In Pursuit of the English Read Online Free PDF

caught.
    ‘Ya,’ he said, looking at me severely, ‘you must get the management to cook it for you. I can tell you, you need feeding up. I can see it. The English can’t cook. They can’t eat. You look very bad.’
    ‘The management,’ I said, ‘is Afrikaans.’
    ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘I will go and make enquiries.’ I heard him stride over the bare boards of the passage. A silence. He came back, still swinging the fish by a loop of string through his forefinger. ‘I can’t give her this fish,’ he said. ‘She would not cook it as it should be cooked. And what are you doing here? This place is going to be pulled down, and instead we shall have a fine modern hotel with all conveniences for the tourists.’ He laid the fish on the floor. The room was pervaded with a loud smell of salt, sea and fish. It was an extremely hot afternoon.
    ‘Piet, I wish you’d take that fish away. People are very sensitive in this place. You’d be surprised.’
    He nodded, with solemnity. ‘I thought so,’ he said, ‘it’s that English colony you’ve been living in. It makes people suspicious and conventional. In a minute you will be telling me not to speak so loudly.’
    Piet did not look himself at all. Or rather, he was wearing his smug look, which went with his public personality. He was a tall man, rangy, with a high bounding stride. He had a long, pale portentous face. He wore his hair rather long. He also wore, for the benefit of his trade, flapping and colourful clothes. He had the ability to appear, by slightly tightening the muscles of his face, like a pale and enduring Christ. This is not at all what his character was. In fact I have never known a man who enjoyed himself more wholeheartedly than he did. He had a smile that spread, wicked and sly, from cheekbone to cheekbone, and eyes that crinkled amusement. Not, however, at the moment.
    ‘You have come at a bad time,’ he said. ‘I’m not happy. I have realized that in three months I shall be forty. I have only ten years to live, I have always known that I shall die at fifty. It is a terrible thing to understand suddenly – death is approaching in great silent strides.’ He smiled, slightly, sideways, his eyes narrowed, as it were listening to the footsteps of death. ‘Ya,’ he said. ‘Ya. Ten years. So much to do, so little done.’ With a great effort he prevented himself from laughing, and sighed deeply instead.
    Piet is not the only man I’ve known who has sentencedhimself to death in advance. I know a doctor, for instance, a man of the highest intelligence moreover, who decided when he was thirty-six that he had ten years to live, and planned his life accordingly. It seems the Medical Association, or some such body, had announced that the average age for doctors to die was at forty-six, and from coronary thrombosis. Meeting this man after an interval, I pointed out that he now had only five years to live, and I trusted he was making good use of his time. But the BMA had meanwhile raised the statistical life of a doctor by ten years, and so things were not so urgent after all.
    ‘But there will be a silver lining to my personal tragedy,’ said Piet. ‘When my death is announced in the Press, for the first time in her history South Africa will be united.’
    ‘How is that?’
    ‘Surely you can imagine for yourself? Ya, think of it. Think of that morning. It will be very hot. The pigeons will be cooing in the trees. Then the news will come. The pigeons will stop cooing. In every town, in every village, in every little dorp, there will be a silence like the end of the world. Then there will rise into the still air a single cry of agony. Then from every house will come wailing and weeping. From every house will rush weeping women, old women, young women, wives, mothers, the Mayor’s daughter and the wife of the linesman. They will look at each other. By their tears they will know each other as sisters. They will run into each other’s arms. English