Free The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer Page A

they’ll get those dirty women to steal it out of your trousers. -
    Izak looked softly from side to side, enjoying attention.
    The fowls were quarrelling for places to roost on stumps of a tree hung with loops of iron and bits of wire; someone made as if to beat at them and the dark shape of the tree blew up.
    — They’ll take something else out of his trousers —
    — That’s nice, Izak? Ay? He likes that —
    Jacobus said to the quiet face of the man without work — Well, what does he say? —
    But the man in the blood-gilded gum-boots whom they all thought of simply as Dorcas’s husband, since she was the daughter of one of them, of Alina - answered directly, in his place. — Even if he had a pass it’s no good, man. There’s no work now. That time when I talked to you . . . but not now. It was the time at Christmas, before they stopped the farmers sending so many cattle. It was when too many cattle were coming at once. They were dying at the station. You remember? The slaughter-house was full up, we couldn’t do anything. The farmers were sending more and more . . . because of no rain . . .
    The man who was looking for work shook his head slowly before them all. The black and white checked cap defined young Izak’s head clearly, but this head was still dusty from the morning’s work, it had a mothy dimness, half-effacing itself into the perimeter of the firelight. The fowls settled again; the children coughed in their sleep; a woman brought round the last of the beer.
    — You keep away from there, Izak. No one should send you, soon you’ll begin going on your own and I tell you, that’s the beginning of trouble for you. You’ll give me trouble and that will be the end of it, for you. -
    Nobody laughed. Nobody said anything. Jacobus was speaking and he must be heard through.
    — That’s where they came from, not from the location; the people who left that - down there at the river. -
    Nobody spoke but the quality of their presence had changed; quite suddenly, drawn away at the touch of these words, clenched as the tendrils of a sea-anemone move with dumb-show recoil deep under water.
    — I’m telling you. -
    Izak looked from one to the other, for a clue, quite forgetting. For the moment the withdrawal seemed another reproof directed at himself - what had he done now? - Then the touch reached him, too. He remembered.
    Jacobus took a gulp of beer, releasing them from the necessity to bring among them something no one spoke of. But just as they were beginning to talk about other things, he broke in again — I don’t ask anyone there. I won’t say this one or that one. Who or who. But all the same - He rapped four fingers at the bony plate of his breast, behind which this knowledge, for all of them, was thrust away.
    This house smells of cat. For weeks now. Every time he comes, he is greeted by it. It’s because the place is shut up all week.
    She never ever came to the house.
    Although he has spoken to the servants nothing seems to be done. There are too many cats around and God knows how they keep alive, anyway. He has suggested to Jacobus that there are too many cats, but being Jacobus, he just grins and counters with another positive statement: There are too many rats. Cattle apart, you can’t get them to care for any animal. He would like to keep a beautiful dog on the farm, a collie or a pointer, but there’s no one to look after it during the week.
    The smell is strongest in the bathroom. Of course, if a cat gets shut inside, it will often do its business in the bath. There is no disinfectant to pour down the plughole. He keeps forgetting to buy something. Even cologne would do.
    ‘I’m sending you to fetch a most charming and beautiful woman.’ ‘A most delightful man will be coming to fetch you.’ - So that people are already embarrassed and prepared to be bored with each other before they are thrown together in this calculated, voyeur’s match-making game. He asked his passenger to get