The Complete Short Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

the mothers in old-fashioned
florals and the fathers in boaters, all cool and mellow as the lemonade being
served, under the marquee by the lake, on trays borne by pale-faced,
black-frocked, white-filled maids. Daphne thought of the heat and glare of
Chakata’s farm, the smell of the natives, and immediately felt bloated and gross.
    A few days later, while
she was dancing cheek-to-cheek with Ronald, at the tea-dance provided by the
hotel on the sea-front, to the strains of
     
    The fundamental
things apply
    As time goes by
     
    — at the same moment young Jan du Toit was
informing the assembled family that Daphne’s fiancé was a married man.
    Her Aunt Sonji spoke to
Daphne next morning.
    Daphne said, ‘He’s the
captain of his local cricket team.’
    ‘He could still be a
married man,’ said Sonji.
    By lunch-time the
information was confirmed, and by sundown the corvette had sailed.
    Daphne felt irrationally
that it was just the sort of thing one would expect to happen while living with
the du Toits. She removed to Durban, treating the English ships with rather
more caution than hitherto. She eschewed altogether the American navy which had
begun to put in frequent appearances.
    Among her colleagues at
the school where she taught in Durban was a middle-aged art master who had
emigrated from Bristol some years before the war. He saw England as the
Barbarian State which had condemned him to be an art master instead of an
artist. He spoke often to Daphne on these said lines, but she was not
listening. Or rather, what she was listening to were the accidentals of this
discourse. ‘Take a fashionable portrait painter,’ he would say. ‘He is prepared
to flatter his wealthy patrons — or more often patronesses. He’s willing to
turn ‘em out pretty on the canvas. He can then afford to take a Queen Anne
house in Kensington, Chelsea, or Hampstead, somewhere like that. He turns the
attic into a studio, a great window frontage. A man I know was at college with
me, he’s a fashionable portrait painter now, has a studio overlooking the
Regent’s Canal, gives parties, goes everywhere, Henley, Ascot, titled people,
dress designers, film people. That’s the sort of successful artist England
produces today.’
    Daphne’s mind played
like the sun over the words ‘Queen Anne house’, ‘Kensington’, ‘Chelsea’, ‘Studio’,
‘Regent’s Canal’, ‘Henley’. She had ears for nothing else.
    ‘Now take another
fellow,’ continued the art master, ‘I knew at college. He hadn’t much talent,
rather ultra-modern, but he wanted to be an artist and he wouldn’t be anything
else. What has he got for it? The last time I saw him he hadn’t the price of a
tube of paint. He was sharing a Soho attic with another artist — who’s since
become famous as a theatrical designer incidentally — name G.T. Marvell. Heard
of him?’
    ‘No,’ Daphne said.
    ‘Well, he’s famous now.’
    ‘Oh, I see.’
    ‘But the artist he was
living with in Soho never got anywhere. They used to partition the room with
blankets and clothes hung on a piece of rope. That’s the sort of thing you get
in Soho. The native in the bush is better off than the artist in England.’
    Daphne took home all
such speeches of discouragement, and pondered them with delight: ‘Soho’, ‘poet’,
‘attic’, ‘artist’.
     
    In 1946, at last, she got a place on a
boat. She went to say goodbye to Chakata. She sat with the ageing man on the
stoep.
    ‘Why did you never
go back to England for a visit?’ she said.
    ‘There has always been
too much to do on the farm,’ he said. ‘I could never leave it.’ But his head
inclined towards the room at the back of the stoep, where Mrs Chakata lay on
her bed, the whisky and the revolver by her side. Daphne understood how
Chakata, having made a mistake in marriage, could never have taken Mrs Chakata
home to the English Pattersons, nor could he ever have left her in the Colony,
even with friends, for he was a man