The Grass is Singing

At thirty nothing had changed. On her thirtieth birthday she felt a vague surprise that did not even amount to discomfort – for she did not feel any different – that the years had gone past so quickly. Thirty! It sounded a great age. But it had nothing to do with her. At the same time she did not celebrate this birthday; she allowed it to be forgotten. She felt almost outraged that such a thing could happen to her, who was no different from the Mary of sixteen.

She was by now the personal secretary of her employer, and was earning good money. If she had wanted, she could have taken a flat and lived the smart sort of life. She was quite presentable. She had the undistinguished, dead-level appearance of South African white democracy. Her voice was one of thousands: flattened, a little sing-song, clipped. Anyone could have worn her clothes. There was nothing to prevent her living by herself, even running her own car, entertaining on a small scale. She could have become a person on her own account. But this was against her instinct.

She chose to live in a girls’ club, which had been started, really, to help women who could not earn much money, but she had been there so long no one thought of asking her to leave. She chose it because it reminded her of school, and she had hated leaving school. She liked the crowds of girls, and eating in a big dining-room, and coming home after the pictures to find a friend in her room waiting for a little gossip. In the Club she was a person of some importance, out of the usual run. For one thing she was so much older than the others. She had come to have what was almost the rôle of a comfortable maiden aunt to whom one can tell one’s troubles. For Mary was never shocked, never condemned, never told tales. She seemed impersonal, above the little worries. The stiffness of her manner, her shyness, protected her from many spites and jealousies. She seemed immune. This was her strength, but also a weakness that she would not have considered a weakness: she felt disinclined, almost repelled, by the thought of intimacies and scenes and contacts. She moved among all those young women with a faint aloofness that said as clear as words: I will not be drawn in. And she was quite unconscious of it. She was very happy in the Club.

Outside the girls’ club, and the office, where again she was a person of some importance, because of the many years she had worked there, she led a full and active life. Yet it was a passive one, in some respects, for it depended on other people entirely. She was not the kind of woman who initiates parties, or who is the centre of a crowd. She was still the girl who is ‘taken out’.

Her life was really rather extraordinary: the conditions which produced it are passing now, and when the change is complete, women will look back on them as on a vanished Golden Age.

She got up late, in time for the office (she was very punctual) but not in time for breakfast. She worked efficiently, but in a leisurely way, until lunch. She went back to the club for lunch. Two more hours’ work in the afternoon and she was free. Then she played tennis, or hockey or swam. And always with a man, one of those innumerable men who ‘took her out’, treating her like a sister: Mary was such a good pal! Just as she seemed to have a hundred women friends, but no particular friend, so she had (it seemed) a hundred men, who had taken her out, or were taking her out, or who had married and now asked her to their homes. She was friend to half the town. And in the evening she always went to sundowner parties that prolonged themselves till midnight, or danced, or went to the pictures. Sometimes she went to the pictures five nights a week. She was never in bed before twelve or later. And so it had gone on, day after day, week after week, year after year. South Africa is a wonderful place: for the unmarried white woman. But she was not playing her part, for she did not get married. The years went past; her friends got married; she had been bridesmaid a dozen times; other people’s children were growing up; but she went on as companionable, as adaptable, as aloof and as heart-whole as ever, working as hard enjoying herself as she ever did in the office, and never for one moment alone, except when she was asleep.

She seemed not to care for men. She would say to her girls, ‘Men! They get all the fun.’ Yet outside the office and the club her life was entirely dependent upon men, though she would have most indignantly repudiated the accusation. And perhaps she was not so dependent upon them really, for when she listened to other people’s complaints and miseries she offered none of her own. Sometimes her friends felt a little put off, and let down. It was hardly fair, they felt obscurely, to listen, to advise, to act as a sort of universal shoulder for the world to weep on, and give back nothing of her own. The truth was she had no troubles. She heard other people’s complicated stories with wonder, even a little fear. She shrank away from all that. She was a most rare phenomenon: a woman of thirty without love troubles, headaches, backaches, sleeplessness or neurosis. She did not know how rare she was.

And she was still ‘one of the girls’. If a visiting cricket team came to town and partners were needed, the organizers would ring up Mary. That was the kind of thing she was good at: adapting herself sensibly and quietly to any occasion. She would sell tickets for a charity dance or act as a dancing partner for a visiting full-back with equal amiability.

And she still wore her hair little-girl fashion on her shoulders, and wore little-girl frocks in pastel colours, and kept her shy, naive manner. If she had been left alone she would have gone on, in her own way, enjoying herself thoroughly, until people found one day that she had turned imperceptibly into one of those women who have become old without ever having been middle-aged: a little withered, a little acid, hard as nails, sentimentally kindhearted, and addicted to religion or small dogs.

They would have been kind to her, because she had ‘missed the best things of life’. But then there are so many people who don’t want them: so many for whom the best things have been poisoned from the start. When Mary thought of ‘home’ she remembered a wooden box shaken by passing trains; when she thought of marriage she remembered her father coming home red-eyed and fuddled; when she thought of children she saw her mother’s face at her children’s funeral – anguished, but as dry and as hard as rock. Mary liked other people’s children but shuddered at the thought of having any of her own. She felt sentimental at weddings, but she had a profound distaste for sex; there had been little privacy in her home and there were things she did not care to remember; she had taken good care to forget them years ago.

She certainly did feel, at times, a restlessness, a vague dissatisfaction that took the pleasure out of her activities for a while. She would be going to bed, for instance, contentedly, after the pictures, when the thought would strike her, ‘Another day gone!’ And then time would contract and it seemed to her only a breathing space since she left school and came into town to earn her own living; and she would feel a little panicky, as if an invisible support had been drawn away from underneath her. But then, being a sensible person, and firmly convinced that thinking about oneself was morbid, she would get into bed and turn out the lights. She might wonder, before drifting off to sleep, ‘Is this all? When I get to be old will this be all I have to look back on?’ But by morning she would have forgotten it, and the days went round, and she would be happy again. For she did not know what she wanted. Something bigger, she would think vaguely – a different kind of life. But the mood never lasted long. She was so satisfied with her work, where she felt sufficient and capable; with her friends, whom she relied on; with her life at the Club, which was as pleasant and as gregarious as being in a giant twittering aviary, where there was always the excitement of other people’s engagements and weddings: and with her men friends, who treated her just like a good pal, with none of this silly sex business.

But all women become conscious, sooner or later, of that impalpable but steel-strong pressure to get married, and Mary, who was not at all susceptible to atmosphere, or the things people imply, was brought face to face with it suddenly, and most unpleasantly.

She was in the house of a married friend, sitting on the verandah, with a lighted room behind her. She was alone; and heard people talking in low voices, and caught her own name. She rose to go inside and declare herself: it was typical of her that her first thought was, how unpleasant it would be for her friends to know she had overheard. Then she sank down again, and waited for a suitable moment to pretend she had just come in from the garden. This was the conversation she listened to, while her face burned and her hands went clammy.

‘She’s not fifteen any longer: it is ridiculous! Someone should tell her about her clothes.’

‘How old is she?’

‘Must be well over thirty. She has been going strong for years. She was working long before I began working, and that was a good twelve years ago.’

‘Why doesn’t she marry? She must have had plenty of chances.’

There was a dry chuckle. ‘I don’t think so. My husband was keen on her himself once, but he thinks she will never marry. She just isn’t like that, isn’t like that at all. Something missing somewhere.’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’

‘She’s gone off so much, in any case. The other day I caught sight of her in the street and hardly recognized her. It’s a fact! The way she plays all those games, her skin is like sandpaper, and she’s got so thin.’

‘But she’s such a nice girl.’

‘She’ll never set the rivers on fire, though.’

‘She’d make someone a good wife. She’s a good sort, Mary.’

‘She should marry someone years older than herself. A man of fifty would suit her…you’ll see, she will marry someone old enough to be her father one of these days.’

‘One never can tell!’

There was another chuckle, good-hearted enough, but it sounded cruelly malicious to Mary. She was stunned and outraged; but most of all deeply wounded that her friends could discuss her thus. She was so naive, so unconscious of herself in relation to other people, that it had never entered her head that people could discuss her behind her back. And the things they had said! She sat there writhing, twisting her hands. Then she composed herself and went back into the room to join her treacherous friends, who greeted her as cordially as if they had not just that moment driven knives into her heart and thrown her quite off balance; she could not recognize herself in the picture they had made of her!

That little incident, apparently so unimportant, which would have had no effect on a person who had the faintest idea of the kind of world she lived in, had a profound effect on Mary. She who had never had time to think of herself, took to sitting in her room for hours at a time, wondering: ‘Why did they say those things? What is the matter with me? What did they mean when they said that I am not like that?’ And she would look warily, appealingly, into the faces of friends to see if she could find there traces of their condemnation of her. And she was even more disturbed and unhappy because they seemed just as usual, treating her with their ordinary friendliness. She began to suspect double meanings where none were intended, to find maliciousness in the glance of a person who felt nothing but affection for her.

Turning over in her mind the words she had by accident listened to, she thought of ways to improve herself. She took the ribbon out of her hair, though with regret, because she thought she looked very pretty with a mass of curls round her rather long thin face; and bought herself tailor-made clothes, in which she felt ill at ease, because she felt truly herself in pinafore frocks and childish skirts. And for the first time in her life she was feeling uncomfortable with men. A small core of contempt for them, of which she was quite unconscious, and which had protected her from sex as surely as if she had been truly hideous, had melted, and she had lost her poise. And she began looking around for someone to marry. She did not put it to herself like that; but, after all, she was nothing if not a social being, though she had never thought of ‘society’, the abstraction; and if her friends were thinking she should get married, then there might be something in it. If she had ever learned to put her feelings into words, that was perhaps how she would have expressed herself. And the first man she allowed to approach her was a widower of fifty-five with half-grown children. It was because she felt safer with him…because she did not associate ardours and embraces with a middle-aged gentleman whose attitude towards her was almost fatherly.

He knew perfectly well what he wanted: a pleasant companion, a mother for his children and someone to run his house for him. He found Mary good company, and she was kind to his children. Nothing, really, could have been more suitable: since apparently she had to get married, this was the kind of marriage to suit her best. But things went wrong. He underestimated her experience; it seemed to him that a woman who had been on her own so long should know her own mind and understand what he was offering her. A relationship developed which was clear to both of them, until he proposed to her, was accepted, and began to make love to her. Then a violent revulsion overcame her and she ran away; they were in his comfortable drawing room, and when he began to kiss her, she ran out of his house into the night and all the way home through the streets to the club. There she fell on the bed and wept. And his feeling for her was not one to be enhanced by this kind of foolishness, which a younger man, physically in love with her, might have found charming. Next morning, she was horrified at her behaviour. What a way to behave; she, who was always in command of herself, and who dreaded nothing more than scenes and ambiguity. She apologized to him, but that was the end of it.

And now she was left at sea, not knowing what it was she needed. It seemed to her that she had run from him because he was ‘an old man’, that was how the affair arranged itself in her mind. She shuddered, and avoided men over thirty. She was over that age herself; but in spite of everything, she thought of herself as a girl still.

And all the time, unconsciously, without admitting it to herself, she was looking for a husband.

During those few months before she married, people were discussing her in a way which would have sickened her, had she suspected it. It seems hard that Mary, whose charity towards other people’s failures and scandals grew out of a genuine, rock-bottom aversion towards the personal things like love and passion, was doomed all her life to be the subject of gossip. But so it was. At this time, too, the shocking and rather ridiculous story of that night when she had run away from her elderly lover was spreading round the wide circle of her friends, though it is impossible to say who could have known about it in the first place. But when people heard it they nodded and laughed as if it confirmed something they had known for a long time. A woman of thirty behaving like that! They laughed, rather unpleasantly; in this age of scientific sex, nothing seems more ridiculous than sexual gaucherie. They didn’t forgive her; they laughed, and felt that in some way it served her right.

She was so changed, they said; she looked so dull and dowdy, and her skin was bad; she looked as if she were going to be ill; she was obviously having a nervous breakdown and at her age it was to be expected, with the way she lived and everything; she was looking for a man and couldn’t get one. And then, her manner was so odd, these days…These were some of the things they said.

It is terrible to destroy a person’s picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction. How can one know he will be able to create another to enable him to go on living? Mary’s idea of herself was destroyed and she was not fitted to recreate herself. She could not exist without that impersonal. casual friendship from other people; and now it seemed to her there was pity in the way they looked at her, and a little impatience, too, as if she were really rather a futile woman after all. She felt as she had never done before; she was hollow inside, empty, and into this emptiness would sweep from nowhere a vast panic, as if there were nothing in the world she could grasp hold of. And she was afraid to meet people, afraid, above all, of men. If a man kissed her (which they did, sensing her new mood), she was revolted; on the other hand she went to the pictures even more frequently than before and came out feverish and unsettled. There seemed no connection between the distorted mirror of the screen and her own life; it was impossible to fit together what she wanted for herself, and what she was offered.

At the age of thirty, this woman who had had a ‘good’ State education, a thoroughly comfortable life enjoying herself in a civilized way, and access to all knowledge of her time (only she read nothing but bad novels) knew so little about herself that she was thrown completely off her balance because some gossiping women had said she ought to get married.

Then she met Dick Turner. It might have been anybody. Or rather, it would have been the first man she met who treated her as if she were wonderful and unique. She needed that badly. She needed it to restore her feeling of superiority to men, which was really, at bottom, what she had been living from all these years.

They met casually at the cinema. He was in for the day from his farm. He very rarely came into town, except when he had to buy goods he could not get at his local store, and that happened perhaps once or twice a year. On this occasion he ran into a man he had not seen for years and was persuaded to stay the night in town and go to the cinema. He was almost amused at himself for agreeing: all this seemed so very remote from him. His farm lorry, heaped with sacks of grain and two harrows, stood outside the cinema, looking out of place and cumbersome; and Mary looked through the back window at these unfamiliar objects and smiled. It was necessary for her to smile when she saw them. She loved the town, felt safe there, and associated the country with her childhood, because of those little dorps she had lived in, and the way they were all surrounded by miles and miles of nothingness – miles and miles of veld.

Dick Turner disliked the town. When he drove in from the veld he knew so well, through those ugly scattered suburbs that looked as if they had come out of housing catalogues; ugly little houses stuck anyhow over the veld, that had no relationship with the hard brown African soil and the arching blue sky, cosy little houses meant for cosy little countries – and then on into the business part of the town with the shops full of fashions for smart women and extravagant imported food, he felt ill at ease and uncomfortable and murderous.

He suffered from claustrophobia. He wanted to run away – either to run away or to smash the place up. So he always escaped as soon as possible back to his farm, where he felt at home.

But there are thousands of people in Africa who could be lifted bodily out of their suburb and put into a town the other side of the world and hardly notice the difference. The suburb is as invincible and fatal as factories, and even beautiful South Africa, whose soil looks outraged by those pretty little suburbs creeping over it like a disease, cannot escape. When Dick Turner saw them, and thought of the way people lived in them, and the way the cautious suburban mind was ruining his country, he wanted to swear and to smash and to murder. He could not bear it. He did not put these feelings into words; he had lost the habit of word-spinning, living the life he did, out on the soil all day. But the feeling was the strongest he knew. He felt he could kill the bankers and the financiers and the magnates and the clerks – all the people who built prim little houses with hedged gardens full of English flowers for preference.

And above all, he loathed the cinema. When he found himself inside the picture-house on this occasion, he wondered what had possessed him that he had agreed to come. He could not keep his eyes on the screen. The long-limbed, smooth-faced women bored him; the story seemed meaningless. And it was hot and stuffy. After a while he ignored the screen altogether, and looked round the audience. In front of him, around him, behind him, rows and rows of people staring and leaning away from each other up at the screen – hundreds of people flown out of their bodies and living in the lives of those stupid people posturing there. It made him feel uneasy.

He fidgeted, lit a cigarette, gazed at the dark plush curtains that masked the exits. And then, looking along the row he was sitting in, he saw a shaft of light fall from somewhere above, showing the curve of a cheek and a sheaf of fairish glinting hair. The face seemed to float, yearning upwards, ruddily gold in the queer greenish light. He poked the man next to him, and said, ‘Who is that?’ ‘Mary,’ was the grunted reply, after a brief look. But ‘Mary’ did not help Dick much. He stared at that lovely floating face and the falling hair, and after the show was over, he looked for her hurriedly in the crush outside the door. But he could not see her. He supposed, vaguely, that she had gone with someone else. He was given a girl to take home whom he hardly glanced at. She was dressed in what seemed to him a ridiculous way, and he wanted to laugh at her high heels, in which she tiptapped beside him across the street. In the car she looked over her shoulder at the piled back of the lorry, and asked in a hurried affected voice: ‘What are those funny things at the back?’

‘Have you never seen a harrow?’ he asked. He dropped her, without regret, at the place where she lived – a big building, which was full of light and people. He forgot her immediately.

But he dreamed about the girl with the young uptilted face and the wave of loose gleaming hair. It was a luxury, dreaming about a woman, for he had forbidden himself such things. He had started farming five years before, and was still not making it pay. He was indebted to the Land Bank, and heavily mortgaged, for he had had no capital at all, when he started. He had given up drink, cigarettes, all but the necessities. He worked as only a man possessed by a vision can work, from six in the morning till seven at night, taking his meals on the lands, his whole being concentrated on the farm. His dream was to get married and have children. Only he could not ask a woman to share such a life. First he would have to get out of debt, build a house, be able to afford the little luxuries. Having driven himself for years, it was part of his dream to spoil a wife. He knew exactly what sort of a house he would build: not one of those meaningless block-like buildings stuck on top of the soil. He wanted a big thatched house with wide verandahs open to the air. He had even chosen the ant-heaps that he would dig to make his bricks, and had marked the parts of the farm where the grass grew tallest, taller than a big man, for the thatch. But it seemed to him sometimes that he was very far from getting what he wanted. He was pursued by bad luck. The farmers about him, he knew, called him ‘Jonah’. If there was a drought he seemed to get the brunt of it, and if it rained in swamps then his farm suffered most. If he decided to grow cotton for the first time, cotton slumped that year, and if there was a swarm of locusts, then he took it for granted, with a kind of angry but determined fatalism, that they would make straight for his most promising patch of mealies. His dream had become a little less grandiose of late. He was lonely, he wanted a wife, and above all, children; and the way things were it would be years before he had them. He was beginning to think that if he could pay off some of the mortgage, and add an extra room to his house, perhaps get some furniture, then he could think of getting married. In the meantime he thought of the girl in the cinema. She became the focus of his work and imaginings. He cursed himself for it, for he knew thinking about women, particularly one woman, was as dangerous as drink to him, but it was no good. Just over a month after his visit to town, he found himself planning another. It was not necessary and he knew it. He gave up even persuading himself that it was necessary. In town, he did the little business he had to do quickly, and went in search of someone who could tell him ‘Mary’s’ surname.

When he drove up to the big building, he recognized it, but did not connect the girl he had driven home that night with the girl of the cinema. Even when she came to the door, and stood in the hall looking to see who he was, he did not recognize her. He saw a tall, thin girl, with deeply blue, rather evasive eyes that looked hurt. Her hair was in tight ridges round her head; she wore trousers. Women in trousers did not seem to him females at all: he was properly old-fashioned. Then she said, ‘Are you looking for me?’ rather puzzled and shy; and at once he remembered that silly voice asking about the harrows and stared at her incredulously. He was so disappointed he began to stammer and shift his feet. Then he thought that he could not stand there for ever, staring at her, and he asked her to go for a drive. It was not a pleasant evening. He was angry with himself for his self-delusion and weakness; she was flattered but puzzled as to why he had sought her out, since he hardly spoke now he had got her into the car and was driving aimlessly around the town. But he wanted to find in her the girl who had haunted him, and he had done so, by the time he had to take her home. He kept glancing at her sideways as they passed street lamps, and he could see how a trick of light had created something beautiful and strange from an ordinary and not very attractive girl. And then, he began to like her, because it was essential for him to love somebody; he had not realized how very lonely he had been. And when he left her that night, it was with regret, saying he would come again soon.

Back on the farm, he took himself to task. This would end in marriage if he were not careful, and he simply could not afford it. That was the end of it, then; he would forget her, put the whole thing out of his mind. Besides, what did he know about her? Nothing at all! Except that she was obviously, as he put it, ‘thoroughly spoiled’. She was not the kind to share a struggling farmer’s life. So he argued with himself, working harder than he had ever done before, and thinking sometimes, ‘After all, if I have a good season this year I might go back and see her.’ He took to walking ten miles over the veld with his gun after his day’s work to exhaust himself. He wore himself out, grew thin and haunted-looking. He fought with himself for two months, until at last one day he found himself preparing to take the car into town, exactly as if he had decided it long ago, and as if all his exhortations and self-discipline had been nothing but a shield to hide from himself his real intention. As he dressed he whistled jauntily, but with a crestfallen undertone; and his face wore a curious little defeated smile.

As for Mary, those two months were a long nightmare. He had come all the way in from his farm after meeting her once for five minutes, and then, having spent an evening with her, had not thought it worth his while to come back. Her friends were right, she lacked something. There was something wrong with her. But she clung to the thought of him, in spite of the fact that she said to herself she was useless, a failure, a ridiculous creature whom no one wanted. She gave up going out in the evenings, and remained in her room waiting for him to call for her. She sat for hours and hours by herself, her mind numb with misery; and at night she dreamed long grey dreams in which she struggled through sand, or climbed staircases which collapsed as she reached the top, letting her slide back to the bottom again. She woke in the mornings tired and depressed, unable to face the day. Her employer, used to her inevitable efficiency, told her to take a holiday and not to come back till she felt better. She left the office, feeling as if she had been thrown out (though he could not have been nicer about her breakdown) and stayed all day in the club. If she went away for a holiday she might miss Dick. Yet what was Dick to her, really? Nothing. She hardly knew him. He was a spare, sunburnt, slow-voiced, deep-eyed young man who had come into her life like an accident, and that was all she could say about him. And yet, she would have said it was for his sake she was making herself ill. All her restlessness, her vague feelings of inadequacy, centred on him, and when she asked herself, in chilly dismay, why it should be he, rather than any of the other men she knew, there was no satisfactory reply.

Weeks after she had given up hope, and had gone to the doctor for a prescription because ‘she was feeling tired’ and had been told she must take a holiday at once, if she wanted to avoid complete breakdown; when she had reached a stage of misery that made it impossible for her to meet any of her old friends, because of her obsession that their friendship was a cloak for malicious gossip and real dislike of her, she was called to the door again one evening. She was not thinking about Dick. When she saw him it took all her self-control to greet him calmly; if she had shown her emotion he might after all have given her up. By now he had persuaded himself into believing she was a practical, adaptable, serene person, who would need only a few weeks on the farm to become what he wanted her to be. Tears of hysteria would have shocked him, ruined his vision of her.

It was to an apparently calm, maternal Mary that he proposed. He was adoring, self-abasing, and grateful when she accepted him. They were married by special licence two weeks later. Her desire to get married as quickly as possible surprised him; he saw her as a busy and popular woman with a secure place in the social life of the town, and thought it would take her some time to arrange her affairs: this idea of her was part of her attraction for him. But a quick marriage fell in with his plans, really. He hated the idea of waiting about the town while a woman fussed with clothes and bridesmaids. There was no honeymoon. He explained he was too poor really to afford one, though if she insisted he would do what he could. She did not insist. She was very relieved to escape a honeymoon.

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