of the onlookers, the old man stopped instantly at that point, drew a long line with his finger east and west in the earth, retreated thirty paces to the south and repeated his tense, hypnotic walk to the north. His gift did not fail him. The stick plunged a second time, and there again he drew another line south and north in the earth. Where the two lines crossed, he dug his heel into the ground and said to our father: ‘There is good water here. Two strong arteries meeting about a hundred feet down.’

I had just completed my first year of Law at the University and my newly-awakened reason was irritated by the old man’s air of simple assurance. I thought at once that he was just putting on an act to disguise a guess that could be no better than our own. I whispered so to my brother but he, without emotion, quietly disagreed,’ You’re wrong, Ouboet.’

‘Don’t be so silly, how could anyone know?’ I replied irritated.

‘But I know,’ he answered mildly. Then seeing the irritation mounting in me he added quickly with an odd note of surprise as if the explanation were news to him, too: ‘I know because – because I believe it would work with me, as well.’

‘What?’ I looked down at him but there was no mistaking that he was in deadly earnest. ‘Let’s prove it then,’ I said quickly thinking it would do him no harm to make a fool of himself.

Instantly he went up to the diviner without a trace of embarrassment. ‘Oom,’ he said, ‘would you mind if I tried it, too?’

The old man looked at him with quick surprise. Then he gave me a glance which somehow disturbed me before turning back to my brother. ‘Certainly,’ he answered. ‘Here’s the stick. Be careful to hold it like this.’ He put the prongs of the stick in my brother’s hand. ‘Grip it tight; keep your eyes on the point and walk steadily. A step with each breath and you will not fail to confound the unbelievers in our midst.’

Then we all turned to watch the awkward, lumbering figure of my brother imitate the diviner’s performance.

Intangible as these things are there was no doubt that my own disapproval was beginning to communicate itself to the others and there was an increasing feeling that the boy was being allowed to presume too much. However, my brother seemed unaware of this mood in the watchers. Young as he was I could not help remarking the odd authority in his bearing. In fact he repeated the diviner’s performance faultlessly and at the end of it all the fork twisted earthwards and where the old man had bent to make his cross, he too drew another like it in the earth with his forefinger. Then he stood up to look at us no doubt expecting some acknowledgement for what he had done. But, as if in mutual agreement that to give him too much credit for what had happened might add to his boyish presumption, after a few words we passed immediately into a busy discussion of the arrangements necessary for boring on the chosen spot.

I do not know what my brother felt but the scene has stayed with me, and often in a guilt-quick memory I have remembered him stooping awkwardly and with his clumsy finger making again his first sign of the cross in the thirsty sand. Oh! the mysterious inevitability of those crosses in our blood! This deep game of noughts and crosses played unremittingly, night and day, from one dimension of being to another of becoming. First the flaming sword of an archangel making a cross over the gate to the forbidden garden of our lost selves. Again a cross over the doorway of the first ghetto to keep away the angel of death on the night of terror before exodus from nothingness in the bondage of Egypt’s plenty to another country of strange, unlikely promise across the desert. Then another Cross where darkness gathers steeply over the very promise itself. Always, the significance of a long journey from bondage to a country not yet known: the negation which can only become positive when a cross has been nailed against it. Always it seems, in the blank space at the end of the inadequate letter lies a large cross for a kiss from that terrible lover, life, who will never take ‘No’ for an answer. So here, too, at the beginning of the boy about to become a man was a cross made to mark the possibility of water in problematical sand.

Yet if on that day automatically we tried to make nothing of my brother’s gift, he was unaffected by this.

He came up to me and said: ‘Look, Ouboet. It was much stronger than me!’

I looked unwillingly and saw that the bark had been stripped off the olive as it twisted and turned in his fist and there, in the broad palm turned upwards before my sceptical eyes was stigmata of the deed, the skin torn and the flesh red and watery from its struggle with the fierce earthbound wood.

‘Looks as if you’d scratched yourself,’ I said coolly.

Yet that night as we lay in the shared bed on the wide open stoep, looking up at a clear sky with the stars crackling and the Milky Way coming down like a river in flood, I begged his pardon. I admitted grudgingly that he may have been right – though it couldn’t signify what he and the diviner thought it did.

He replied, ‘Oh, that was nothing,’ and turning on his side he fell instantly asleep, leaving me wakeful and dissatisfied.

For there are degrees in nothingness. Nothingness has its own backward inevitability of erosion. On this occasion there was something specific for which I could beg his pardon. But the master-nothing to which all these apprentice occasions are bound is so insubstantial that no question or thought of pardon arises.

There remain still two essential differences between my brother and myself to enumerate but before I do so I must add that when my brother became a man his gift for water-divining was much in demand in our remote world. He put it at the service of whoever needed it. But he would never accept any reward. Uncomfortable as it made many rich people to be under an obligation to him he would never charge, saying always: ‘I can’t take payment for it. The gift isn’t mine. If I took money for it, I know it would leave me.’

I have mentioned already that physically I was well-made and my brother not so favoured. Now I have to confess that he had a slight deformity. It was not in the least obvious, and my brother was able to conceal it almost entirely by arranging that his clothes were always slightly padded along the shoulders. It was not discernible as a specific deformity and yet in some way it formed a sure centre round which not only all that was odd in his appearance but also all that in his nature was at variance with the world seemed to meet. It was amazing how, whether other people knew of its existence or not, sooner or later their eyes were compelled by the laws of my brother’s own being to fasten on this spot between his shoulders. I don’t know who was the more sensitive about it: he or I. All I do know is that between us we never referred to it by name. We always designated it by an atmospheric blank in our sentences. For instance, I would say, ‘But if you do go swimming there wouldn’t they see . . . blank.’ Or he to me: ‘D’you think if I wore that linen jacket it would . . . blank . . . you know?’

Instantly we would both know that we were referring to the razor-edged hump between his shoulders. Self-contained as he was in his spirit yet this deformity was a breach in my brother’s sufficiency which he could never man, and any enemy from without who discovered it could walk through the breach at will.

I have said we were both extremely sensitive about it but perhaps it would be more accurate to say he was afraid because of it, irrationally afraid of what the world might think, feel and be provoked to do on account of it. My own sensitiveness, on the other hand, although I passed it off to myself as a form of’ minding for him’, was of a different order. This, after all, was a problem in a dimension which was peculiarly my own. I could not readily endure the thought of people setting eyes on this razor-edged hump behind my brother’s broad shoulders because I must have feared that it would reflect on me. I could not bear that anything related to me was not of the best. I had not learned to fear my lack of physical blemish as my brother did his deformity. And the scales, in this matter of our appearance, seemed so unfairly loaded against him. We could never appear together without people being reminded of it. Though it was an inequality which was not of my making and the blame (if such a word can be used for so impersonal a process) lay with life, yet the fact remained that I was, no matter how unwillingly, the main instrument whereby this manifest inequality was kept alive. I think again of the Man from Palestine when He said, ‘It may be that offence has to come in life but woe to him by whom it comes.’ He might have spoken the words for me. My discomfort over my brother’s deformity had yet another powerful stimulus. I must have known instinctively that however much people sympathized with my brother on a perfunctory level, underneath in the more spontaneous world of their emotions, they often felt embarrassed and even threatened by his departure from the norm. They could even secretly resent it and wish him out of the way. I say this confidently because I have found since both in myself and others that the greater the need for individual differentiation from a stagnant normality, the more we struggle and resent those who represent this difference. I have even noticed the same tendency in the behaviour of animals, and I think now of one animal in particular who played a brief, mysterious role in my story. But all I submit here is that, in those far-off days, I and those around me in our behaviour to my brother confirmed this paradoxical law without ever knowing what we did. I grew up showing an excessive solicitude on behalf of my brother’s deformity, firmly believing it was his feelings that I wanted to protect. Yet without realizing it I was obliquely asserting values and defending feelings which belonged to me and my own world. In doing so I was extremely popular with my fellow men. My brother at best was tolerated. It was most noticeable that the moment he entered a room wherein I had company restraint came in with him like winter’s fog. I immediately began to defend and explain him without appearing to do so, and found myself acting out an elaborate apologia on his behalf. My friends then began to feel that they had a duty to deny the effect caused by his odd appearance and soon the conversation became too artificial and self-conscious to be enjoyed. My brother grew up apparently a lonely, friendless person. Yet it sometimes seemed that I had more interests and friends than my life could contain.

And now I come to the final difference between us. I was tone-deaf. I could not sing in tune. It may sound a slight matter scarcely worthwhile mentioning. But for me it was an odd and difficult handicap. Secretly the fact that whenever I tried to join in any singing I spoilt it made me surprisingly unhappy. If I persisted, as I often did when I was younger, I merely provoked a titter which forced me quickly to desist. It was an added irony too, that I, who was so well adapted to my world, was utterly at odds with it in my singing whereas my brother, whose nature always stood at such an acute angle, through his singing became completely at one. Even as a child he had a clear unhesitating soprano which developed as he grew older into a manly and pleasantly-rounded tenor.

I remember going to look for him once in our garden on my first day home from school on the long summer vacation. The garden was immense and I thought I would have difficulty in finding him. But I had just come to the edge of the orchard with its great yellow apricots, ruby peaches, purple plums and figs, pears, scarlet and pink cherries and pomegranates all shining like Persian jewellery in the morning sun, when I heard his voice, lovely as I had never heard it before, soaring up from the centre of the garden. He was singing something I didn’t recognize which had that curiously simple yet urgent up-down rhythm of the African idiom. To me it sounded like primitive music before the mind and worldly experience had worked upon it.

I stood there listening to him singing, feeling more and more shut out from I knew not what – but something that I recognized to be urgent and vital. In the end I was overcome not by a nostalgia for the past (that is simple and well within the capacity of our awareness) but by a devouring homesickness for the future which is precipitated in our hearts through a sense of what we have left uncompleted behind us. The little song became for me, to borrow a platitude of the present day, a signature tune reminding me always of my brother as well as my own unrealized longings.

Ry, ry deur die dag,

Ry, deur die maanlig;

Ry, ry deur die nag!

Want ver in die verte

Brand jou vuurtjie

Vir iemand wat lang at wag.

The words, as you can see, even if you do not know our mother tongue, are simple enough. I can translate them freely in prose: ‘Ride, ride through the day, ride through the moonlight, ride, ride through the night. For far in the distance burns your fire for someone who has waited long.’

‘Where on earth did you learn that tune and who wrote the words?’ I asked as I came on him watering seedbeds beside a tree sullen with the weight of its yellow fruit.

‘Ag, Ouboet!’ he answered smiling in welcome putting down his watering can and stretching his absurd frame: ‘It’s just something that came bursting into my head one day while you were away.’

As he spoke he had the same look on his face as when he made his cross beside the diviner’s in the sand. But if he was waiting for some sort of acknowledgement from me he was again to be disappointed.

‘It’s not bad,’ I replied.

‘Glad you think so,’ he answered. But he looked intently at me for a moment before he resumed his watering.

I suppose, therefore, it was no accident that my brother’s first serious brush with the world of his boyhood was caused by his sense of the musical fitness of things.

In church the family who occupied the pew behind us had remarkably loud voices but no sense for tune. They all sang hymns loudly, usually slightly behind the rest of the congregation and almost two tones out of true, or so my brother said. One Sunday morning they were singing with such magnificent unawareness of their crime against the laws of harmony that my brother was first silenced, then set sniggering and soon we were both shaking with that convulsive merriment which sometimes assails one in places where it is strictly forbidden to laugh. The whole of the offending family gave us a very hard disapproving look after church but I thought no more of it. Yet from that Monday onwards I had an uneasy feeling of something amiss in our village life which I discounted as fantasy whenever it thrust itself upon my attentions and certainly did not connect with the episode of our merriment in church. Yet despite my determination not to recognize it this feeling steadily grew. Unfortunately I did not know then, as I do now, how surely and wordlessly a change in the popular mood can communicate itself to those with whom the change is most concerned. During our school vacation neither my brother nor I had great occasion to go out into the streets, but whenever I did so I came back with a sense of uneasiness. It was as if some hostile force were secretly mobilizing against us. On occasions I would find myself in the main street at the sunniest hour of the day looking over my shoulder because of a sudden suspicion that I was being followed. Instantly I would laugh at myself for being so jumpy since invariably all I saw were the familiar figures of some of the village lads dodging artfully behind the glistening pepper-trees or swiftly round the corner of a wall which stood out like a rock in the sea of summer heat. ‘Obviously playing hide and seek,’ I told myself. And so ridiculous did any other interpretation seem that I mentioned my apprehensions to no one. Nor did I connect them with an added reserve in my brother’s withdrawals.

Then one Wednesday morning from the moment I stepped into the street to carry out some errands for the house I found this feeling of uneasiness subtly augmented. The manner in which I was greeted by the village, the looks I received, the words spoken, seemed to carry some new content of climax whose existence I could no longer deny. In the afternoon I was sent with my brother to take some horses to the blacksmith who lived a little distance outside the village. The village itself was very silent, half-asleep in the summer heat. The streets were empty and our horses’ hooves echoed loudly from the walls of the white-faced houses. In the main grocer’s window between the drawn blind and the panes, a large orange tabby cat lay fast asleep in the sun. As we passed, the edge of the blind was suddenly drawn back and the red head of the grocer’s boy appeared, no doubt curious to see who rode out so loudly at so somnolent an hour of the day. He recognized us, and at once vanished so quickly that the blind whipping back into position flicked the sleeping cat smartly on the flank and sent it vanishing in a prodigious leap from the window shelf. Soon the hatless red-head emerged from the shop door, jumped the steps and came running after us.

‘Hey!’ he called out, and then when he caught up with us: ‘Off to the farm already?’ he asked breathlessly.

Everybody asked everybody their business in our world and the question appeared to me no more than routine curiosity.

‘Only taking the horses over to the blacksmith,’ I replied.

He stood there for a moment, repeating the words over and over to himself. Then he gave my brother a sly glance, broke off hurriedly, ‘Well, I must be off – Totsiens,’^fn3 and disappeared in a golden blur of dust down the street.

Again I felt uneasy but merely shrugged my shoulders. What did it all mean?

I had been told to leave the horses at the blacksmith’s and at once return home with my brother because some cousins were coming that afternoon to call on us. But when the moment came I felt myself oddly reluctant to return. The smithy stood on the main cross-road at the edge of the bush-veld about a mile from the village. Leaning, hesitant, in the open gateway outside the smithy I saw that the country between us and the village was empty of people. Only a donkey and a cow with its calf were moving slowly about in a dream of after-dinner sleep, while an unfed grey falcon, suspended in a trance of blinding blue, trembled over their heads. It was all so silent and still that I stood on to let the familiar scene repulse my strange uneasiness. Then, distinctly, through the vibrations of light a cock crowed on the marches of our village. It has never been my favourite sound. In the indeterminate dawn hour between sleeping and waking it is bad enough. But breaking out suddenly as this crowing did, reminding me that yet another uncomprehended afternoon was about to plunge steeply into fathomless night, I found it almost more than I could endure. The crucified sound coming straight out of the heart of unrealized animal-being seemed appropriately a prelude to some inevitability of suffering. I looked up to the top of the spire of our village church which flaunted a cock rampant with a comb of stainless steel on its head, and for some reason I felt myself both reproached and warned by the sight.

I stirred. I couldn’t go on standing there all day, but I turned to give a last glance at the smithy behind me. The smith was drawing a shoe, made magic in fire, from the forge. Placing its eager gold on to the black anvil he began expertly to batter it into shape for a horse stamping in the shade outside. Leaning on the bar of the bellows, a black apprentice flashed a smile at me. My brother too was watching and had the excitement of the fire glowing in his eyes.

I beckoned to him and turning we took the road to the village. Just before you enter our village the road dips steeply to disappear in a dry river bed emerging a hundred yards or so further on almost at the beginning of the main street. As we were walking I noticed in the distance dark figures hurriedly coming out of the village in clusters of three or four and taking the road down into the river bed. I thought nothing of it until I realized that none of the figures emerged on our side of the river bed.

I stopped short in my tracks and turned to my brother. Looking down, I saw that his face had gone suddenly white under its olive shadow. His eyes were wide open and the anguish of an unknown fear walked naked in them.

‘Have you seen what I’ve seen?’ I asked, my lips oddly dry.

He nodded.

‘Any idea what it means?’ I asked curtly.

‘Yes, Ouboet. They’re after me.’ His voice was still with certainty as water is still with depth.

‘What?’ I exclaimed, feeling my own uneasiness of the past few days rush in fast to confirm his reply.

Then in the same breath I asked, ‘But why?’

‘Because of Sunday,’ he answered slowly. ‘I laughed at them in church on Sunday. They say I’ve insulted them and they must teach me a lesson.’

‘Nonsense,’ I protested. ‘What about me? I sniggered too.’

‘It’s me they’re after, not you,’ he said darkly. ‘They like you, but they don’t like me. Two of the sons stopped me in the village on Monday and asked me what the great joke on Sunday had been about. When I told them they got so angry.’

‘You told them?’ I exclaimed, hardly believing my own ears.

He seemed genuinely surprised at the hardening tone of my voice. ‘I just told them what had happened,’ he explained. ‘And that I couldn’t help laughing. Of course I said I was sorry if – if I hurt them – but it – it had sounded so funny –’

He broke off but, despairing of his want of tact I prodded him: ‘What did they say to that?’

‘They said so much and so fast I can hardly remember, Ouboet,’ he answered miserably. ‘They said I was a liar and dared me to repeat what I’d said. They asked if I thought I knew more about singing then their parents did . . . and when I said that honestly they’d all been –’

‘I see,’ I interrupted. There was no need to know more. ‘And now they’re all waiting down there in the river bed to teach you, or both of us, a lesson, eh?’

He nodded his head sombrely. Then added, ‘Not both of us, Ouboet, only me. They like you, I tell you, but they don’t like me. The singing is just an excuse really –’ He faltered. ‘They don’t even want to beat me – they want to . . .’ His voice dropped to a whisper. ‘To pull the clothes off my back and make fun of . . . you know.’

‘No! No!’ I protested appalled, for after all the same ghost had burrowed for so long in the foundations of both our minds. For a moment I thought of retreating on the smithy, waiting for our horses and then riding back fast through the crowd of young lads that had collected for the sort of brawl that was one of their favourite sports. I thought also of taking some roundabout path and thereby avoiding the dry river crossing between us and our home. But just at that very instant, as if Fate had commanded it, one of the older boys came out of the river bed, climbed on to a boulder sparkling like a fabulous garnet in the sun, saw us, put his hands to his mouth and called out loudly and provocatively in unmistakable challenge.

I have been over this phase of the incident many times in my mind. I know that the sensible thing to do would still have been to avoid the crowd of boys, or even to wait for the storm to blow over as these village upsets sometimes did. Yet once that boy had seen me and knew that I had seen him, I was no longer a free agent but a prisoner of the situation. It was impossible for me to do anything else but go on, because everyone expected that and nothing else of me. Whatever price the drama was going to exact from us all it was presupposed that I would play my part exactly as I did. The ancient pattern conditioning the minds of the youth of our village from that fateful Sunday onwards was such that they were instinctively, without any special word of command or active leadership, committed to a conspiracy wherein they would all serve a moment when my brother and I could be confronted together, and alone, without any chance of interference from our elders. But I knew none of this at that time. I knew only that under that empty and unseeing blue sky from which even the witness of the hungry falcon had been withdrawn, I had to go on and get over that crossing with my awkward brother as best I could.

Feeling sick in the stomach I moved forward. My brother however still blanched at the prospect. Putting his broad ploughman’s hand on my arm to restrain me he said in an incredulous voice: ‘But, Ouboet, if you go on they’ll tear the clothes off my back and mock me for –’

I pushed his hand roughly away and said with bitter resignation: ‘It’s too late now for anything else. But I’ll not let them touch you if I can help it. Look! When we get to the river bed I want you to go straight on. I want you to promise me to walk straight on home . . . and not look back whatever happens. If you’re right and they’ve nothing against me then you’ve no need to worry.’

He opened his mouth to protest but I shook him roughly and said, ‘For Christ’s sake do what you’re told! You’ve already caused trouble enough.’

It was the oath that did it. That form of swearing is absolutely forbidden among decent people in my country. I don’t think I had ever tried it before. To this day I find it strange that I should have used it then and that, hearing it, my brother should have come forward without demur to walk like a shadow at my side.

Some minutes before we came to the dip in the road we could hear the quick buzz which comes from an excited crowd. The sound rose high into the bright air around us and harmonized uncannily with the feverish tempo of the light and constant murmur of heat which always trembles in our bush-veld afternoon silences. But as we came nearer the buzz quickly detached itself from the general rhythm of the day and hit us like the noise of a crowd at some public demonstration. Nevertheless, directly my brother and I came out on the river bank someone called out joyfully: ‘Look: Oubeotjies, ^fn4 they’re here!’

Instantly the crowd went as silent as a tomb. I had not much eye for detail at that moment nor indeed for anything save the sullen shade and earthquake rumble of the dark necessity which drew my brother and myself. Yet as I took in the general outline of that mass of oddly-expectant faces arranged in a half-moon on the level surface of the river bed I saw that not a boy under sixteen from our village was absent and that some pimply over-seventeens had been thrown in for the generous measure that fate reserves for these occasions. I remember also that the glare in those eyes focused on me and my brother seemed fired with a blazing cannibal hunger which I had never seen before on human faces – though today I know it only too well. Then quickly I marked down two figures standing apart from the rest and facing us. Bitterly I recognized the principals in the scene, the two toughest of the occupants of the pew behind ours. As my eyes met theirs one shifted his hobbledehoy weight uneasily on to another foot, and the other licked his lips with apparent nervousness.

‘Remember,’ I whispered to my brother: ‘Not a word to anyone. Walk past them and straight home. I’ll do all the talking that’s necessary.’

He made no reply. Silently we approached. Though we had known those present all our young lives no one called out a greeting: they just sat or lolled against the river banks staring at us with that strange hunger in their eyes. My brother, devastated by the brilliance of that massed impersonal stare, tried desperately to look for comfort in some eye not hostile to him. But those faces were not glaring so much at us but at the event that they longed to bring about through us. At last we came close to the two standing apart waiting in the middle of the river bed. I could hear their hard breathing. My brother and I stepped to the side in order to pass them. At that a hiss of imperative meaning escaped from the crowd like steam from a high-pressure boiler. Automatically the biggest of the two grasped my brother by the arm and said: ‘Not so fast – you misshapened bastard!’

As if long rehearsed for the part I moved in between them, pushed him aside and said quietly to my brother: ‘Remember. Your promise.’ In the same breath I turned to face his opponent.

The crowd sighed with relief. Tongues licked expectant lips as quickly as those of our lizards when they deftly flick some ripe insect-sparkle from the air into their saffron mouths. The occasion was developing according to their satisfaction.

‘Get out of my way, Cousin,’ the youth growled at me. ‘Our quarrel isn’t with you but with that abortion of a brother of yours.’

‘I shan’t get out of your way,’ I told him, my heart beating wildly. ‘You’re not going to touch my brother. He’s much younger and smaller than you.’

I forbore to add that my opponent was also a good deal bigger than I.

For a moment he stood there undecided, looking first at me and then at my brother who was walking fast up to the far bank and towards the village with an apparent willingness so different in spirit from the reluctant promise which I had extracted from him that even I was surprised and perhaps somewhat shocked. Then my enemy looked back from my brother to the one-eyed crowd and in its glance read his instructions. I had just time to see my brother scramble up the far bank and break into a run, when he exploded in hoarse, militant sarcasm: ‘Well, you’ve asked for it!’ and came for me hitting out fast with both hands.

Excitement heaved the crowd to its feet and sent it rushing to form an eager ring around us. He was, as I said, bigger than I and I never had much hope of beating him, quite apart from the fact that while we fought his brother danced around exhorting him to finish me and threatening to join in if the other failed. I don’t know how long we fought. I am told that after the first few minutes I was clearly the loser, but I was unaware of the fact. In me some stranger had taken over. He did the thinking and the hitting for me and robbed me of all feeling. Yes, someone of infinite experience became master of my situation. Then suddenly on the far perimeter of the storm of my senses came a new sound.

Someone was bellowing like a bull at the crowd of boys and hitting out at them. Simultaneously we stopped fighting, and looking round in amazement we saw the crowd scattering fast and the big figure of the village lay-preacher lashing out right and left with his horsewhip as he came towards us, my brother following close behind him.

‘Are you all right, Ouboet?’ my brother implored even before he reached me.

I don’t know why but at his words rage boiled over like water in a kettle inside me.

‘You’d no business,’ I told him panting furiously, ‘to fetch him here!’ The village moralist was still pursuing the fleeing multitude with his whip. ‘Why didn’t you go home as I told you?’

A few of the boys who had not yet fled apparently heard my words for on the way home whenever we passed groups of excited boys in the street obviously discussing the fight and the respective merits of the two performances, they gave me a look of approval. But for my brother there was only a scornful glance. He did not protest but walked silently beside me like a condemned person. Occasionally I could feel him trying to get me to look at him. However, I kept my outraged eyes firmly on the street watching our shadows thrown up by the fast-westering sun behind us growing longer and longer, darkening the scarlet dust of Africa and taking the colour out of the pink, red and white berries of the heavily scented pepper-trees which lay like the beads of a broken necklace around our feet. To this day I have only to smell the whiff of green peppers in the air to see our shadows, side by side, staining the hungry dust, and to feel again the retarded horror of the inflexible condemnation in my heart.

When we did get home my brother rushed straight to our father with an account of what had happened. He made me out to have been a kind of David who had faced a village Goliath. Before he had finished, the whole family had come in to listen, absorbed, to his tale. As I went to bathe my bruised face in the bathroom I heard the murmur of their spontaneous approval. The tone of their words warmed me through like wine. Even so I noticed that no one expressed approval of my brother for his deed of rescue in my need.

That night, as we lay in our bed on the stoep listening to the jackals barking with frantic mournfulness on the margin of our little village so deeply marooned in the black bush-veld sea, I heard a sob break from my brother.

‘What’s the matter, ou klein Boetie?’ ^fn5 I asked quickly turning over towards him.

The unexpected note of concern in my voice was too much for him. He began sobbing without effort at self-control, and then gasped out, ‘I don’t want you to have to fight for me. . . . Please don’t always fight for me. If you do you’ll end up by hating me one day. And – and I don’t want you to hate me too, Ouboet . . .’

I was a witness then of the starry prancing impis^fn6 of the night throwing down their assegais and watering the heroic heaven of Africa with their gentlest tears.

^fn1 Afrikaans for old brother: a term of endearment.

^fn2 Little brother.

^fn3Totsiens: Au revoir.

^fn4 Little old ones: Afrikaans term of endearment among boys.

^fn5 Literally: Old little, little brother: term of great endearment.

^fn6 An Impi is a Zulu or Matabele regiment of war.

3 The Initiation

HALF-WAY THROUGH MY last year at school my family decided to send my brother to join me. He could have done with another six months or year at the village school because he was still backward in his studies, but my family thought it would be easier for him if he had me to introduce him to life in a great public institution and help guide his awkward paces. I was not consulted but merely told of the decision, because, I expect, my family took it for granted that I myself would like the idea. It was another instance of what everyone expected of me and I received the decision, as far as I am aware, with an ease which confirmed my place in the estimation of my elders and betters.

The year had gone well for me at school. I had never been more successful and popular both with boys and masters. I was in the first eleven, captained the first fifteen, won the Victor Ludorum medal at the annual inter-school athletics, and was first in my final form. I was head of the senior house and would have been head of the school, I think, if I had not been a year or two younger than most fellows in my form. Both masters and boys confidently predicted that at the close of the year I would be awarded the most coveted prize of the school, that for the best all-round man of the year. It was to this brilliant and crowded stage that I returned from vacation with my strange brother at my side.

We arrived the afternoon before the re-opening of the school. I don’t think I was over-sensitive as a child except, perhaps, to the reaction of people and the world to me. But as the school slowly became aware that the awkward, graceless shadow at my side was indeed my brother even I could not help feeling the surprise that merged into the ineffable condescension of public pity in the atmosphere around me. More subtly still I got an inkling of the relief that can surge through the hearts of the many when they begin to suspect an infliction of fallible humanity in the lives of their popular idols. My contemporaries were surprised and for one brief moment I was able to see how ready are the mass instincts to seize an excuse for pulling down the very thing that they themselves have need of elevating. Perhaps I imagined myself to be beyond the reach of all these influences. But they had their effect on me. They could not, to put it at its lowest, make me love either myself or my brother more. I was young enough to hope that once he had gone through the various rites and the tough period of initiation which tradition prescribed for newcomers to the school, his oddness would be accepted as part of the daily scene, and that the qualities which endeared him to his family would have their chance to emerge. Yet, from the very first evening, the start was not encouraging. First impressions are important to the young and never more important than when there are initiation rites to perform.

After all, the purpose of initiation ceremonial is first, by a process of public humiliation, to make the victim aware of his inferiority and then to extract from him, through some painful form of ordeal, proof of the courage which alone can entitle him to redemption from his shameful singularity in membership of the privileged community. Moreover, I have noticed that among those to be initiated there is always one who seems to be predestined to bear an extra burden of ritual because he alone appears to personify most clearly the singularity that has to be humiliated and sacrificed. I use the word ‘appears’ deliberately because in my school it was this appearance, this first impression, which decided the degree in initiation that the candidate was to be forced to endure. All crowds seem to possess an instinct for determining with diabolic accuracy the most suitable sacrifice among its prospective victims. My school was no exception. Even if I had not been apprehensive I could not have helped noticing how everyone who met my brother soon found their eyes drawn in puzzled focus to the spot where his padded coat concealed his deformity.

I watched one boy after another come up to him and fire the usual questions: name, age, address, form in school, games, favourite books, hobbies and so on. My brother answered them all in that artless manner of his without concealment. Yes, his name was the same as mine: he was indeed my brother. Was that so surprising? He was eleven, and in the first form. Yes, he probably should have been out of it long ago but he was no good at books. No, he didn’t play any games either. He didn’t like games much and never played them unless forced to. His hobbies were music and growing things, if you could call that a hobby!

This catalogue of unorthodox answers completed, his questioners hastened away to spread the news of how strange a fish had been thrown up on the school beach in the shape of the brother of the head of the senior house. Soon I was left without doubt that he would have to bear the main burden of initiation if the school were free to have its way. Only one thing stood between my brother and such an unenviable fate: the fact that he was my brother.

Now to be fair to myself I had discussed initiation many times with my brother. He knew all there was to know about it. He knew the details by heart and even remembered some that I had forgotten. He was as ready for it, intellectually, as any newcomer could be. Also, he had great physical strength and resistance to pain. Nothing I had told him about running the gauntlet in pyjamas with the school drawn up in two long rows and hitting out hard at the runners with wet towels plaited to a fine lash-like point; about waking-up at night and finding some boys sitting with pillows on his head while others put a slip-knot of a fishing line round his toes and pulled at them, one by one, until they bled in a perfect circle; nothing about being made to measure the distance from school to town with his toothbrush on his half-holidays, or having to wear boot-laces instead of a tie into town, or being forced to look straight into the sun without blinking for as long as some older boy commanded, or being trussed up and left on the frosty dormitory balcony all night, none of these things, I repeat, had unduly dismayed him. There was only one thing he truly feared: exposure and mockery.

When we were told he was accompanying me to school the first thing he asked was ‘They won’t make fun of . . . you know . . . will they?’

‘Of course not,’ I’d replied vehemently. ‘You’re going to a decent school not a village kalwerhok.’^fn1

The relief in his eyes was so intense that I quickly looked away. Was there far back in the long tunnel in my mind a faint cackle of cock-crow? Was I really so certain? But I gave myself no chance to discover doubt and repeated firmly: ‘We’re not at all that kind of school.’

Later, on the day of our return to school, as our train came to a standstill at the platform and we got ready to leave our compartment, again his broad hand clutched by arm and he asked: ‘They won’t – will they, Ouboet?’

It was on that occasion, for the first time, that I pretended not to know what his question meant.

I exclaimed irritably: ‘Won’t what?’

He was utterly taken aback. For a moment he stared speechless at me, then said in a frightened whisper: ‘Mock me because of – Oh God, you know what, Ouboet!’

‘Oh, that!’ I answered noticing how heavily he was taking it to heart and continuing as if it were all too trivial for words: ‘I’ve told you already, we’re not that kind of school.’

I think the question was again on his lips when I did my rounds of the dormitories last thing that night. But if it was he dared not ask it. He just looked at me with such eloquent apprehension that I turned away hastily and bade him a curt: ‘Good night.’

My rounds done I went to join the heads of the other three houses in the study of the Captain of the school. I had done that walk between my house and the school many times, yet that night it felt to me as if I had never done it before. Every detail had taken to itself the mystery of all things. The moon was so bright that I could see the shadow of our greatest mountains at the end of the plain many miles away. The round white-washed stones beside the gravelled drive might have been skulls adorning the approach to a barbaric court. The cactus in the rock-garden raising its arms high to heaven was a Maya priest, knife in hand, sacrificing to the moon. The shadows of the trees were inky pools of tidal water lying forgotten among glistening rocks, and the whole night was hissing urgently as if the moonlight were the sea and the earth an outward-bound ship parting the surf at the bar of some harbour mouth. Between the school and distant town, night-plovers cried continuously, like gulls over the stormy Cape.

It all made such an overwhelming impression on me that I stood for a while in front of the Captain’s door, wondering. Even the stars moved as if they were sparking off messages in their own confidential code. Noticing it, I was sharply harried by the fancy, which came out at me like a watch-dog in the dark, that perhaps they really did carry some special message for me? Impatiently I dismissed the notion as clearly absurd. I was there to discuss with the Captain of the school and others the ordinary business of the term. The five of us had met, thus, on the eve of each re-assembly for the past eighteen months. The idea that there would be any extra significance on this occasion even made me impatient with the splendour of the night.

I rapped on the door and went in to be warmly welcomed by the Captain and heads of the other three houses. After a cheerfully busy hour or two the Captain said: ‘This brings us now to the little matter of tomorrow’s initiation. I take it you’ve all interviewed the newcomers in your houses. Have you any youngsters you think should be excused?’

Yes, said the man next to me, he had a boy with a weak heart who’d brought a doctor’s certificate to that effect. The next, grumblingly, said he’d got a chap who was as blind as a bat, with lenses thick enough for a septuagenarian! He’d probably better be excused all the physical rites though there was no reason why he shouldn’t be available for the rest of the fun. The third pleaded similarly for a boy still recovering from a long fever. Then came my turn. Firmly I said I had no one needing to be excused.

The Captain looked keenly at me. ‘No one?’

‘No,’ I repeated carefully veiling the surprise I felt at his question and looking him steadily in the eye. But to my amazement he didn’t leave it at that.

‘You’ve got a young brother in your house, haven’t you?’ he asked.

‘I have,’ I answered, my whole being springing to attention.

‘What about him?’ the Captain asked.

‘Well, what about him?’ I parried so sharply that the others laughed.

The Captain smiled. ‘I was merely wondering if he was all right –’

‘Of course he’s all right.’ My answer was quietly vehement yet the Captain persisted.

‘Forgive me, old chap,’ he said, almost shyly. ‘I don’t want to badger you. If you say he’s all right we all accept it. But, knowing you, we realize the last thing you’d ask for would be special dispensation for a relation. So if you’ve any reason for wanting your brother excused tomorrow we’d none of us think of it as favouritism.’

A spontaneous murmur of applause went round the table. I found myself blushing. ‘Awfully decent of you but there’s no reason, honestly.’

‘Well, then, that’s that,’ said the Captain, evidently well satisfied with the way the claims of business and decency had been met, and he bade us a hearty good night.

On the way back I found myself perturbed and not a little sad, and I was unable to explain it to myself. It is only now that I know that between my impatient rap on the Captain’s door and the moment when it opened and shut behind me again as I stepped out into the unbelievable moonlight of that wheeling night, the master-nothing of which I have spoken previously had caught up with me and was moving fast into place.

A second example of this, if I may use so positive a phrase for so negative a phenomenon, arose next morning right at the beginning of school.

Prayers over, the Captain came up to me and said: ‘I’ve got to see the Head immediately after classes this afternoon. Would you keep an eye on things for me until I get back?’

He was referring of course to the ‘round-up’ of newcomers which always took place on the opening day between the last class and the first prep.

‘D’you mind if I don’t?’ I asked at once.

‘Of course not.’ He paused. ‘I didn’t really think you’d want to. But as you’re head of the senior house I felt I had to ask you.’ He smiled and put a friendly hand on my shoulder before moving on.

I had a suspicion of his feeling but my intimates saw to it that I soon knew the full meaning of his words. Apparently after our conversation the Captain had told them all of my refusal to take charge of the school during the ‘round-up’, and he had explained that he was certain it was done out of respect for the traditions of the school and in order to ensure that my popular presence in a position of authority should not influence the crowd to treat my brother differently from any other unprivileged newcomer. He had even added that it was exactly what he’d expected of one with such a scrupulous sense of fair play.

Slowly that first day at school passed its peak mid-day hour. I had not seen my brother at all since early morning when I stopped an over-spirited scrummage between some older boys outside his dormitory before breakfast, until a moment or two before the school dismissed at the end of the day. There were, of course, dozens of good reasons why the head of a large house has no time for personal affairs and private considerations on the opening day of school. If anyone had accused me then of trying to avoid my brother, I could have rebutted the charge without difficulty. Today I might accept the result of my actions as proof enough of my real intention no matter how hidden it may have been from me at the time. I have no idea what my brother felt during all that busy day because we have never discussed it. In a way I can imagine it from my own experience of my first day in the same school. After all I had had to endure the start of school without a brother for comfort and a lot of good had come to me out of so elementary a test. Obviously there was a lot to be said for leaving my brother to fend for himself. True, he had his extra dimension of fear to make horror of his anxieties but, believe it or not, ever since that moment on the platform when I had refused to understand his meaning, this aspect of his problem had slipped from my memory, almost as if I had been secretly resolved not to remember it.

When finally I did see him that day, it was just after school had ended. He was standing against a pillar close to the door of the senior Science laboratory in which my form was doing practical Chemistry. He was standing very still as always when possessed by only one thought. Occasionally his eyes left the door to try and peer through the windows of the laboratory but because the light flamed and flared in the cool mauve glass he could not see anything in the shadows behind it. Obviously he was waiting for the class to come out to seize a chance of speaking to me before the ‘round-up’ which, judging by the noise coming from the quadrangle on the far side of the laboratory, was rapidly getting under way.

For a moment I felt a desperate pity. He looked so incongruous and helpless, his young arm clasped round the iron pillar for support. I knew, too, that he had no chance of seeing me. Some minutes before I had already gone to the science master and offered to stay behind after class and prepare the laboratory for the next morning’s class. The idea had come to me quite suddenly. I could pass it off as pure impulse. Yet the result deprived me of my last chance of seeing my brother before the ‘round-up’ and ensured that I was detained on duty elsewhere until it was all over.

As the laboratory door opened and the class hurried out my brother desperately searched among them to make quite certain he should not miss me from among those jostling figures. When the last one sped by him and I was not there the same look of utter finality came to his eyes as on that afternoon before crossing the dry river bed at home, when he had said tonelessly: ‘They’re after me, Ouboet.’ He stood peering at the emptiness round him as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. I doubt if he saw the science master come out and shut the laboratory door almost in his face. He just stood there looking irrevocably lost while I watched him, unseen, from within, wilfully denying the validity of his need of me or of my chance of helping him. Indeed, suddenly I found my spirit hardening against him. I wished he would go and get his trivial fate over as we had all had to do before him. . . .

Almost as I wished it an exultant shout went up nearby. There was a rush and scurry of heavy school boots: heads and faces of a crowd of young lads appeared outside the window. Whooping, jeering, screaming, tearing, they pulled my brother towards them. He stumbled. As he went down his face was like that of someone who cannot swim being swept out to sea on an unsuspected current.

I turned my back on the window thinking: ‘Well, that’s that. It’ll soon be over now and he’ll be better for the experience.’ I began to tidy up. But I didn’t get far.

I found myself standing, a retort in hand, listening. The noise coming from the quadrangle which before had been like a great roar, now had a new subdued tone. Not that it was dying down. On the contrary it maintained itself in waves, at the same savage pitch. It was the sound of a people all of one mind – or rather of no mind at all. Yes, this united voice came before mind and its cry was filled with the strange cannibal hunger of those who have not yet lived themselves. It was the sound of diverse being made one through the same appetite, and though it issued from young throats the sound itself was old and worn threadbare with time. It was even older, I felt, than the grey old mountain looking down on the school.

I had helped at these ‘round-ups’ often enough. But this was the first time I had had to listen to it apart, and alone. It was the first time, too, that my own flesh and blood had fed its hunger. At the thought I nearly dropped the chemical retort in my hand. Swiftly I wondered what my brother could have wanted of me? What good could seeing me have done? Would my familiar brotherly face in that sea of unknown ones have made him feel that he was not quite alone in his experience? Would my awareness of his own most secret fear have made him feel, in some measure, safe against the excesses of the mob? These seemed such fantastic lines of reasoning that I told myself impatiently: ‘A fat lot of good it is arguing. He’s just got to go through with it. My being there might even make it worse.’

In this way I completed my betrayal. So confident was my negation that it did not even fear drawing attention to itself by argument. But as it settled down comfortably within me, a great silence suddenly fell over the school. I knew that silence well. The victim designate, the sacrifice supreme, the symbol round which the herd ritual turned, was about to be proclaimed. Despite all my resolutions to the contrary, I moved quickly to the one window which gave on the quadrangle. I looked out. My brother, hatless, dishevelled and whiter than I had ever seen him, was lifted shoulder-high by some of the bigger boys in the quadrangle. The moment the crowd saw him a fresh roar burst from it and everyone began mocking him according to their own particular gift until, in a flash, all the streams of insult and humiliation became one, and the whole school, as my brother was carried through the crowd, began chanting derisively:

Why was he born so beautiful,

Why was he born at all?

At the far end of the quadrangle were two long deep water-troughs, relics of the far pioneering days when bearded ‘boys’ rode to their classes on horseback, guns slung across the shoulder. Between the two troughs were two sets of taps, side by side, in the wall. This, by tradition, was a favourite place for sport with newcomers to the school. The taps were convenient for display, and the troughs handy for ducking. My brother was soon forced to stand on the taps and roughly pushed up against the wall, facing the crowd.

I was too far away to see his expression. I know only that, from a distance, he looked like a caricature of a schoolboy. His dark face which had gone startlingly white was all the more so by contrast with his great head of thick black hair. His nose was invisible to me, but his mouth and large black eyes showed up like three blobs of darkness in the centre of his moon-white face. His head was tilted awkwardly on one side and he looked awfully like a clown. When he was firmly in position on the water-taps one of the bigger boys climbed on to a trough beside him, held up his hand for silence and said: ‘Chaps, this newcomer has got to do something for our entertainment. What shall it be?’

After a moment several voices cried out: ‘Let him sing. He says he likes singing. Let him sing!’

‘Right!’ The speaker turned at once to my brother as if expecting him to start singing straight away. My brother, I suspect, was swallowing hard with nervousness and far from ready to sing. The speaker at once punched him with a fist on the shoulder, shouting: ‘Come on, Greenie, you’ve had your orders. Sing, blast you, sing!’

Music as I have told you was peculiarly my brother’s own idiom. With the prospect of singing, even in such circumstances, his courage appeared to come back. He obeyed at once and began to sing:

Ride, ride through the day,

Ride through the moonlight,

Ride, ride through the night

Far, far . . .

The opening notes were perhaps a trifle uncertain but before the end of the first line his gift for music confidently took over. By the second line his little tune sounded well and truly launched. But he didn’t realize, poor devil, that the very faultlessness of his performance was the worst thing that could have happened. The essence of his role in the proceedings was that of scapegoat. He should not only look like one but also behave accordingly. Anything else destroyed his value as a symbol and deprived the crowd of any justification for its fun. The boys, quick to feel that the clear voice singing with such unusual authority was cheating the design of its ritual, uttered an extraordinary howl of disapproval.

My brother faltered. Even at my distance from the scene dismay was plain in his attitude. He tried once again to sing but the din was too much for him. So he stopped altogether, his long arms dangling like sawdust limbs at his side, and stared in bewilderment from one end of the quadrangle to the other, searching wildly, so a sudden sickness in my stomach told me, for my face. At that moment the crowd felt itself again to be in command.

The howl of disapproval became a roar of relieved delight and the school now began to press towards the troughs chanting joyfully:

Greenie’s a liar and a cheat,

He can’t sing a note.

Greenie’s a fraud: drown him,

Drown him in the moat!

For a moment my brother’s white face remained outlined against the afternoon fire flaming along the red-brick quadrangle wall, his eyes ceaselessly searching the screaming, whistling mob of schoolboys. Then he vanished like the last shred of sail of a doomed ship into a grasping sea. I don’t know if you have ever listened to a crowd screaming when you have been alone and divorced from the emotion which motivates it? At any time it is a sobering experience. But when the scream is directed against your own flesh and blood – At that moment my heart, my mind, my own little growth of time all seemed, suddenly, to wither.

I could not see what was happening. My experience told me that my brother was being ducked vigorously in the troughs as we had all been before him. I knew the ‘drown’ in the chant really meant ‘duck’. All the same I was extremely nervous. I watched the struggle and tumult of yelling heads and shoulders by the water-trough, wondering whether it would never end.

Then suddenly again the crowd went motionless and silent. Some of the broader shoulders by the trough heaved, an arm shot up holding aloft a damp coat and shirt, and behind it was slowly lifted my brother’s gasping face and naked torso.

‘Look chaps!’ a voice near him rang out with a curious intonation. ‘Look! Greenie has a boggeltjie.’^fn2

For a second there was silence as the boys stared at my brother held dripping in their midst. Then, as if at a signal, they all began to laugh and shake and twist and turn with hysterical merriment.

I had never seen my school go to these lengths before. I stood at the window as if nailed to the floor while the merriment transformed itself into one of the favoured chants:

Greenie has a boggeltjie,

boggeltjie, boggeltjie,

Greenie has a boggeltjie: one

two and three and

Greenie has –

Then it stopped. The noise fizzled out and the crowd in the quadrangle became uneasily still. A window on the second-floor of the main building had been thrown open. The head and shoulders of the English master were leaning far out of it.

‘Who, might I ask,’ he demanded in a voice precise and icy with anger, ‘Who is in charge here this afternoon?’

‘I am, sir,’ the head of a certain house answered contritely.

‘Well, dismiss your rabble and report to me in my rooms at once,’ the master told him slamming down the window.

However, there was scarcely need to dismiss the school. It needed no telling that it had exceeded itself. It was dispersing of its own accord, taking my brother away with it.

I remained at the window for a while in a state of irresolute agitation. I wanted to rush out and do something to make good what had just happened. I was angry and humiliated and wanted to take it out of all and sundry in the school, not excluding my brother. I wanted also to rush out and comfort my brother. But it all came back to the fact that I still had a duty in the laboratory to perform. The fact of duty won. I tidied up the laboratory, set up the apparatus for the next morning’s experiment and in the process came to the convenient conclusion that by far the best way of helping my brother would be to make light of his experience.

It was evening before I saw him again. He was coming out of the matron’s room carrying a complete change of clothing on his arm. The long corridor was lit only by the reflected flames of a cataclysmic sunset flickering in the tall windows over the main stairway at the far end of the landing. My brother, recognizing my steps, stood still in the open doorway. The light from the Matron’s room fell sideways on his face and left the rest of him indistinct in the rising night-shadow. He stood so still that his face looked like an antique mask hanging on the door behind him. I expected him to greet me as he always did but on this occasion he just stood there, silent.

‘Well,’ I said, assuming the gay nonchalance that I’d decided would be good for him. ‘How did you get on today?’

‘Then you weren’t there?’ His question was flat.

‘Not where?’ I answered seeking respite in evasion.

‘At the round-up.’ He peered hard at me in the twilight.

‘Oh, there!’ I replied easily. ‘No, I was in the science lab most of the afternoon. Had a job for the Science master to do. In fact, I’ve only just finished.’

I stopped. Something in his face, looking up at me out of a past and forgotten dimension of time, stopped me. We stared at each other in a silence so great that I could even hear the Matron’s alarm clock ticking on her table inside the room.

‘I see,’ he said at last with, for one so young, an odd note of finality in his voice. ‘Well, I must hurry or I’ll be late for supper.’

He walked straight past me and ran for the stairs. I was so taken by surprise that I never stopped him. I might even have followed him if the Matron, hearing my voice, hadn’t asked me in to discuss some petty matter.

I saw him again late that night. He was in bed and either asleep or pretending to be. Twenty-four hours before I would without hesitation have called him by name, softly. Now, somehow, I had not the confidence to do so; and so my last natural opportunity for coming to terms with myself vanished.

The school, however, did not abandon the incident with ease. For a few days I was continually being stopped by fellows with sheepish faces all muttering some sort of an apology.

On the night after the round-up at the Monitors’ meeting the Captain of the school addressed me amid a murmur of approval, saying: ‘I’m sure I needn’t tell you, old man, what the school feels about this afternoon. We’re horribly ashamed of letting you down, particularly seeing how you trusted us,’ and so on.

Yet no one begged my brother’s pardon. I seemed to gain in popularity by the incident, but not so my brother. To him the school behaved as if it blamed him, and not itself, for the outrage, almost as if he had tricked them into doing something which otherwise they would never ever have dreamed of doing.

As for myself, that night, just as I was about to drop asleep comforted by the warmth of my reception at the Monitors’ meeting and the Captain’s concern for my feelings, I suddenly heard my young brother’s voice saying again in a tone that I had never heard before: ‘I see.’

Instantly I was wide-awake. That was a phrase he had never used before. Always in the past, when anything went wrong between us he’d shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘It’s nothing, Ouboet.’ But now a new realization followed me like a ghost across the flimsy threshold of my sleep. Dear God, had my truth always got to be my brother’s untruth? My untruth his truth? Was something of this sort implicit in the nature of all betrayal?

I got my prize at the end of the year. My father and mother were there, beside the Governors of the school, to hear the headmaster make a pretty little speech before he announced that I had been chosen as the best all-round man of the year. Amid the shattering applause of masters and boys I climbed on to the school platform for the last time to receive the award. I felt drunk with satisfaction at my achievement yet, as I turned to go back to my place in the hall, I was sobered instantly by the sight of two faces in the applauding crowd. One was my brother’s. He was cheering as if the achievement were his own yet there was something in his eyes which made me uneasy. The other was that of the master who had thrown open a window and intervened on my brother’s behalf on the day of the ‘round-up’. Subsequently he had come to take a close interest in my brother and he was looking at me now with an enigmatic expression on his sensitive face while he politely clapped his hands. It came to me that he looked almost sorry for me.

That night, for the first time, I went with my closest ‘buddies’ to a private bar at the principal hotel in town. There we pledged ourselves in strong drink to be forever one for all and all for one. In the morning, with strangely poignant feelings, many of us, and I was among them, left the school for good.

As I wished my intimates ‘good-bye’ on the platform I felt a lump in my throat and noticed that even the eyes of the school Captain were unusually bright. Then my brother and I climbed, with our parents, into the train and for the last time we all journeyed home together. Yet not even then in the intimacy of a family re-united did we ever discuss what had happened to my brother on his first day at school. Neither he nor I ever mentioned it to my parents nor in our talks with each other. We both behaved as if we had no other desire than to forget the incident as quickly as possible. But we reckoned without the incident itself.

That is another aspect of betrayal. It has a will of its own which feeds on the very will that seeks to deny it. I might have succeeded in forgetting the event if it had not so obstinately persisted in remembering me. As for my brother, I believe that his success was no greater than mine.

There was, for instance, the episode of ‘Stompie’.^fn3

On the broad acres of my father’s high-veld estate we had immense herds of springbok. Unlike many of our neighbours, my father and his grandfather before him had preserved the indigenous game on their land with the greatest care and affection. There was hardly a view from the high-raised stoep stretching all round our white house, which did not show a group of springbok peacefully grazing in the safe distance. I was never tired of watching them. They were seldom still yet never appeared restless for their movements were consistently rhythmical. The patterns they made on the blue and gold veld possessed a curious heraldic quality and on some of our crystal days the herd, from a distance, would appear to open and shut like the flower of chivalry itself. In summer when the distances were set on fire by the sun, when grass, bushes and sequined savannahs were reflected in the quicksilver air in an endless succession of crackling coloured flames, the springbok held their position in the centre of the tumult with pastel delicacy and precision. In winter, when the fires of summer were drawn and the fine dust of burnt-out ashes stood blue and high in the air, they would still be there maintaining a glow of living fire on the raked-out hearth of my native land.

In the spring the scene was made poignant with the keen thrust of new being in the flickering herds. First, the young bucks would emerge to challenge the old rams. They would bound out into the open from the herd like ballet dancers from the wings of time. Backs arched and a ruff of white, magnetic hair parted along their quivering spines to fall like snow upon their fiery flanks, they would dance their challenge in front of the established but ageing rams. The older ones would ignore them as long as possible, but finally the whiff of disdain emanating from the wide-eyed does waiting alertly for the outcome, would sting them into obeying the implacable choreography of spring in their blood. The battle that followed, then, was deadly. The horns of the two males would interlock with speed and clash as swords of heroes in some twilit Celtic scene. The herd, entranced, would follow closely in impassioned rushes, taking every advantage of ground which gave them a better view of the combat. I have often sat on my horse, watching, with the whole herd, normally so fearful of man, pressing tightly round me for a closer view of the fight, snorting and sighing with excitement and suspense. The fight over I have watched the young does, their hieroglyphic eyes under long lashes shining with the tension of spring without and fear of the uncompromising fires within, display their charms to the winner. Passing and re-passing repeatedly in front of him, tails tucked with becoming modesty under their buttocks, they would keep their glances fixed firmly on the ground.

But in the autumn the herds would contract, drawing young and old together in a circle the centre of which turned on their fear of death implicit in the coming winter. All differences among them vanished. Steadily they gave the homesteads an even wider berth, and became acutely wary of our movements as if they sensed that our season of killing, too, was about to begin.

But there was one odd phenomenon that I noticed had maintained itself for some years in the seasonal regroupings of our herd. There was one buck who was never allowed to join the herd in any circumstances whatsoever. Whenever he came near the main herd the bucks, young and old, would combine to drive him away with a ferocity most unusual in so gentle and lovable a species. For a year or two he persisted, often trying several times during a day to rejoin the herd, but each time he was driven off with the same determined ferocity. In the end he gave up trying and was always to be seen following the main body of his fellows at a safe distance. At first I thought he must be some old ram who had incurred unusual hatred by maintaining a dominant position in the herd extending beyond the normal span. However I soon found out that I was wrong.

One day I was lying in ambush for a particularly cunning jackal who for long had been creating great havoc among both sheep and buck, when the main herd of buck came grazing so close by me that I could hear them cropping the grass with quick lips and a crunch of eager mouths. I know of no more attractive sound for it has always brought back to me a sense of being briefly restored to the abiding rhythm and trust of nature. As the sound receded, leaving me alone with only the faint sigh of afternoon air in the sparkling broom-bushes wherein I lay, I felt strangely forsaken. I had decided to abandon my ambush when another faint crunching reached me. Coming towards me, closer even than the herd, was the lone buck. I was amazed to see, then, that he was not old at all. He was young with a lovely, shining coat and glistening black velvet muzzle. Whenever he stopped grazing delicately to sniff the air, he would first stare forlornly at the herd before searching the vast shimmering horizon trembling on the rim of high-veld like an expanding ripple in a pool of blue water. There was no doubt as to his nostalgia. He went on cropping the grass and only when he was immediately opposite me did he stop, lift his head and turn it in my direction. Instantly I knew the reason for his rejection by the herd. He was deformed. One horn lay crumpled behind a saffron ear; the other was stunted and stuck out crookedly in the air. As for his eyes – On that day I was not ready to allow myself to know of what they reminded me.

My brother did not care much for animals, particularly game, but when I first told him all this, he was greatly interested. This buck henceforth found an assured place in his imagination. He began to keep a close and affectionate watch on it. It was he who first called the buck ‘Stompie’. Soon he surprised me by telling me things about the buck which even I had not noticed. It was he, for instance, who one day observed that although the herd had rejected ‘Stompie’ yet he was bound more closely to the herd by that rejection than any of the other animals. They all mated and fought and roamed away on long foraging parties with comparative freedom. But ‘Stompie’ felt compelled to do only what the assembled herd did. When we rounded-up the main body of buck for shooting and drove them down towards the line of guns lying in wait for them, although we ignored Stompie and left him safely outside the ring of mounted drovers, nevertheless he would insist on taking the same fatal route that the herd had taken and, undeterred by the sound of firing ahead, he would come up from behind and with extraordinary and solitary courage run the gauntlet of deadly guns. He would have been shot many times over had we not all contracted for him the compassion which his own kind so conspicuously denied him. So he was spared to live a sort of moon existence, a fated satellite, condemned to circle forever the body which had expelled it. In this role he was not without great value to the herd. Exposed to the danger of man and beast, constantly alone, he developed a remarkable intelligence and heightened presentiment of danger. He was always the first to feel it and then to give the alarm by making a series of prodigious bounds into the air, his pastel coat, sea-foam belly and black-lacquered feet of Pan flashing in the sun. Often an exasperated gun would threaten to shoot him for spoiling our chances in this way, and sending us back to an empty pot. But a curious compassion for the deformed animal always restrained us.

Then came this vacation at the end of my school career. On the first morning I came out of the house at dawn to see the great herd mistily burning in the shadows of the veld. I took a deep breath. It was wonderful to see everything again as it had always been. At that very moment the first level ray of the sun picked out Stompie, standing like a statue on a pedestal of golden earth far to the left of the main herd. Immediately the feeling of contentment fell from me. I could not account for it. All I know is that at that moment I felt about Stompie something I had never felt before. Somehow he spoilt the view for me. In the past I had tended to feel reproach of the herd and even some slight gratitude to the lone buck for giving us the constantly recurring opportunity of displaying a certain magnanimity to life. Now the sight of him in the natural vista that I had loved so long disturbed me. I took it to be merely a temporary emotion but the reaction gained rather than diminished in vigour.

At the end of my vacation I went to continue my studies at University. For six months I never gave Stompie a thought. I came back on holiday again as ready to accept the familiar as ever before. It happened to be our first shooting season since I had left school. On the night of my arrival I was asked if my brother and I couldn’t try next day to relieve the monotony of our winter diet with a taste of the venison we all loved. No sooner had we ridden out into the open than I saw the forlorn shape of Stompie standing to attention in the distance.

‘He’s seen us,’ I remarked to my brother with a trace of exasperation that drew a surprised glance from him. ‘He’s getting more cunning each year. I bet you we’re going to find it difficult to come up to the herd today.’

I had hardly finished when Stompie suddenly left the earth, almost vanished for a second from our startled gaze, and then reappeared flashing high in the blue air. He must have turned round completely in the course of one of the greatest jumps of his life. Again and again he repeated this astonishing performance until the shimmer of fire on the coats of the herd was arrested and it steadied into a front of unwavering flame. For a moment it remained so, a thousand delicate heads moving backwards and forwards between us and that far empty flank where Stompie was dancing out his concern for the safety of the herd. Then the alarm beat too, in the hearts of the animals. Fear is the deepest of our vortexes and determines its own cataclysmic dance in the heart. I never cease to marvel at the immediacy with which terror turns the animal soul inwards upon an empty centre with whirlwind paces. But the speed with which the herd before us contracted even after a cycle of seasons free from fear, seemed to me unusually poignant. It spun across the sleep-indifferent veld like a cyclone of fire, turning and returning upon itself in an anti-clockwise direction as if it believed that there was magic strong enough in devout movement against the sun to turn back Time to its Elysian source and leave behind the threatening present.

‘Told you so,’ I remarked with gloomy satisfaction to my brother riding silently at my side. ‘It’s no good going on.’ I paused. ‘Unless you go on alone and drive the herd to the far side of the farm. Remember that ant-heap near the boundary fence where we dug out the ant-bear last year? I’ll lie up there, and if you can send the herd streaking by between the ant-heap and the fence, I’ll do the rest.’

I had no fear my brother would reject the suggestion since he disliked shooting intensely. Now, to my amazement, however, he seemed to hesitate.

I asked brusquely: ‘Well, what is it?’

‘Sorry, Ouboet, I was just wondering –’ He made no effort to ride on.

‘What?’

‘I don’t know –’

I asked deliberately, ‘Would you rather do the shooting and I’ll round them up?’

A shiver of distaste went through him. ‘No, it’s all right. We’ll do as you said first.’ He pulled his horse into a gallop and rode off.

Watching him go I felt rather sorry for him. Poor devil, he rode so badly! I could see daylight between his seat and the saddle at every stride of the horse. Then I wheeled about, put my horse into a brisk canter and rode for the hills.

The long line of hills ahead my brother and I called the ‘dinosaur hills’. We called them that because in the light of Africa’s Götterdämmerung sunsets they looked like the vertebrae of some fabulous prehistoric fossil. I rode quickly through them, the incense of wild-olive and black-leopard ferns stinging in my nostrils and my horse’s hooves sounding almost blasphemous in the silence. I read an Arabic scribble of wind in the grass’s silken parchment as I emerged, alone, on the great plain beyond. It was as if I had burst a time barrier and come out into a world that had existed before the Word and man’s articulation of it. Far as the eye could see the plain was empty. Not even a lone wanderer’s smoke hung over it. Above, the sky was filled to the brim with blue and only the morning air feebly complained in my ear for neglect of sound.

I rode steadily across the plain towards a tall clump of wild-raisin bushes near the ant-heap of which I had spoken. At the clump of bushes I dismounted, put my horse under cover and then walked to my pre-arranged position behind the ant-heap. I got there none too soon for as I unslung my rifle, carefully laid it down out of the sun’s sparkle and stood up for a last look round, the head of the herd was just emerging from the dark eye of the pass in the hills. For a moment I stood immobile watching them. All our high-veld buck are from birth afflicted with claustrophobia. This fear was drawing them now strung out in a long line through the pass as fast as they could go. At that distance the hills were a smoky purple and the buck themselves a coral and white glitter, but so swiftly did they follow on one another’s heels out into the glittering plain that they looked like a twist of silk threading some ancient needle. However, once clear of the pass they slowed down, stopped, re-formed their tight circle, and faced about.

They had barely done so when Stompie came bounding out into the open. Not far behind came my brother. The lone buck saw him first. Again and again he flashed his warning colours high in the air in a series of prodigious leaps. The herd, unsettled, needed no persuasion. Almost at once the buck were on the move again, not running full out but trotting with their easy, elegant, long-distance stride. Occasionally they would stop, look quickly over their shoulders as if to make certain that indeed a horse and a man with a gun were really on their spoor. Then the sight of my brother still darkening the blue of their day as he came doggedly onwards would huddle them together in panic, and they would mill about uncertainly, as if demanding of that empty sky and lonely plain what they had done to merit such a situation. But then, inevitably, some natural leader would emerge, and provoke the herd into following him, at the trot, deeper into the open veld and nearer to me.

This was for me, always a most moving sight and full of real excitement. Until the very last moment I could never tell what the herd would do. Often when the buck were nearing reasonable rifle range they would suddenly change their instinctive plan, break away at right-angles from their line of advance, out-circle their drovers, and go back the way they had come. It needed only one mistake from my brother to bring this about. He had only to press them too hard, or appear too eager to turn them on one particular flank rather than another, to make them suspicious of his secret intent. Then in a flash they would wheel, break through that wide gap between him and me, and make for the familiar ground from which they had been driven. Considering how indifferent my brother was to sport of this kind the risk of this happening was never remote. Perhaps it was awareness of this that made me over-anxious and, as I watched their progress, tempted me into exposing myself once too often over the shoulder of the ant-heap. Suddenly Stompie began to run as never before, coming fast round on the far flank of the herd which was still trotting easily towards me. Soon he appeared at its head and with arched back and glistening coat did his warning dance in full view of the main body. The herd stopped in a ragged, irresolute line looking rapidly from Stompie to my brother and back. Again Stompie bounded. At that moment he was barely 200 yards from me and as his finely moulded and superbly arched frame appeared high above the grass, the lace of the white ruff on his pastel coat flying wide open from the violence of his bound, I saw him cross and uncross his finely pointed feet twice in the air before he came down to earth again. It was a difficult and brave act, beautifully executed, and perhaps possible only to some lonely outcast denied other forms of expression in life. But, unhappily, on that day it only filled me with fury.

No sooner had he landed and bounded away again at an incredible angle to his descent, than the herd reacted. It wheeled right like a battalion of Royal Guards on parade and charged at incredible speed in the direction that Stompie was pointing, straight for the hills and the invisible plains of home. In fact so rapidly did the herd change course and run that it got between my brother and Stompie, who in obedience to herd tabu had now stopped bounding and had dropped into a slow walk behind the herd whose hooves were still making the plain reverberate like a drum. Then, when he was once more rightly distanced from the fast receding herd, he did not follow them as he normally did, but turned and stopped so that he was standing sideways on to me. From this position he looked first at the pink and sea-foam surge of buck on the fringe of the blue hills, and then straight back at my ant-heap with, as I believed, a look of pure triumph. It was more than I could bear.

In my way I, we all, had been good to that buck. Yet, before I knew what I was doing, I had laid my sights on him thinking, ‘You’ve bloody well asked for this!’ and pressed the trigger. I have always enjoyed the smack of the bullet as it hits the game I’m after, particularly game that has tested my patience and skill. On this occasion I liked it too, but only for as long as the sound lived in my ear. Stompie took the shock of the bullet without a bound or a stagger. For one second he remained in position looking at me without surprise as I stood up from behind my ant-heap. Then his fore-legs began to give way. He struggled to remain upright, gave one last, wild glance at the hills where the herd had fled, before he sank down on to his knees. Like a destroyer holed in the bows and sucked down into smooth waters so his body took a swift glide forward to sink steeply into the hissing grass and vanished from my sight.

Immediately I ran forward to put him out of unnecessary pain. However, he was dead when I reached him, lying on his side with large brown eyes wide open, filled with hurt and turning purple between the blue of the day without and fall of night within. I cut his throat quickly. I stood up to wipe my hands and knife. The last of the herd was vanishing down the pass. Behind me a horse snorted and jingled its bridle chain. I swung about. My brother was there sitting on his horse, his face white as chalk, looking at Stompie.

‘Well?’ I asked, pretending to take it for granted that he was about to dismount to give me a hand cleaning the buck: ‘Not much of a bag for all that work, is it?’

He made no answer but went on staring past me at the stained earth.

That put me on the defensive. ‘What’s biting you?’ I said. ‘Aren’t you going to help?’

He shook his heavy head and said with difficulty, his eyes bright with the unanswerable rhetoric of tears: ‘No, Ouboet. I’m not going to help.’ Then he burst out suddenly, ‘How could you? How could you do such a thing?’

‘Don’t be an ass,’ I answered, more perturbed than I cared to show. ‘Stompie asked for it. Besides I probably did him a kindness. He can’t have enjoyed himself much. No one wanted him around.’

It was then that my brother became more violent than I had ever seen him. ‘How d’you know?’ he asked passionately. ‘Life must have wanted him or he would never have been born.’

This time there was no holding his tears. I became so upset that I sent him off home on his own, thinking I could then clean and truss Stompie at peace. But all the time I was haunted by that look of living hurt still lingering in the dead buck’s eyes. I seemed to have known that look all my life though never so poignantly or at such close quarters. For instance, had I not seen something of the sort a year before in my brother’s eyes at school? The question of it gripped my mind like the first nip of winter frost in the shadows cast by a watery autumn sun. It made me shiver and I tried to dismiss the association as sheer fantasy. Yet from that time onwards, although I continued shooting for years, I never again enjoyed it as before. I shot purely out of habit. My liking for it ended that morning with Stompie on the wide plain on the far side of the prehistoric ridge at the back of the white walls of our home. And my liking for Stompie? How and when had that died? Was Stompie perhaps condemned on the afternoon when I abandoned my brother to the school’s strange hunger? But I am better at questions than answers. All I know for certain is that it is on such dubious trifles as these that the ‘nothingness’ of which I have spoken feeds and grows great.

^fn1 Kalwerhok: calfpen.

^fn2 Boggel: hunch; Tjie: diminutive.

^fn3 Stompie is the diminutive of stomp – stump, but it is also slang for the discarded fag-end of a cigar or cigarette and is used as both here.

4 The Growth of Nothing

MY BROTHER AND I never spoke of Stompie again. The incident seemed to glide into place naturally beside the other unmentionable episode and to form a pair of creatures waiting in the shadow of my mind for their native night to fall. There were even long periods when I succeeded in forgetting them altogether. I was aided and abetted in this by the fact that life afflicts the young with appetites and longings so violent and vivid as to lend reality to the illusion that they are permanent and that their satisfaction is purpose enough. I had my university to get through, then my law studies to conclude and finally my own legal practice to set up. I did all this in a manner which satisfied the high expectations everyone had of me. True, towards the end of my law examinations I was conscious for the first time of a slightly sagging interest in the mechanics of learning. From time to time I wondered whether what I was doing was as important and urgent as it seemed to be. This may even have been noticeable in the results of my examinations. However, the change was so slight and there were so many valid excuses to be made for it since I had so many interests that it escaped both particular and general comment. Yet sometimes in the very midst of my activities and at all sorts of odd and unexpected moments, something would stir in the shadows: there was a movement of things long forgotten as if to remind me that they were still waiting for their own night-fall. This awareness always was accompanied by a feeling of indefinable dismay; a startling of my whole being. And I never got used to it. Perhaps because what we call ‘forgetfulness’ and ‘neglect’ are the favourite sustenances of a certain part of ourselves. Suddenly, in a street crowded with traffic, my step would falter because some leopard light on a white wall reminded me of that morning when my brother and I rode out of the white gates to shoot on the other side of the hills on the great plain. Sometimes at the climax of a complicated plea for the prosecution I would find myself stammering and forced to play for time by drinking a glass of water I did not need because the look in the black eyes of a handcuffed African prisoner waiting his turn in the dock had reminded me, poignantly, of my own past with my brother. I told myself that it was absurd, even unjust that such remote events should be allowed to keep such determined pace with my grown-up self. But none of these admirable and undoubtedly valid considerations influenced their behaviour or their effect on me. They lived on from year to year, thriving apart from the main stream of life within me, with a volition and dark reason all their own and in time their self-announcements seemed to gain in vigour. But even worse than their disconcerting reappearances in a recognizable dimension of my spirit was their invisible subversion.

As I grew older I became more and more afraid of being either alone or unoccupied. I found that my leisured moments were invaded by a strange uneasiness and bleakness. Particularly I could not bear to be alone during the hours of mid-afternoon, for this period seemed to acquire its own bleak, masterful intent which lived itself out quite apart from me. I could no longer hear the wind rising (a sound I had always loved) without feeling unbearably sad because now my spirit seemed to be incapable of response. And the sound of a cockcrow, even in bright daylight, always gave me the feeling that I was groping in a crepuscular sleep gripped by a horror for which there was never a name.

At the time, of course, I did not understand this sabotage in the invisible dimensions of my being. That came about only many years later. So I became a sufferer denied even the comfort of knowing the name of his disease; and that feeling of uncertainty promptly planted its own colony of uneasiness on the mainland of my spirit. I became, if you like, a haunted person. Yes, I know the meaning of ghosts. And we who discount them do so only because we look for them in the wrong dimension. We think of them as a return of the bodily dead from their graves. But these dead have no need to return to life for they are not the dead. As I see it what has once given life to the spirit can never again be dead in the dimension of the spirit. So we mistake the shadow for the substance; confuse the reflection and the reality. Ghosts do not follow physical death, but rather they precede life. The only death the spirit recognizes is the denial of birth to that which strives to be born: those realities in ourselves that we have not allowed to live. The real ghost is a strange, persistent beggar at a narrow door asking to be born; asking, again and again, for admission at the gateway of our lives. Such ghosts I had, and thus, beyond all reason, I continued to be haunted.

It made no difference that I worked hard, that I took good care never to be idle and seldom alone, that I did my duty conscientiously wherever I saw it clearly, that I earned the envy and esteem of my fellow-men in almost equal measure, that I took my vacations regularly in good company by the sea. . . . This subtle chill of ‘nothingness’, of a cold, phantom presence silently trying and re-trying the handle of my door, turned the warmth of my ardent living tepid. Yet for many years I doubt if any of my contemporaries suspected that anything was wrong with me. Occasionally a woman would catch me out. In the midst of some cheerful gathering she would ask with curious urgency: ‘What’s happened? You look as if something awful had happened?’ I would laugh off the question, for how could I explain that I myself had no inkling of the truth and that in the past, when I had tried to track down the answer, it had led only to a jumble of unrelated visions.

It was only the forward thrust of youth in me and the support, visible and invisible, which the approval and expectation of our community gave me which enabled me to carry on, without wavering, until I was thirty-two. Then, for the first time, I was not merely saddened but frightened. The spirit of play declined in me. I began to be increasingly worried that what I had achieved was without meaning and my success merely an illusion. I would find myself waking up in the small hours of the morning not knowing where I was or who I was. I would appear in court or attend a public function with the feeling that I was not really there at all. I would look at the church clock and think: ‘But that’s not my time at all; that’s not the hour I keep.’ Or glance at the weathercock swinging complacently on its perilous perch and long to cry: ‘For God’s sake teach your kind to be as silent as you are.’

For the first time too the world around me began to indicate that it might have misgivings. One day an old acquaintance buttonholed me in the club to say with flattering solicitude: ‘You know, young fellow-me-lad, we all think you’re overdoing things a bit. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy! Why not come up north with me and put in a month’s shooting on my ranch?’

I could only protest and decline with polite gratitude. Impossible to explain that for years now I had shot only from necessity, for, if there was one thing more than another which made my life seem like the endless repetition of a meaningless pattern, it was this automatic yearly recurrence of a long shooting excursion up north.

Later one or two elderly women, interested in my welfare, began to urge me to marry. ‘You’re not looking after yourself properly. You need someone to take care of you.’ And then, with a touch of archness, ‘Don’t leave it too long!’ I forced a laugh at their concern and said that as soon as I met the right person I wouldn’t hesitate. But on these occasions the question which always rose immediately to the surface of my mind was: ‘How take on somebody else when I can’t even know myself?’

Yes, the paradox which more than any other disturbed my nights was just that: my familiar self was a stranger to me, and the more deeply I felt this the less inclined I was to visit my home. While my parents were still alive I went occasionally to visit them though always with reluctance. When they died I sold the home in the village where I was born and only once went to stay with my brother on the farm which he had inherited. Of that night I remember clearly only one incident. One evening, after a dinner party, I asked my brother to sing for us. Before he could reply the girl he was to marry said with surprise ‘But didn’t you know, Cousin, he never sings any more.’ The answer went deep into me like a knife-stab in the dark.

I never visited him again after that although I was repeatedly pressed and as often promised to do so. I claimed pressure of work which, in the past, would have been a reasonable excuse. But at this period the bitter process of cancellation within me had reached such a point that there were times when I could barely summon up the energy to get up in the mornings or, once dressed, to get through the day. Often, the day over, I was unable to undress for bed. This distaste of life, joined to my fear of the distaste, lengthened in my heart like my own evening shadow cast behind me on a great, yellow plain of the high-veld. When at last one September our African spring came, it fell on my torn and tattered senses like the rap of a policeman at my own door with a warrant for my arrest. I was at my wits’ end – and my wits, as my career showed, were not inconsiderable.

At that moment the War came.

War is animal, not vegetable or mineral. It should be proclaimed as such by the beast blowing his own apocalyptic trumpet and sending scarlet heralds on coal-black horses to spread the news from one land’s end to the other so that all can recognize him for what he is.

It came to us, however, quite differently. We read the news on the club teleprinter whose main duty it was to keep us posted of the latest market prices, as we crowded round it that Sunday before lunch, glasses of wine in hand. I joined with the rest in the many expressions of horror that went up in the room. I, too, called it a crime against God and humanity. I warmly supported the oldest member when, tears streaming down his smooth pink cheeks, he called Heaven to witness that the war was not of our seeking and had been thrust on us despite the most honourable efforts to avoid it. But even as he spoke and I agreed I was aware of a barely perceptible sense of relief, a feeling as if an obstruction which had been damming the waters of life and rendering them stagnant had now broken through and the stream was once more flowing fast towards the sea.

Not that I want to exaggerate. This is an issue of war and I want to be dead accurate. But it is not easy. In order to be so I have to deal in a currency which the civilized, Christian heart considers counterfeit; to pursue considerations to which no decent mind will wittingly own. Yet my impression that Sunday morning was that the company in the teleprinter room shared with me a lifting of tension. This, of course, had its legitimate aspect. For a long time the fear of war had been hanging over our heads: the removal of that uncertainty was accompanied by a certain relief. Yet, now that doubt was slain and the ancient theatre, closed for so long, was open once more and yet another great drama of life and death was about to be acted, it was noteworthy how the feeling of having a definite part to play in a world-premiere quickly invested the many persons in the room with a new sense of importance and an emotion of differences overcome. I saw two bitter enemies in the club who had not spoken to each other for years, simultaneously pledge themselves, with moist eyes, in an extra measure of wine. I myself felt the burden of meaningless which had been growing in me so alarmingly of late fall away and the savour returned to my tongue. I felt a new reinstatement of purpose in my life, and a promise of greater significance to come.

I stood at the window of the club. Alone for a moment, absorbed in my own thoughts, I listened to sirens and factory hooters breaking the Sunday calm to announce the news. Their tones of sinister hysteria affected the whole community. People walking in the street suddenly swung out into a stride, cars doubled their normal speed, all the leisurely, Sunday traffic began to hasten. I saw a policeman overlooking flagrant breaches of traffic regulations, and all sorts and conditions of men who had never before mixed together now gathered spontaneously on the street corners talking with extraordinary animation and gesticulating dramatically in a manner unknown in our community. Behind me, too, the club buzzed like a beehive. The sound reminded me of – of – I could only think of the noise in the quadrangle at school the afternoon just before the ‘round-up’. I felt my body stiffen as the finger of the implacable memory touched me. Then deliberately I forced myself to relax. The war – real fighting – I told myself savagely, would soon put an end to this shadow-boxing that I had endured for so many years. Yes, I even felt a kind of grim satisfaction at the thought.

I was just about to heed the voices of my friends calling me back to the bar when, among all those animated fast-moving and quickly-changing figures without, my eye was caught and held by one inconspicuous scene. A woman and a child by her waiting no doubt for a man, were sitting apart from the crowd in the swirling streets on an iron bench under the Royal Palm in front of our imposing gates. The woman had her arm thrown out protectively round the child. Her shoulders were shaking. Clearly she was crying. When I turned away she was still crying. It was a scene I never forgot, and that went to join the other shadows in my mind, fighting for recognition.

All that Sunday my mind worked with a vigour and a precision I had not known for long. I did not worry at all about my own personal safety. I had an idea I would be all right in battle and good at killing. Ignorant of the origins of this terrible need of life for death in the living issue that was upon us, I dismissed them. All my instinct for action and my confidence seemed promptly to return to me. I left the club after a quick lunch, went to my chambers and wound up my affairs. I gave my clerks and juniors detailed instructions in writing as to how to carry on in my absence. It was nearly midnight when I finished, and yet for the first time in years I did not feel tired. I went home, still curiously exhilarated, woke up my housekeeper and repeated my performance there. I did not get to bed until four in the morning. Even so I was up by seven with a small suitcase packed with a few essentials. Soon after, still filled with this curious new eagerness, I presented myself at our military headquarters. I was nearly an hour too early and a sleepy sergeant, impatient for his relief, angrily told me so. However, I insisted, with such an assumption of authority, on seeing one of the duty officers that he had no option but to fetch him. As a result I was the first volunteer to be enrolled for the war in our city. In all this I behaved as if in accordance to a plan worked out years before for just such an emergency. I never thought about what to do next; each step presented itself to me in an unhesitating sequence of an apparently predetermined logic, even down to this question of volunteering and entering the army through the ranks. I do not suppose that I really anticipated being left there long. Perhaps if I had I would have enlisted as an officer straight away, as it was easy to do in my country. Indeed, probably the more normal thing to do would have been quietly to apply for a commission and patiently wait my turn with the rest of my friends. But my instinct for the drama of the occasion, my yearning to keep close to this revived feeling of purpose, would have none of that. It exacted this precipitate gesture from me and persuaded me, at the same time, that this was the natural thing to do. The persuasion seemed more than justified when that evening, sitting in barracks in a brand-new uniform, I read in the evening newspapers: City’s youngest K.C. leads nation-wide rush to the colours: Famous barrister joins the ranks.