The Catch

His thin strong bony legs passed by at eye level every morning as they lay, stranded on the hard smooth sand. Washed up thankfully out of the swirl and buffet of the city, they were happy to lie there, but because they were accustomed to telling the time by their nerves' response to the different tensions of the city–children crying in flats, lorries going heavily, and bicycles jangling for early morning, skid of tires, sound of frying, and the human insect noise of thousands talking and walking and eating at midday–the tensionless shore keyed only to the tide gave them a sense of timelessness that, however much they rejoiced mentally, troubled their habit-impressed bodies with a lack of pressure. So the sound of his feet, thudding nearer over the sand, passing their heads with the deep sound of a man breathing in the heat above the rolled-up faded trousers, passing away up the beach and shrinking into the figure of an Indian fisherman, began to be something to be waited for. His coming and going divided the morning into three; the short early time before he passed, the time when he was actually passing, and the largish chunk of warm midday that followed when he had gone.

After a few days, he began to say good morning, and looking up, they found his face, a long head with a shining dark dome surrounded with curly hair given a stronger liveliness by the sharp coarse strokes of grey hairs, the beautiful curved nose handed out so impartially to Indians, dark eyes slightly bloodshot from the sun, a wide muscular mouth smiling on strong uneven teeth that projected slightly like the good useful teeth of an animal. But it was by his legs they would have known him; the dark, dull-skinned feet with the few black hairs on the big toe, the long hard shaft of the shin tightly covered with smooth shining skin, the pull of the tendons at his ankle like the taut ropes that control the sails of a ship.

They idly watched him go, envious of his fisherman's life not because they could ever really have lived it themselves, but because it had about it the frame of their holiday freedom. They looked at him with the curious respect which people feel for one who has put a little space between himself and the rest of the world. "It's a good life," said the young man, the words not quite hitting the nail of this respect. "I can just see you... ,"said the girl, smiling. She saw him in his blue creased suit, carrying a bottle of brandy wrapped in brown paper, a packet of bananas, and the evening paper.

"He's got a nice open face," said the young man. "He wouldn't have a face like that if he worked as a waiter at the hotel."

But when they spoke to him one morning when he was fishing along the surf for chad right in front of them, they found that he like themselves was only on holiday from a more complicated pattern of life. He worked five or six miles away at the sugar refinery, and this was his annual two weeks. He spent it fishing, he told them, because that was what he liked to do with his Sundays. He grinned his strong smile, lifting his chin out to sea as he swung his spoon glittering into the coming wave. They stood by like children, tugging one another back when he cast his line, closing in to peer with their hands behind their backs when he pulled in the flat silver fish and pushed the heads into the sand. They asked him questions, and he answered with a kind of open pleasure, as if discounting his position as a man of skill, a performer before an audience, out of friendliness. And they questioned animatedly, feeling the knowledge that he too was on holiday was a sudden intimacy between them, like the discovery between strangers that they share a friend. The fact that he was an Indian troubled them hardly at all. They almost forgot he was an Indian. And this too, though they did not know it, produced a lightening of the heart, a desire to do conversational frolics with a free tongue the way one stretches and kicks up one's legs in the sun after confinement in a close darkroom.

"Why not get the camera?" said the girl, beginning to help with the fish as they were brought in. And the young man went away over the sand and came back adjusting the complications of his gadget with the seriousness of the amateur. He knelt in the wet sand that gave beneath his weight with a wet grinding, trying to catch the moment of skill in the fisherman's face. The girl watched quietly, biting her lip for the still second when the camera blinked. A ware but not in the least self-conscious of the fact that he was the subject, the Indian went on with his fishing, now and then parenthetically smiling his long-toothed smile.

The tendrils of their friendship were drawn in sharply for a moment when, putting his catch into a sack, he enquired naturally, "Would you like to buy one for lunch, sir?" Down on his haunches with a springy strand of hair blowing back and forth over his ear, he could not know what a swift recoil closed back through the air over his head. He wanted to sell something. Disappointment as much as a satisfied dig in the ribs from opportunist prejudice stiffened them momentarily. Of course, he was not in quite the same position as themselves, after all. They shifted their attitude slightly."Well, we live at the hotel, you see," said the girl.He tied the mouth of the sack and looked up with a laugh. "Of course!" he smiled, shaking his head. "You couldn't cook it." His lack of embarrassment immediately made things easy.

"Do you ever sell fish to the hotel?" asked the young man. "We must keep a lookout for it."

"No-no, not really," said the Indian. "I don't sell much of my fish-mostly we eat it up there," he lifted his eyebrows to the hills, brilliant with cane. "It's only sometimes I sell it."

The girl felt the dismay of having mistaken a privilege for an imposition. '(Oh well," she smiled at him charmingly, "that's a pity. Anyway, I suppose the hotel has to be sure of a regular supply."

"That's right," he said. "I only fish in my spare time."

He was gone, firmly up the beach, his strong feet making clefts in the sand like the muscular claws of a big strong­ legged bird.

"You'll see the pictures in a few days," shouted the girl. He stopped and turned with a grin. "That's nothing," he said. "Wait till I catch something big. Perhaps soon I'll get some­ thing worth taking."

He was "their Indian." When they went home they might remember the holiday by him as you might remember a particular holiday as the one when you used to play with a spaniel on the beach every day. It would be, of course, a nameless spaniel, an ownerless spaniel, an entertaining creature existing nowhere in your life outside that holiday, yet bound with absolute intimacy within that holiday itself. And as an animal becomes more human every day, so every day the quality of their talk with the Indian had to change; the simple question-and-answer relation that goes with the celluloid pop of a ping-pong ball and does so well for all inferiors, foreigners, and children became suddenly a toy ( the Indian was grown-up and might smile at it). They did not know his name, and now, although they might have asked the first day and got away with it, it was suddenly impossible, because he didn't ask them theirs. So their you's and he's and I's took on the positiveness of names, and yet seemed to deepen their sense of communication by the fact that they introduced none of the objectivity that names must always bring. He spoke to them quite a lot about Johannesburg, to which he assumed they must belong, as that was his generalization of city life, and he knew, sympathetically, that they were city people. And although they didn't live there, but somewhere near on a smaller pattern, they answered as if they did. They also talked a little of his life; or rather of the processes of the sugar refinery from which his life depended. They found it fascinating.

"If I were working, I'd try and arrange for you to come and see it," he said, pausing, with his familiar taking his own time, and then looking directly smiling at them, his head tilted a little, the proud, almost rueful way one looks at two attractive children. They responded to his mature pleasure in them with a diffusion of warm youth that exuded from their skin as sweat is released at the touch of fear. "What a fascinating person he is!" they would say to one another, curious.

But mostly they talked about fishing, the sea, and the particular stretch of coast on which they were living. The Indian knew the sea–at home the couple would have said he "loved" it–and from the look of it he could say whether the water would be hot or cold, safe or nursing an evil grievance of currents, evenly rolling or sucking at the land in a fierce backwash. He knew, as magically to them as a diviner feeling the pull of water beneath the ground, where the fish would be when the. wind blew from the east, when it didn't blow at all, and when clouds covered in from the hills to the horizon. He stood on the slippery rocks with them and saw as they did, a great plain of heaving water, empty and unreadable as infinity; but he saw a hard greedy life going on down in there, shining plump bodies gaping swiftly close together through the blind green, tentacles like dark hands feeling over the deep rocks. And he would say, coming past them in his salt­stiff old trousers that seemed to put to shame clothes meekly washed in soap and tap water, "Over there at the far rocks this morning."

They saw him most days; but always only in the morning. By afternoon they had had enough of the beach, and wanted to play golf on the closely green course that mapped inland through the man-high cane as though a barber had run a pair of clippers through a fine head of hair, or to sit reading old hotel magazines on the porch whose windows were so bleared with salt air that looking through them was like seeing with the opaque eyes of an old man. The beach was hot and faraway; one day after lunch when a man came up from the sand and said as he passed their chairs, "There's someone looking for you down there. An Indian's caught a huge salmon and he says you've promised to photograph it for him,"-they sat back and looked at one another with a kind of lazy exasperation. They felt weak and unwilling, defeating interest.

"Go on," she said. "You must go."

''It had to be right after lunch," he grumbled, smiling. "Oh go on," she insisted, head tilted. She herself did not move, but remained sitting back with her chin dropped to her chest, whilst he fetched the camera and went jogging off down the steep path through the bush. She pictured the salmon. She had never seen a salmon: it would be pink and powerfully agile; how big? She could not imagine.

A child came racing up from the beach, all gasps. "Your husband says," saying it word for word, "he says you must come down right away and you must bring the film with you. It's in the little dressing-table drawer under his handkerchiefs." She swung out of her chair as if she had been ready to go. The small boy ran before her all the way down to the beach, skidding on the stony path. Her husband was waving incoherently from the sand, urgent and excited as a waving flag. Not understanding, she began to hurry too.

"Like this!" he was shouting, "Like this! Never seen any­ thing like it! It must weigh eighty pounds-," his hands sized out a great hunk of air.

But where?" she cried impatiently, not wanting to be told, but to see.

It's right up the beach. He's gone to fetch it. I'd forgotten the film was finished, so when I got there, it was no use. I had to come back, and he said he'd lug it along here." Yet he hadn't been able to leave the beach to get the film himself; he wanted to be there to show the fish to anyone who came along; he couldn't have borne to have some one see it without him, who had seen it first.

At last the Indian came round the paw of the bay, a tiny black stick-shape detected moving alive along the beached waterline of black drift-sticks, and as he drew nearer he took on a shape, and then, more distinctly, the shape divided, another shape detached itself from the first, and there he was–a man hurrying heavily with a huge fish slung from his shoulder to his heels. "0-o-h !" cried the girl, knuckle of her first finger caught between her teeth. The Indian's path wavered, as if he staggered under the weight, and his forearms and hands, gripping the mouth of the fish, were bent stiff as knives against his chest. Long strands of grey curly hair blew over from the back of his head along his bright high forehead, that held the sun in a concentric blur of light on its domed prominence.

"Go and help him," the girl said to her husband, shaming him. He was standing laughing proudly, like a spectator watching the winner come in at a race. He was startled he hadn't gone himself: "'Shall I?" he said, already going.

They staggered up with the fish between them, panting heavily, and dropped the dead weight of the great creature with a scramble and thud upon the sand. It was as if they had rescued someone from the sea. They stood back that they might feel the relief of their burden, and the land might receive the body. But what a beautiful creature lay there! Through the powdering of sand, mother-of-pearl shone up. A great round glass eye looked out.

"Oh, get the sand off it!" laughed the girl. "Let's see it properly."

Exhausted as he was, he belonged to the fish, and so immediately the Indian dragged it by the tail down to the rill of the water's edge, and they cupped water over it with their hands. Water cleared it like a cloth wiping a film from a diamond; out shone the magnificent fish, stiff and handsome in its mail of scales, glittering a thousand opals of color, set with two brilliant deep eyes all hard clear beauty and not marred by the capability of expression which might have made a reproach of the creature's death; a king from another world, big enough to shoulder a man out of the way, dead, captured, astonishing.

The child came up and put his forefinger on its eye. He wrinkled his nose, smiling and pulling a face, shoulders rising. "It can't see!" he said joyously. The girl tried it; smooth, firm, resilient eye; like a butterfly wing bright under glass.

They all stood, looking down at the fish, that moved very slightly in the eddy of sand as the thin water spread out softly round its body and then drew gently back. People made for them across the sand. Some came down from the hotel; the picannin caddies left the golf course. Interest spread like a net, drawing in the few, scattered queer fish of the tiny re­ sort, who avoided one another in a gesture of jealous privacy. They came to stand and stare, prodding a tentative toe at the real fish, scooped out of his sea. The men tried to lift it, making terse suggestions about its weight. A hundred, seventy, sixty-five, they said with assurance. Nobody really knew. It was a wonderful fish. The Indian, wishing to take his praise modestly, busied himself with practical details, explaining with serious charm, as if he were quoting a book or someone else's experience, how such a fish was landed, and how rarely it was to be caught on that part of the coast. He kept his face averted, down over the fish, like a man fighting tears before strangers.

"Will it bite? Will it bite?" cried the children, putting their hands inside its rigid white-lipped mouth and shrieking. "Now that's enough," said a mother.

"Sometimes there's a lovely stone, here," the Indian shuffled nearer on his haunches, not touching but indicating with his brown finger a place just above the snout. He twisted his head to find the girl. "If I find it in this one, I'll bring it for you. It makes a lovely ring." He was smiling to her.

"I want a picture taken with the fish," she said determinedly, feeling the sun very hot on her head.

Someone had to stand behind her, holding it up–it was too heavy for her. It was exactly as tall as she was; the others pointed with admiration. She smiled prettily, not looking at the fish. Then the important pictures were to be taken: the Indian and his fish.

"Just a minute," he said, surprisingly, and taking a comb out of his pocket, carefully smoothed back his hair under his guiding hand. He lifted the fish by the gills with a squelch out of the wet sand, and some pictures were taken. "Like this?" he kept saying anxiously, as he was directed by the young man to stand this way or that.

He stood tense, as if he felt oppressed by the invisible presence of some long-forgotten backdrop and palmstand. "Smile!" demanded the man and the girl together, anxiously. And the sight of them, so concerned for his picture released him to smile what was inside him, a strong, wide smile of pure achievement, that gathered up the unequal components of his face-his slim fine nose, his big ugly horse-teeth, his black crinkled-up eyes, canceled out the warring inner contradictions that they stood for, and scribbled boldly a brave moment of whole man.

After the pictures had been taken, the peak of interest had been touched; the spectators' attention, quick to rise to a phenomenon, tended to sink back to its level of ordinary, more dependable interests. Wonderment at the fish could not be sustained in its purely specific projection; the remarks became more general and led to hearsay stories of other catches, other unusual experiences. As for the Indian, he had neglected his fish for his audience long enough. No matter how it might differ as an experience, as a fish it did not differ from other fish. He worried about it being in the full hot sun, and dragged it a little deeper into the sea so that the wavelets might flow over it. The mothers began to think that the sun was too hot for their children, and straggled away with them. Others followed, talking about the fish, shading the backs of their necks with their hands. "Half-past two," said someone. The sea glittered with broken mirrors of hurtful light. "What do you think you'd get for it?" asked the young man, slowly fitting his camera into its case.

"I'll get about two-pound-ten." The Indian was standing with his hands on his hips, looking down at the fish as if sizing it up.

So he was going to sell it! "As much as that?" said the girl in surprise. With a slow, deliberate movement that showed that the sizing up had been a matter of weight rather than possible profit, he tried carrying the fish under his arm. But his whole body bent in an arc to its weight. He let it slither to the sand again.

"Are you going to try the hotel?" she asked; she expected something from the taste of this fish, a flavor of sentiment.

He smiled, understanding her. "No," he said indulgently, "I might. But I don't think they'd take it. I'll try somewhere else. They might want it." His words took in vaguely the deserted beach, the one or two tiny holiday cottages. "But where else?" she insisted. It irritated her although she smiled, this habit of other races of slipping out of one's questioning, giving vague but adamant assurances of sureties which were supposed to be hidden but that one knew perfectly well did not exist at all. "Well, there's the boardinghouse at Bailey's River–the lady there knows me. She often likes to take my fish."

Bailey's River was the next tiny place, about a mile away over the sands. "Well, I envy them their eating I" said the girl, giving him her praise again. She had taken a few steps back over the sand, ready to go; she held out her hand to draw her husband away. "When will I see the picture?" the Indian stayed them eagerly. "Soon, soon, soon!" they laughed. And they left him, kneeling beside his fish and laughing with them.

"I don't know how he's going to manage to carry that great thing all the way to Bailey's," said the young man. He was steering his wife along with his hand on her little nape. "It's only a mile!" she said. "Ye-es! But–?" "Oh, they're strong. They're used to it," she said, shaking her feet free of the sand as they reached the path.

When they got back to the hotel, there was a surprise for them. As though the dam of their quiet withdrawal had been fuller than they thought, fuller than they could withstand, they found themselves toppling over into their old stream again, that might run on pointlessly and busy as the brook for ever and ever. Three friends from home up country were there, come on an unexpected holiday to a farm a mile or two inland. They had come to look them up, as they would no doubt come every day of the remainder of the holiday; and there would be tennis, and picnic parties, and evenings when they would laugh riotously on the verandah round a table spiked with bottles and glasses. And so they were swept off from something too quiet and sure to beckon them back, looking behind them for the beckon, but already twitching to the old familiar tune. The visitors were shown the hotel bedroom, and walked down the broken stone steps to the first tee of the little golf course. They were voracious with the need to make use of everything they saw; bouncing on the beds, hanging out of the window, stamping on the tee, and assuring that they'd be there with their clubs in the morning.

After a few rounds of drinks at the close of the afternoon, the young man and his wife suddenly felt certain that they had had a very dead time indeed up till now, and the unquiet gnaw of the need to "make the best"–of time, life, holidays, anything–was gleefully hatched to feed on them again. When someone suggested that they all go into Durban for dinner and a cinema, they were excited. "All in our car!" the girl cried. "Let's all go together."

The women had to fly off to the bedroom to prepare themselves to meet the city, and whilst the men waited for them, talking quieter and closer on the verandah, the sun went down behind the cane, the pale calm sea thinned into the horizon and turned long straight shoals of light foam to glass on the sand, pocked, further up, by shadow. When they drove off up the dusty road between the trees they were steeped in the first dark. White stones stood out; as they came to the dip in the road where the sluit ran beneath, they saw someone sitting on the boulder that marked the place, and as they slowed and bumped through, the figure moved slightly with a start checked before it could arrest their attention. They were talking. "What was that?" said one of the women, without much interest. "What?" said the young man, braking in re­ flex. "It's just an old Indian with a sack or something," some­ one else broke off to say. The wife, in the front seat, turned:

"Les!" she cried, "It's him, with the fish!"

The husband had pulled up the car, skidded a little sideways on the road, its two shafts of light staring up among the trees. He sat looking at his wife in consternation. "But I wonder what's the matter?" he said. "I don't know!" she shrugged, in a rising tone. "Who is it?" cried someone from the back.

"An Indian fisherman. We've spoken to him on the beach. He caught a huge salmon today."

"We know him well," said the husband; and then to her: "I'd better back and see what's wrong." She looked down at her handbag. "It's going to make us awfully late, if you hang about," she said. "I won't hang about!" He backed in a long jerk, annoyed with her or the Indian, he did not know. He got out, banging the door behind him. They all twisted, trying to see through the rear window. A silence had fallen in the back of the car; the woman started to hum a little tune, faded out. The wife said with a clear little laugh: "Don't think we're crazy. This Indian is really quite a personality. We forgot to tell you about the fish–it happened only just before you came. Everyone was there looking at it–the most colossal thing I've ever seen. And Les took some pictures of him with it; I had one taken too!"

"So why the devil's the silly fool sitting there with the thing?"

She shrugged. "God knows," she said, staring at the clock. The young husband appeared at the window; he leant conspiratorially into the waiting faces, with an unsure gesture of the hand. "He's stuck," he explained with a nervous giggle. "Can't carry the thing any further." A little way be­ hind him the figure of the Indian stood uncertainly, supporting the long dark shape of the fish. "But why didn't he sell it?" said the wife, exasperated. "What can we do about it."

Taking it home as a souvenir, of course," said a man, pleased with his joke. But the wife was staring, accusing, at the husband. "Didn't he try to sell it?" He gestured impatiently. "Of course. But what does it matter? Fact is, he couldn't sell the damn thing, and now he can't carry it home." "So what do you want to do about it?" her voice rose indig­ nantly. "Sit here all night?" "Shh," he frowned. He said nothing. The others kept the studiedly-considerate silence of strangers pretending not to be present at a family argument. Her husband's silence seemed to be forcing her to speak. "Where does he live?" she said in resigned exasperation.

"Just off the main road," said the husband, pat.

She turned with a charmingly exaggerated sense of asking a favor. "Would you mind awfully if we gave the poor old thing a lift down the road?" "No. No.... Good Lord, no," they said in a rush. "There'll be no time to have dinner," someone whispered.

Come on and get in," the young man called over his shoulder, but the Indian still hung back, hesitant. "Not the fish!" whispered the wife urgently after her husband. "Put the fish in the boot!"

They heard the wrench of the boot being opened, the thud of the lid coming down again. Then the Indian stood with the young husband at the door of the car. When he saw her, he smiled at her quickly.

So your big catch is more trouble than it's worth," she said brightly. The words seemed to fall hard upon him; his shoulders dropped as if he suddenly realized his stiff tiredness; he smiled and shrugged.

"Jump in," said the husband heartily, opening the door of the driver's seat and getting in himself. The Indian hesitated, his hand on the back door. The three in the back made no move.

"No, there's no room there," said the girl clearly, splintering the pause. "Come round the other side and get in the front." Obediently the fisherman walked round through the headlights–a moment of his incisive face against the light–and opened the door at her side.

She shifted up. "That's right," she said, as he got in.

His presence in the car was as immediate as if he had been drawn upon the air. The sea-starched folds of his trousers made a slight harsh rubbing noise against the leather of the seat, his damp old tweed jacket smelled of warm wool, showed fuzzy against the edge of light. He breathed deeply and slowly beside her. In her clear voice she continued to talk to him, to ask him about his failure to sell the fish.

"The catch was more trouble than it was worth," he said once, shaking his head, and she did not know whether he had just happened to say what she herself had said, or whether he was consciously repeating her words to himself.

She felt a stab of cold uncertainty, as if she herself did not know what she had said, did not know what she had meant, or might have meant. Nobody else talked to the Indian. Her husband drove the car. She was furious with them for leaving it all to her: the listening of the back of the car was as rude and blatant as staring.

"What shall you do with the salmon now?" she asked brightly, and "I'll probably give it away to my relations," he answered obediently.

When they got to a turn-off a short distance along the main road, the Indian lifted his hand and said quickly, "Here's the place, thank you." His hand sent a little whiff of fish into the air. The car scudded into the dust at the side of the road, and as it did so, the door swung open and he was out. He stood there as if his body still held the position he had carefully disciplined himself to in the car, head hunched a bit, hands curled as, if he had had a cap, he might perhaps have held it before him, pinned there by the blurs of faces looking out at him from the car. He seemed oddly helpless, standing whilst the young husband opened the boot and heaved the fish out.

"I must thank you very much," he kept saying seriously. "I must thank you."

"That's all right," the husband smiled, starting the car with a roar. The Indian was saying something else, but the revving of the engine drowned it. The girl smiled down to him through the window, but did not turn her head as they drove off.

"The things we get ourselves into!" she said, spreading her skirt on the seat. She shook her head and laughed a high laugh. "Shame! The poor thing! What on earth can he do with the great smelly fish now?"

And as if her words had touched some chord of hysteria in them all, they began to laugh, and she laughed with them, laughed till she cried, gasping all the while, "But what have I said? Why are you laughing at me? What have I said?"