Читать книгу Doris Lessing Three-Book Edition: The Golden Notebook, The Grass is Singing, The Good Terrorist - Doris Lessing - Страница 19

People who live to themselves, whether from necessity or choice, and who do not trouble themselves about their neighbours’ affairs, are always disquieted and uneasy if by some chance they come to know that other people discuss them. It is as though a sleeping man should wake and find round his bed a circle of strangers staring at him. The Turners, who might have been living on the moon for all the thought they gave to ‘the district’, would have been astonished if they had known that for years they had provided the staple of gossip among the farmers round about. Even people they knew by name only, or those they had never heard of, discussed them with an intimate knowledge that was entirely due to the Slatters. It was all the Slatters’ fault – yet how can one blame them? No one really believes in the malignancy of gossip, save those who know how they themselves have suffered from it; and the Slatters would have cried, had they been challenged: ‘We have told people nothing but the truth’ – but with that self-conscious indignation that confesses guilt. Mrs Slatter would have had to be a most extraordinary woman to remain perfectly impartial and fair to Mary, after having been snubbed so many times. For she had made repeated attempts to ‘get Mary out of herself’, as she put it. Sensing Mary’s fierce pride (she had plenty of her own), she had asked her time and time again to a party, or a tennis afternoon, or an informal dance. Even after the second of Dick’s illnesses she had tried to make Mary break her isolation: the doctor had been frighteningly cynical about the Turner ménage. But always came back those curt little notes from Mary (the Turners had not had a telephone installed when everyone else did, because of the expense) that were like the deliberate ignoring of an offered hand. When Mrs Slatter came across Mary in the store on post-days, she had always asked her, with unfailing kindness, to come over some time. And Mary had always replied stiffly that she would like to, but that ‘Dick was so busy just now’. But it was a long time now since anyone had seen Mary or Dick at the station.

‘What did they do?’ people asked. At the Slatters’ people always asked what the Turners did. And Mrs Slatter, whose good humour and patience had at long last given out, was prepared to tell them. There was that time Mary ran away from her husband – but that must be a good six years ago now. And Charlie Slatter would chip in, telling his story how Mary had arrived hatless and shabby, after having walked alone over the veld (although she was a woman), and asked him to drive her in to the station. ‘How was I to know she was running off from Turner? She didn’t tell me. I thought she was going in for a day’s shopping, and Turner was too busy. And when Turner came over, half-batty with worry, I had to tell him I had taken her in. She shouldn’t have done it. It was not the right thing to do.’ The story had by now become monstrously distorted. Mary had run away from her husband in the middle of the night because he had locked her out, had found refuge with the Slatters, had borrowed money from them to leave. Dick had come after her next morning and promised never to illtreat her again. That was the story, told all over the district to the accompaniment of headshaking and tongue-clickings. But when people started saying that Slatter had horsewhipped Turner, it was too much: Charlie got annoyed. He liked Dick, though he despised him. Dick he was sorry for. He began to put people right about the affair. He repeated continually that Dick should have let Mary go. It was good riddance. He had been well out of it and didn’t know when he was lucky. So, slowly, because of Charlie, the thing was reversed. Mary was execrated; Dick exonerated. But of all this interest and talk, Mary and Dick remained ignorant. Necessarily so, since for years they had been confined to the farm.

The real reason why the Slatters, particularly Charlie, maintained their interest in the Turners, was that they wanted Dick’s farm still: more even than they had. And, since it was Charlie’s intervention that precipitated the tragedy, though he cannot be blamed for it, it is necessary to explain about his farming. Just as World War II produced its fabulously wealthy tobacco barons, so the First World War enriched many farmers because of the sharp rise in the price of maize. Until World War I, Slatter had been poor; after it, he found himself rich. And once a man is rich, when he has the temperament of a Slatter, he gets richer and richer. He was careful not to invest his money in farming: farming he did not trust as an investment. Any surplus went into mining shares; and he did not improve his farm more than was essential for the purpose of making money from it. He had five hundred acres of the most beautiful rich dark soil, which in the old days had produced twenty-five and thirty bags of mealies to the acre. Year after year he had squeezed that soil, until by now he got five bags an acre if he was lucky. He never dreamed of fertilizing. He cut down his trees (such as remained when the mining companies had done) to sell as firewood. But even a farm as rich as his was not inexhaustible; and while he no longer needed to make his thousands every year, his soil was played out, and he wanted more. His attitude to the land was fundamentally the same as that of the natives whom he despised; he wanted to work out one patch of country and move on to the next. And he had cultivated all the cultivable soil. He needed Dick’s farm badly, because the farms that bounded his on the other sides were taken up. He knew exactly what he wanted to do with it. Dick’s farm consisted of a little bit of everything. He had a hundred acres of that wonderful dark soil; and it was not played out, because he had looked after it. He had a little soil suitable for tobacco. And the rest was good for grazing.

It was the grazing Charlie wanted. He did not believe in pampering cattle by feeding them in winter. He turned them out to fend for themselves, which was all very well when the grass was good, but he had so many cattle and the grazing was thin and poor. So Dick provided the only outlet. For years Charlie had been planning for when Dick would be bankrupt. But then Dick obstinately refused to go bankrupt. ‘How does he do it?’ people asked irritably; for everyone knew that he never seemed to make any money, always had bad seasons, was always in debt. ‘Because they live like pigs and they never buy anything,’ said Mrs Slatter tartly; by now she felt that Mary could go and drown herself, for all she cared.

Perhaps they would not have been so indignant and as irritated if Dick had been suitably conscious of his failure. If he had come to Charlie and asked for advice, and pleaded incapacity, it would have been different. But he did not. He sat tight on his debts and his farm, and ignored Charlie. To whom it occurred one day that he had not seen Dick at all for over a year. ‘How time flies!’ said Mrs Slatter, when he pointed this out; but after working it out, they agreed it was nearer two years; time, on a farm, has a way of prolonging itself unnoticed. That same afternoon Charlie drove over to the Turners. He was feeling a little guilty. He had always considered himself as Dick’s mentor, as a man with much longer experience and greater knowledge. He felt responsible for Dick, whom he had watched right from the time he first began to farm. As he drove, he kept a sharp eye for signs of neglect. Things seemed neither better nor worse. The fireguards along the boundary were there, but they would protect the farm from a small slow-burning fire, not a big one with the wind behind it. The cowsheds, while not actually falling down, had been propped up by poles, and the thatched roofs were patched like darned stockings, the grass all different colours and stages of newness, reaching untidily to the ground in untrimmed swathes. The roads needed draining: they were in a deplorable state. The big plantation of gum trees past which the road went had been burnt by a veld-fire in one corner; they stood pale and spectral in the strong yellow afternoon sunlight, their leaves hanging stiffly down, their trunks charred black.

Everything was just the same: ramshackle, but not exactly hopeless.

He found Dick sitting on a big stone by the tobacco barns, which were now used as store-sheds, watching his boys stack the year’s supply of meal out of reach of the ants on strips of iron supported by bricks. Dick’s big floppy farm hat was pulled over his face, and he looked up to nod at Charlie, who stood beside him, watching the operations, his eyes narrowed; he was noting that the sacks in which the meal was held were so rotten with age that they were unlikely to last out the season.

‘What can I do for you?’ asked Dick, with his usual defensive politeness. But his voice was uncertain; it sounded unused. And his eyes, peering painfully out of the shadow of the hat, were bright and anxious.

‘Nothing,’ said Charlie curtly, giving him a slow, irritated look. ‘Just came to see how you were doing. Haven’t seen you for months.’

To which there came no reply. The natives were finishing work. The sun had gone down, leaving a wake of sultry red over the kopjes, and the dusk was creeping over the fields from the edges of the bush. The compound, visible among the trees half a mile away as a group of conical shapes, was smoking gently, and there was a small glow of fire behind dark trunks. Someone was beating a drum; the monotonous tom-tom noise sounded the end of the day. The boys were swinging their tattered jackets over their shoulders and filing away along the edge of the lands. ‘Well,’ said Dick, getting up with a painful stiff movement, ‘that’s another day finished.’ He shivered sharply. Charlie examined him: big trembling hands as thin as spines; thin hunched shoulders set in a steady shiver. And it was very hot: the ground was glowing out warmth and the red flush in the sky was fiery. ‘Got fever?’ asked Charlie.

‘No, don’t think so. Blood getting thin after all these years.’

‘More than thin blood is wrong with you,’ retorted Charlie, who seemed to find it a personal triumph that Dick should have fever. Yet he looked at him kindly, his big bristly face with its little squashed-looking features intent and steady. ‘Get fever much these days? Had it since I brought the quack to see you?’

‘I get it quite often these days,’ said Dick. ‘I get it every year. I had it twice last year.’

‘Wife look after you?’

A worried look came on Dick’s face. ‘Yes,’ he said.

‘How is she?’

‘Seems much the same.’

‘Has she been ill?’

‘No, not ill. But she’s not too good. Seems nervy. She’s run down. Been on the farm too long.’ And then, in a rush, as if he could not keep it to himself another moment, ‘I am worried sick about her.’

‘But what’s the trouble?’ Charlie sounded neutral; yet he never took his eyes off Dick’s face. The two men were still standing in the dusk under the tall shape of the barn. A sweetish moist smell came from the open door; the smell of freshly-ground mealies. Dick shut the door, which was half off its hinges, by lifting it into place with his shoulder. He locked it. There was one screw in the triangular flange of the hasp: a strong man could have wrenched it off the frame. ‘Come up to the house?’ he asked Charlie, who nodded, and then inquired, looking around: ‘Where’s your car?’

‘Oh, I walk these days.’

‘Sold it?’

‘Yes. Cost too much to run. I send in the waggon now to the station when I want something.’

They climbed into Charlie’s monster of a car, which balanced and clambered over the rutted tracks too small for it. The grass was growing back over the roads now that Dick had no car.

Between the low, tree-covered rise where the house was, and where the barns stood among bush, were lands which had not been cultivated. It looked as if they had been allowed to lie fallow, but Charlie, looking closely through the dusk, could see that among the grass and low bushes were thin, straggling mealies. He thought at first they had seeded themselves; but they seemed to be regularly planted. ‘What’s this?’ he asked, ‘what’s the idea?’

‘I was trying out a new idea from America.’

‘What idea?’

‘The bloke said there was no need to plough or to cultivate. The idea is to plant the grain among ordinary vegetation and let it grow of itself.’

‘Didn’t work out, hey?’

‘No,’ said Dick, blankly. ‘I didn’t bother to reap it. I thought I might as well leave it to do the soil some good…’ His voice tailed off.

‘Experiment,’ said Charlie briefly. It was significant that he sounded neither exasperated nor angry. He seemed detached; but kept glancing curiously, with an undercurrent of uneasiness, at Dick, whose face was obstinately set and miserable. ‘What was that you were saying about your wife?’

‘She’s not well.’

‘Yes, but why, man?’

Dick did not answer for a while. They passed from the open lands, where the golden evening glow still lingered on the leaves, to the bush, where it was dense dusk. The big car zoomed up the hill, which was steep, its bonnet reaching up into the sky. ‘I don’t know,’ said Dick at last. ‘She’s different lately. Sometimes I think she’s much better. It’s difficult to tell with women how they are. She’s not the same.’

‘But in what way?’ persisted Charlie.

‘Well, for instance. Once, when she first came to the farm she had more go in her. She doesn’t seem to care. She doesn’t care about anything. She simply sits and does nothing. She doesn’t even trouble about the chickens and things like that. You know she used to make a packet out of them every month or so. And she doesn’t care what the boy does in the house. Once she used to drive me mad nagging. Nag, nag, nag, all day. You know how women get when they’ve been too long on the farm. No self-control.’

‘No woman knows how to handle niggers,’ said Charlie.

‘Well, I am quite worried,’ stated Dick, laughing miserably. ‘I should be quite pleased if she did nag.’

‘Look here, Turner,’ said Charlie abruptly. ‘Why don’t you give up this business and get off the place? You are not doing yourself or your wife any good.’

‘Oh, we rub along.’

‘You are ill, man.’

‘I am all right.’

They stopped outside the house. A glimmer of light came from within, but Mary did not appear. A second light sprang up in the bedroom. Dick had his eyes on it. ‘She’s changing her dress,’ he said; and he sounded pleased. ‘No one has been here for so long.’

‘Why don’t you sell out to me? I’ll give you a good price for it.’

‘Where should I go?’ asked Dick in amazement.

‘Get into town. Get off the land. You are no good on the land. Get yourself a steady job somewhere.’

‘I keep my end up,’ said Dick resentfully.

The thin shape of a woman appeared against the light, on the verandah. The two men got out of the car and went inside.

‘Evening, Mrs Turner.’

‘Good evening,’ said Mary.

Charlie examined her closely when they were inside the lighted room, more closely because of the way she had said, ‘Good evening.’ She remained standing uncertainly in front of him, a dried stick of a woman, her hair that had been bleached by the sun into a streaky mass falling round a scrawny face and tied on the top of her head with a blue ribbon. Her thin, yellowish neck protruded out of a dress that she had apparently just put on. It was a frilled raspberry-coloured cotton; and in her ears were long red ear-rings like boiled sweets, that tapped against her neck in short swinging jerks. Her blue eyes, which had once told anyone who really took the trouble to look into them that Mary Turner was not really ‘stuck-up’, but shy, proud, and sensitive, had a new light in them. ‘Why, good evening!’ she said girlishly. ‘Why, Mr Slatter, we haven’t had the pleasure of seeing you for a long time.’ She laughed, twisting her shoulder in a horrible parody of coquetry.

Dick averted his eyes, suffering. Charlie stared at her rudely: stared and stared until at last she flushed and turned away, tossing her head. ‘Mr Slatter doesn’t like us,’ she informed Dick socially, ‘or otherwise, he would come to see us more often.’

She sat herself down in the corner of the old sofa, which had gone out of shape and become a thing of lumps and hollows with a piece of faded blue stuff stretched over it.

Charlie, his eyes on that material, asked: ‘How is the store going?’

‘We gave it up, it didn’t pay.’ said Dick brusquely. ‘We are using up the stock ourselves.’

Charlie looked at Mary’s ear-rings, and at the sofa-cover, which was of the material always sold to natives, an ugly patterned blue that has become a tradition in South Africa, so much associated with ‘kaffir-truck’ that it shocked Charlie to see it in a white man’s house. He looked round the place, frowning. The curtains were torn; a windowpane had been broken and patched with paper; another had cracked and not been mended at all; the room was indescribably broken down and faded. Yet everywhere were little bits of stuff from the store, roughly-hemmed, draping the back of a chair, or tucked in to form a chair seat. Charlie might have thought that this small evidence of a desire to keep up appearances was a good sign; but all his rough and rather brutal good humour was gone; he was silent, his forehead dark.

‘Like to stay to supper?’ asked Dick at last.

‘No thanks,’ said Charlie; then changed his mind out of curiosity. ‘Yes, I will.’

Unconsciously the two men were speaking as if in the presence of an invalid; but Mary scrambled out of her seat, and shouted from the doorway: ‘Moses! Moses!’

Then, since the native did not appear, she turned and smiled at them with social coyness, and said: ‘Excuse me, but you know what these boys are.’

She went out. The men were silent. Dick’s face was averted from Charlie, who since he had never become convinced of the necessity for tact, gazed intently at Dick, as if trying to force him into some explanation or statement.

Supper, when it was brought in by Moses, consisted of a tray of tea, some bread and rather rancid butter, and a chunk of cold meat. There was not a piece of crockery that was whole; and Charlie could feel the grease on the knife he held. He ate with distaste, making no effort to hide it, while Dick said nothing, and Mary made abrupt, unrelated remarks about the weather with that appalling coyness, shaking her ear-rings, writhing her thin shoulders, ogling Charlie with a conventional flirtatiousness.

To all this Charlie made no response. He said, ‘Yes, Mrs Turner. No, Mrs Turner.’ And looked at her coldly, his eyes hard with contempt and dislike.

When the native came to clear away the dishes there was an incident that caused him to grind his teeth and go white with anger. They were sitting over the sordid relics of the meal, while the boy moved about the table, slackly gathering dishes together. Charlie had not even noticed him. Then Mary asked: ‘Like some fruit, Mr Slatter? Moses, fetch the oranges. You know where they are.’ Charlie looked up, his jaws moving slowly over the food in his mouth, his eyes alert and bright; it was the tone of Mary’s voice when she spoke to the native that jarred him: she was speaking to him with exactly the same flirtatious coyness with which she had spoken to himself.

The native replied, with a rough offhand rudeness: ‘Oranges finished.’

‘I know they are not finished. There were two left. I know they are not.’ Mary was appealing, looking up at the boy, almost confiding in him.

‘Oranges finished,’ he repeated in that tone of surly indifference, but with a note of self-satisfaction, of conscious power that took Charlie’s breath away. Literally, he could not find words. He looked at Dick, who was sitting staring down at his hands; and it was impossible to see what he was thinking, or whether he had noticed anything at all. He looked at Mary: her wrinkled yellow skin had an ugly flush under the eyes, and the expression on her face was unmistakably one of fear. She appeared to have understood that Charlie had noticed something: she kept glancing at him guiltily, smiling.

‘How long have you had that boy?’ asked Charlie at last, jerking his head at Moses, who was standing at the doorway with the tray, openly listening. Mary looked helplessly at Dick.

Dick said tonelessly, ‘About four years, I think.’

‘Why do you keep him?’

‘He’s a good boy.’ sid Mary, tossing her head. ‘He works well.’

‘It doesn’t seem like it,’ said Charlie bluntly, challenging her with his eyes. But hers were evasive and uneasy. At the same time they held a gleam of secret satisfaction that sent the blood to Charlie’s head. ‘Why don’t you get rid of him? Why do you let him speak to you like that?’

Mary did not reply. She had turned her head, and was looking over her shoulder at the doorway where Moses stood; and in her face was an ugly brainlessness that caused Charlie to shout out suddenly at the native: ‘Get away from there. Get on with your work.’

The big native disappeared, responding at once to the command. And then there was a silence. Charlie was waiting for Dick to speak, to say something that showed he had not completely given in. But his head was still bent, his face dumbly suffering. At last Charlie appealed direct to him, ignoring Mary as if she were not present at all. ‘Get rid of that boy,’ he said. ‘Get rid of him, Turner.’

‘Mary likes him.’ was the slow, blank response.

‘Come outside, I want to talk to you.’

Dick lifted his head and looked resentfully at Charlie; he resented that he was being forced to take notice of something he wanted to ignore. But he obediently hoisted his body out of the chair and followed Charlie outside. The two men went down the verandah steps, and as far as the shadow of the trees.

‘You’ve got to get away from here,’ said Charlie curtly.

‘How can I?’ said Dick listlessly. ‘How can I when I am still in debt?’ And then, as if it were still a question of money, with nothing else involved, he said: ‘I know other people don’t seem to worry. I know there are plenty of farmers who are as hard up as I am and who buy cars and go for holidays. But I just can’t do it, Charlie. I can’t do it. I am not made that way.’

Charlie said: ‘I’ll buy your farm from you and you can stay here as manager, Turner. But you must go away first for a holiday, for at least six months. You must get your wife away.’

He spoke as if there could be no question of a refusal; he had been shocked out of self-interest. It was not even pity for Dick that moved him. He was obeying the dictate of the first law of white South Africa, which is: ‘Thou shalt not let your fellow whites sink lower than a certain point; because if you do, the nigger will see he is as good as you are.’ The strongest emotion of a strongly organized society spoke in his voice, and it took the backbone out of Dick’s resistance. For, after all, he had lived in the country all his life; he was undermined with shame; he knew what was expected of him, and that he had failed. But he could not bring himself to accept Charlie’s ultimatum. He felt that Charlie was asking him to give up life itself, which for him, was the farm and his ownership of it.

‘I’ll take this place over as it stands, and give you enough to clear your debts. I’ll engage a manager to run it till you get back from the coast. You must go away for six months at the very least, Turner. It doesn’t matter where you go. I’ll see that you have the money to do it. You can’t go on like this, and that is the end of it.’

But Dick did not give in so easily. He fought for four hours. For four hours they argued, walking up and down beneath the trees.

Charlie drove away at last without going back to the house. Dick returned to it walking heavily, almost staggering, the spring of his living destroyed. He would no longer own the farm, he would be another man’s servant. Mary was sitting in a lump in the corner of the sofa; the manner she had instinctively assumed in Charlie’s presence, to preserve appearances and to hold her own, had gone. She did not look at Dick when he came in. For days at a time she did not speak to him. It was as if he did not exist for her. She seemed to be sunk fathoms deep in some dream of her own. She only came to life, only noticed what she was doing, when the native came in to do some little thing in the room. Then she never took her eyes off him. But what this meant Dick did not know: he did not want to know; he was beyond fighting it now.

Charlie Slatter did not waste time. He drove round the district from farm to farm, trying to find someone who would take over the Turners’ place for a few months. He gave no explanations. He was extraordinarily reticent; he said merely that he was helping Turner to take his wife away. At last he heard of a young man just out from England, who wanted a job. Charlie did not mind who it was: anyone would do; the thing was too urgent. He at last drove into town himself to find him. He was not particularly impressed with the youth one way or the other; he was the usual type; the self-contained, educated Englishman who spoke in a la-di-da way as if he had a mouthful of pearls. He brought the young man back with him. He told him little; he did not know what to tell him. The arrangement was that he should take over the farm at once, within a week, letting the Turners go off to the coast; Charlie would arrange about the money; Charlie would tell him what to do on the farm: that was the plan. But when he went over to Dick, to tell him, he found that while he had become reconciled to the necessity of leaving, he could not be persuaded to leave at once.

Charlie, Dick, and the young man, Tony Marston, stood in the middle of a field; Charlie hot and angry and impatient (for he could not bear to be thwarted at the best of times), Dick stubborn and miserable, Marston sensitive to the situation and trying to efface himself.

‘Damn it, Charlie, why kick me off like this? I’ve been here fifteen years!’

‘For God’s sake, man, I am not kicking you off. I want you to get off before – you should get off at once. You must see that for yourself.’

‘Fifteen years!’ said Dick, his lean dark face flushed, ‘fifteen years!’ He even bent down, unconsciously, and picked up a handful of earth, and held it in his hand, as if claiming his own. It was an absurd gesture. Charlie’s face put on a jeering little smile.

‘But, Turner, you will be coming back to it.’

‘It won’t be mine,’ said Dick, and his voice broke. He turned away, still clutching his soil. Tony Marston also turned away, and pretended to be inspecting the condition of the field; he did not want to intrude on this grief. Charlie, who had no such scruples, looked impatiently at Dick’s working face. Yet with a tinge of respect. He respected the emotion he could not understand. Pride of ownership, yes: that he knew; but not this passionate attachment to the soil, as such. He did not understand it; but his voice softened.

‘It will be as good as yours. I won’t upset your farm. You can go on with it, when you come back, just as you like.’ He spoke with his usual rough good-humour.

‘Charity,’ said Dick, in that remote grieved voice.

‘It’s not charity. I’m buying it as a business concern. I want the grazing. I will run my cattle here with yours, and you can go on with your crops as you like.’

Yet he was thinking it was charity, was even a little surprised at himself for this complete betrayal of his business principles. In the minds of all three of them the word ‘charity’ was written in big black letters, obscuring everything else. And they were all wrong. It was an instinctive self-preservation. Charlie was fighting to prevent another recruit to the growing army of poor whites, who seem to respectable white people so much more shocking (though not pathetic, for they are despised and hated for their betrayal of white standards, rather than pitied) than all the millions of black people who are crowded into the slums or on to the dwindling land reserves of their own country.

At last, after much argument, Dick agreed to leave at the end of a month, when he had shown Tony how he liked things done on ‘his’ land. Charlie, cheating a little, booked the railway journey for three weeks ahead. Tony went back to the house with Dick, agreeably surprised that he had not been in the country more than a couple of months before finding a job. He was given a thatched, mud-walled hut at the back of the house. It had been a store-hut at one stage, but was now empty. There were scattered mealies on the floor still, which had escaped the broom; on the walls were ant tunnels of fine red granules which had not been brushed away. There was an iron bedstead, supplied by Charlie, a cupboard made of boxes and curtained over with that peculiarly ugly, blue native stuff, and a mirror over a basin on a packing-case. Tony did not mind these things in the least. He was in a mood of elation, a fine romantic mood, and things like bad food or sagging mattresses were quite unimportant to him. Standards that would have shocked him in his own country seemed more like exciting indications of a different sense of values, here.

He was twenty. He had had a good, conventional education, and had faced the prospect of becoming some kind of a clerk in his uncle’s factory. To sit on an office stool was not his idea of life; and he had chosen South Africa as his home because a remote cousin of his had made five thousand pounds the year before out of tobacco. He intended to do the same, and better, if he could. In the meantime he had to learn. The only thing he had against this farm was that it had no tobacco; but six months on a mixed farm would be experience, and good for him. He was sorry for Dick Turner, whom he knew to be unhappy; but even this tragedy seemed to him romantic; he saw it, impersonally, as a symptom of the growing capitalization of farming all over the world, of the way small farmers would inevitably be swallowed by the big ones. (Since he intended to be a big one himself, this tendency did not distress him.) Because he had never yet earned his own living, he thought entirely in abstractions. For instance, he had the conventionally ‘progressive’ ideas about the colour bar, the superficial progressiveness of the idealist that seldom survives a conflict with self-interest. He had brought with him a suitcase full of books, which he stacked round the circular wall of his hut: books on the colour question, on Rhodes and Kruger, on farming, on the history of gold. But, a week later, he picked up one of them and found the back eaten out by white ants. So he put them back in the suitcase and never looked at them again. A man cannot work twelve hours a day and then feel fresh enough for study.

He took his meals with the Turners. Otherwise, he was expected to pick up enough knowledge in a month to keep this place running for six, until Dick returned. He spent all day with Dick on the lands, rising at five, and going to bed at eight. He was interested in everything, well-informed, fresh, alive – a charming companion. Or perhaps Dick might have found him so ten years before. As it was he was not responsive to Tony, who would start a comfortable discussion on miscegenation, perhaps, or the effects of the colour bar on industry only to find Dick staring, with abstract eyes. Dick was concerned, in Tony’s presence, only to get through these last days without losing his last shreds of self-respect by breaking down, by refusing to go. And he knew he had to go. Yet his feelings were so violent, he was in such a turmoil of unhappiness, that he had to restrain crazy impulses to set fire to the long grass and watch the flames destroy the veld he knew so well that each bush and tree was a personal friend; or to pull down the little house he had built with his own hands and lived in so long. It seemed a violation that someone else would give orders here, someone else would farm his soil and perhaps destroy his work.

As for Mary, Tony hardly saw her, He was disturbed by her, when he had time to think about the strange, silent, dried-out woman who seemed as if she had forgotten how to speak. And then, it would appear that she realized she should make an effort, and her manner would become odd and gauche. She would talk for a few moments with a grotesque sprightliness that shocked Tony and made him uncomfortable. Her manner had no relation to what she was saying. She would suddenly break into one of Dick’s slow, patient explanations about a plough or a sick ox, with an irrelevant remark about the food (which Tony found nauseating) or about the heat at this time of the year. ‘I do so like it when the rains come,’ she would say conversationally, giggle a little, and relapse suddenly into a blank, staring silence. Tony began to think she wasn’t quite all there. But then, these two had had a hard time of it, so he understood; and in any case, living here all by themselves for so long was enough to make anyone a bit odd.

The heat in that house was so great that he could not understand how she stood it. Being new to the country he felt the heat badly; but he was glad to be out and away from that tin-roofed oven where the air seemed to coagulate into layers of sticky heat. Although his interest in Mary was limited, it did occur to him to think that she was leaving for a holiday for the first time in years, and that she might be expected to show symptoms of pleasure. She was making no preparations that he could see; never even mentioned it. And Dick, for that matter, did not talk about it either.

About a week before they were due to leave, Dick said to Mary over the lunch table, ‘How about packing?’ She nodded, after two repetitions of the question, but did not reply.

‘You must pack, Mary,’ said Dick gently, in that quiet hopeless voice with which he always addressed her. But when he and Tony returned that night, she had done nothing. When the greasy meal was cleared away, Dick pulled down the boxes and began to do the packing himself. Seeing him at it, she began to help; but before half an hour was gone, she had left him in the bedroom, and was sitting blankly on the sofa.

‘Complete nervous breakdown,’ diagnosed Tony, who was just off to bed. He had the kind of mind that is relieved by putting things into words: the phrase was an apology for Mary; it absolved her from criticism. ‘Complete nervous breakdown’ was something anyone might have; most people did, at some time or another. The next night, too, Dick packed, until everything was ready. ‘Buy yourself some material and make a dress or two,’ said Dick diffidently, for he had realized, handling her things, that she had, almost literally, ‘nothing to wear’. She nodded, and took out of a drawer a length of flowered cotton stuff that had been taken over with the stock from the store. She began to cut it out, then remained still, bent over it, silent, until Dick touched her shoulder and roused her to come to bed. Tony, witness of this scene, refrained from looking at Dick. He was grieved for them both. He had learned to like Dick very much; his feeling for him was sincere and personal. As for Mary, while he was sorry for her, what could be said about a woman who simply wasn’t there? ‘A case for a psychologist,’ he said again, trying to reassure himself. For that matter, Dick would benefit by treatment himself. The man was cracking up, he shivered perpetually, his face was so thin the bone structure showed under the skin. He was not fit to work at all, really; but he insisted on spending every moment of daylight on the fields; he could not bear to leave them when dusk came. Tony had to bring him away; his task now was almost one of a male nurse, and he was beginning to look forward to the Turners’ departure.

Three days before they were due to leave, Tony asked to stay behind for the afternoon, because he was not feeling well. A touch of the sun, perhaps; he had a bad headache, his eyes hurt, and nausea moved in the pit of his stomach. He stayed away from the midday meal, lying in his hut which, though warm enough, was cold compared to that oven of a house. At four o’clock in the afternoon he woke from an uneasy aching sleep, and was very thirsty. The old whisky bottle that was usually filled with drinking water was empty; the boy had forgotten to fill it. Tony went out into the yellow glare to fetch water from the house. The back door was open, and he moved silently, afraid to wake Mary, whom he had been told slept every afternoon. He took a glass from a rack, and wiped it carefully, and went into the living-room for the water. A glazed earthenware filter stood on the shelf that served as a sideboard. Tony lifted the lid and peered in: the dome of the filter was slimy with yellow mud, but the water trickled out of the tap clear, though tasting stale and tepid. He drank, and drank again, and, having filled his bottle, turned to leave. The curtain between this room and the bedroom was drawn back, and he could see in. He was struck motionless by surprise. Mary was sitting on an upended candle-box before the square of mirror nailed on the wall. She was in a garish pink petticoat, and her bony yellow shoulders stuck sharply out of it. Beside her stood Moses, and, as Tony watched, she stood up and held out her arms while the native slipped her dress over them from behind. When she sat down again she shook out her hair from her neck with both hands, with the gesture of a beautiful woman adoring her beauty. Moses was buttoning up the dress; she was looking in the mirror. The attitude of the native was of an indulgent uxoriousness. When he had finished the buttoning, he stood back, and watched the woman brushing her hair. ‘Thank you, Moses,’ she said in a high commanding voice. Then she turned, and said intimately: ‘You had better go now. It is time for the boss to come.’ The native came out of the room. When he saw the white man standing there, staring at him incredulously, he hesitated for a moment and then came straight on, passing him on silent feet, but with a malevolent glare. The malevolence was so strong, that Tony was momentarily afraid. When the native had gone, Tony sat down on a chair, mopped his face which was streaming with the heat, and shook his head to clear it. For his thoughts were conflicting. He had been in the country long enough to be shocked; at the same time his ‘progressiveness’ was deliciously flattered by this evidence of white ruling-class hypocrisy. For in a country where coloured children appear plentifully among the natives wherever a lonely white man is stationed, hypocrisy, as Tony defined it, was the first thing that had struck him on his arrival. But then, he had read enough about psychology to understand the sexual aspect of the colour bar, one of whose foundations is the jealousy of the white man for the superior sexual potency of the native; and he was surprised at one of the guarded, a white woman, so easily evading this barrier. Yet he had met a doctor on the boat coming out, with years of experience in a country district, who had told him he would be surprised to know the number of white women who had relations with black men. Tony felt at the time that he would be surprised; he felt it would be rather like having a relation with an animal, in spite of his ‘progressiveness’.

And then all these considerations went from his mind, and he was left simply with the fact of Mary, this poor twisted woman, who was clearly in the last stages of breakdown, and who was at this moment coming out of the bedroom, one hand still lifted to her hair. And then he felt, at the sight of her face, which was bright and innocent, though with an empty, half-idiotic brightness, that all his suspicions were nonsense.

When she saw him, she stopped dead, and stared at him with fear. Then her face, from being tormented, became slowly blank and indifferent. He could not understand this sudden change. But he said, in a jocular uncomfortable voice: ‘There was once an Empress of Russia who thought so little of her slaves, as human beings, that she used to undress naked in front of them.’ It was from this point of view that he chose to see the affair; the other was too difficult for him.

‘Was there?’ she said doubtfully at last, looking puzzled.

‘Does that native always dress and undress you?’ he asked.

Mary lifted her head sharply, and her eyes became cunning. ‘He has so little to do,’ she said, tossing her head. ‘He must earn his money.’

‘It’s not customary in this country, is it?’ he asked slowly, out of the depths of his complete bewilderment. And he saw, as he spoke, that the phrase ‘this country’, which is like a call to solidarity for most white people, meant nothing to her. For her, there was only the farm; not even that – there was only this house, and what was in it. And he began to understand with a horrified pity, her utter indifference to Dick; she had shut out everything that conflicted with her actions, that would revive the code she had been brought up to follow.

She said suddenly, ‘They said I was not like that, not like that, not like that.’ It was like a gramophone that had got stuck at one point.

‘Not like what?’ he asked blankly.

‘Not like that.’ The phrase was furtive, sly, yet triumphant. God, the woman is mad as a hatter! he said to himself. And then he thought, but is she, is she? She can’t be mad. She doesn’t behave as if she were. She behaves simply as if she lives in a world of her own, where other people’s standards don’t count. She has forgotten what her own people are like. But then, what is madness, but a refuge, a retreating from the world?

Thus the unhappy and bewildered Tony, sitting on his chair beside the water filter, still holding his bottle and glass, staring uneasily at Mary, who began to talk in a sad quiet voice which made him say to himself, as she was speaking, changing his mind again, that she was not mad, at least, not at that moment. It’s a long time since I came here,’ she said, looking straight at him, in appeal. ‘So long I can’t quite remember…I should have left long ago. I don’t know why I didn’t. I don’t know why I came. But things are different. Very different.’ She stopped. Her face was pitiful; her eyes were painful holes in her face. ‘I don’t know anything. I don’t understand. Why is all this happening? I didn’t mean it to happen. But he won’t go away, he won’t go away.’ And then, in a different voice, she snapped at him, ‘Why did you come here? It was all right before you came.’ She burst into tears, moaning, ‘He won’t go away.’

Tony rose to go to her: now his only emotion was pity; his discomfort was forgotten. Something made him turn. In the doorway stood the boy, Moses, looking at them both, his face wickedly malevolent.

‘Go away,’ said Tony, ‘go away at once.’ He put his arm round Mary’s shoulders, for she was shrinking away and digging her fingers into his flesh.

‘Go away,’ she said suddenly, over his shoulder at the native. Tony realized that she was trying to assert herself: she was using his presence there as a shield in a fight to get back a command she had lost. And she was speaking like a child challenging a grown-up person.

‘Madame want me to go?’ said the boy quietly.

‘Yes, go away.’

‘Madame want me to go because of this boss?’

It was not the words in themselves that made Tony rise to his feet and stride to the door, but the way in which they were spoken. ‘Get out,’ he said, half-choked with anger. ‘Get out before I kick you out.’

After a long, slow, evil look the native went. Then he came back. Speaking past Tony, ignoring him, he said to Mary, ‘Madame is leaving this farm, yes?’

‘Yes,’ said Mary faintly.

‘Madame never coming back?’

‘No, no, no,’ she cried out.

‘And is this boss going too?’

‘No,’ she screamed. ‘Go away.’

‘Will you go?’ shouted Tony. He could have killed this native: he wanted to take him by his throat and squeeze the life out of him. And then Moses vanished. They heard him walk across the kitchen and out of the back door. The house was empty. Mary sobbed, her head on her arms. ‘He’s gone,’ she cried, ‘he’s gone, he’s gone!’ Her voice was hysterical with relief. And then she suddenly pushed him away, stood in front of him like a mad woman, and hissed, ‘You sent him away! He’ll never come back! It was all right till you came!’ And she collapsed in a storm of tears. Tony sat there, his arm round her, comforting her. He was wondering only, ‘What shall I say to Turner?’ But what could he say? The whole thing was better left. The man was half-crazy with worry as it was. It would be cruel to say anything to him – and in any case, in two days both of them would be gone from the farm.

He decided that he would take Dick aside and suggest, only, that the native should be dismissed at once.

But Moses did not return. He was not there that evening at all. Tony heard Dick ask where the native was, and her answer that she ‘had sent him away’. He heard the blank indifference of her voice: saw that she was speaking to Dick without seeing him.

Tony, at last, shrugged in despair, and decided to do nothing. And the next morning he was off to the lands as usual. It was the last day; there was a great deal to do.