The Grass is Singing

‘You have used it yourself for some weeks without complaining,’ he said drily, automatically reaching for a cigarette and sticking it between his lips. But she did not reply.

He shook his head when she said the food was ready and went off to the fields again, calling for the dogs. When she was in this mood, he could not bear to be near her. Mary cleared the table, without eating herself, and sat down to listen to the sound of the scrubbing brush. She remained there for two hours, her head aching, listening with every muscle of her tensed body. She was determined he should not scamp his work. At half-past three there was sudden silence, and she sat up, alertly ready to go to the bathroom and make him begin again. But the door opened and he entered. Without looking at her, addressing her invisible double that stood to one side of her, he said that he was going to his hut for some food, and would go on with the bath when he came back. She had forgotten about his food. She never thought of natives as people who had to eat or sleep: they were either there, or they were not, and what their lives were when they were out of her sight she had never paused to think. She nodded, feeling guilty. Then she smothered her guilt, thinking, ‘It’s his fault for not keeping it properly clean in the first place.’

The tension of listening to his working relaxed, she went out to look at the sky. There were no clouds at all. It was a low dome of sonorous blue, with an undertone of sultry sulphur-colour, because of the smoke that dimmed the air. The pale sandy soil in front of the house dazzled up waves of light, and out of it curved the gleaming stems of the poinsettia bushes, bursting into irregular slashes of crimson. She looked away over the trees, which were dingy and brownish, over the acres of shining wavy grass to the hills. They were hazy and indistinct. The veld fires had been burning for weeks, all round, and she could taste the smoke on her tongue. Sometimes a tiny fragment of charred grass fell on her skin, and left a greasy black smudge. Columns of smoke rose in the distance, heavy bluish coils hanging motionless, making a complicated architecture in the dull air.

The week before a fire had swept over part of their farm, destroying two cowsheds and acres of grazing. Where it had burnt, lay black expanses of desolation, and still, here and there, fallen logs smoked in the blackness, faint tendrils of smoke showing grey against the charred landscape. She turned her eyes away, because she did not want to think of the money that had been lost, and saw in front of her, where the road wound, clouds of reddish dust. The course of that road could always be marked, because the trees along it were rust-coloured as if locusts had settled on them. She watched the dust spurt up as if a beetle were burrowing through the trees, and thought, ‘Why, it is a car!’ And a few minutes later she realized it was coming to them, and felt quite panicky. Callers! But Dick had said she must expect people to come. She ran into the back of the house, to tell the boy to get tea. He wasn’t there. It was then four: she remembered that half an hour before she had told him he could go. She ran out over the shifting mass of chips and bark-strips of the wood-pile, and, drawing the rusty wooden bolt from the crotch of the tree, beat the plough disc. Ten resonant clanging beats were the signal that the houseboy was wanted. Then she returned to the house. The stove was out; she found it difficult to light; and there was nothing to eat. She did not bother to cook cakes when Dick was never there for tea. She opened a packet of store biscuits and looked down at her frock. She could not possibly be seen in such a rag! But it was too late. The car was droning up the hill. She rushed out into the front, wringing her hands. She might have been isolated for years, and unused to people, from the way she behaved, rather than a woman who for years and years had never, not for a minute, been alone. She saw the car stop, and two people get out. They were a short, powerfully-built, sandy-coloured man, and a dark full-bodied woman with a pleasant face. She waited for them, smiling shyly to answer their cordial faces. And then, with what relief she saw Dick’s car coming up the hill! She blessed him for his consideration, coming to help her out on this first visit. He had seen the dust-trail over the trees, too, and had come as soon as he could.

The man and the woman shook her hand, and greeted her. But it was Dick who asked them inside. The four of them sat in the tiny room, so that it appeared even more crowded than ever. Dick and Charlie Slatter talked on one side, and she and Mrs Slatter on the other. Mrs Slatter was a kindly soul, and sorry for Mary who had married a good-for-nothing like Dick. She had heard she was a town girl, and knew herself what hardship and loneliness was, though she was long past the struggling state herself. She had, now, a large house, three sons at university, and a comfortable life. But she remembered only too well the sufferings and humiliations of poverty. She looked at Mary with real tenderness, remembering her own past, and was prepared to make friends. But Mary was stiff with resentment, because she had noticed Mrs Slatter looking keenly round the room, pricing every cushion, noticing the new whitewash and the curtains.

‘How pretty you have made it,’ she said, with genuine admiration, knowing what it was to use dyed flour sacks for curtains and painted petrol boxes for cupboards. But Mary misunderstood her. She would not soften at all. She would not discuss her house with Mrs Slatter, who was patronizing her. After a few moments Mrs Slatter looked closely at the girl’s face, flushed, and in a changed voice that was formal and distant, began to talk of other things. Then the boy brought in the tea, and Mary suffered fresh agonies over the cups and the tin tray. She tried to think of something to discuss that was not connected with the farm. Films? She cast her mind over the hundreds she had seen in the last few years, and could not remember the names of more than two or three. Films, which had once been so important to her, were now a little unreal; and in any case Mrs Slatter went to the pictures perhaps twice a year, when she was in town on her rare shopping trips. The shops in town? No, that was a question of money again, and she was wearing a faded cotton frock she was ashamed of. She looked across to Dick for help, but he was absorbed in conversation with Charlie, discussing crops, prices, and – above all – native labour. Whenever two or three farmers are gathered together, it is decreed that they should discuss nothing but the shortcomings and deficiencies of their natives. They talk about their labourers with a persistent irritation sounding in their voices: individual natives they might like, but as a genus, they loathe them to the point of neurosis. They never cease complaining about their unhappy lot, having to deal with natives who are so exasperatingly indifferent to the welfare of the white man, working only to please themselves. They had no idea of the dignity of labour, no idea of improving themselves by hard work.

Mary listened to the male conversation with wonder. It was the first time she had heard men talk farming, and she began to see that Dick was hungry for it, and felt a little mean that she knew so little, and could not help relieve his mind by discussing the farm with him. She turned back to Mrs Slatter, who was silent, feeling wounded because Mary would not accept her sympathy and her help. At last the visit came to an end, with regret on Dick’s side, but relief from Mary. The two Turners went out to say good-bye, and watched the big expensive car slide down the hill, and away into the trees amid puffs of red dust.

Dick said, ‘I am glad they came. It must be lonely for you.’

‘I am not lonely,’ said Mary truthfully. Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people’s company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.

‘But you must talk women’s talk sometimes,’ said Dick, with awkward jocularity.

She glanced at him in surprise: this tone was new to her. He was staring after the departing car, his face regretful. He was not regretting Charlie Slatter, whom he did not like, but the talk, the masculine talk which gave him self-assurance in his relations with Mary. He felt as though he had been given an injection of new vigour, because of that hour spent in the little room, the two men on one side, discussing their own concerns, and the two women on the other, talking, presumably, about clothes and servants. For he had not heard a word of what Mrs Slatter and Mary had said. He had not noticed how awkward it had been for both of them.

‘You must go and see her, Mary,’ he announced. ‘I’ll give you the car one afternoon when work is slack, and you can go and have a good gossip.’ He spoke quite jauntily and freely, his face clear from that load of worry, his hands in his pockets.

Mary did not understand why he seemed alien and hostile to her, but she was piqued at this casual summing up of her needs. And she had no desire for Mrs Slatter’s company. She did not want anyone’s company.

‘I don’t want to,’ she said childishly.

‘Why not?’

But at this point the servant came out on to the verandah behind them, and held out, without speaking, his contract of service. He wanted to leave: he was needed by his family in the kraal. Mary immediately lost her temper; her irritation found a permissible outlet in this exasperating native. Dick simply pulled her back, as if she were a thing of no account, and went out to the kitchen with the native. She heard the boy complain that he had been working since five o’clock that morning with no food at all, because he was only in the compound a few moments before he had been summoned back by the gong. He could not work like that; his child in his kraal was ill; he wanted to go at once. Dick replied, ignoring the unwritten rules for once, that the new missus did not know much about running a house yet, and that she would learn and that it would not happen again. Speaking like this to a native, appealing to him, was contrary to Dick’s ideas of relationship between white and black, but he was furious with Mary for her lack of consideration and tact.

Mary was quite stupefied with rage. How dare he take the native’s part against her! When Dick returned she was standing on the verandah with her hands clenched and her face set.

‘How dare you!’ she said, her voice stifled.

‘If you must do these things, then you must take the consequences,’ said Dick wearily. ‘He’s a human being, isn’t he? He’s got to eat. Why must that bath be done all at once? It can be done over several days, if it means all that to you.’

‘It’s my house,’ said Mary. ‘He’s my boy, not yours. Don’t interfere.’

‘Listen to me,’ said Dick curtly. ‘I work hard enough, don’t I? All day I am down on the lands with these lazy black savages, fighting them to get some work out of them. You know that. I won’t come back home to this damned fight, fight, fight in the house. Do you understand? I will not have it. And you should learn sense. If you want to get work out of them you have to know how to manage them. You shouldn’t expect too much. They are nothing but savages after all.’ Thus Dick, who had never stopped to reflect that these same savages had cooked for him better than his wife did, had run his house, had given him a comfortable existence, as far as his pinched life could be comfortable, for years.

Mary was beside herself. She said, wanting to hurt him, really wanting to hurt him for the first time, because of this new arrogance of his. ‘You expect a lot from me, don’t you?’ On the brink of disaster, she pulled herself up, but could not stop completely, and after a hesitation went on, ‘You expect such a lot! You expect me to live like a poor white in this pokey little place of yours. You expect me to cook myself every day because you won’t put in ceilings…’ She was speaking in a new voice for her, a voice she had never used before in her life. It was taken direct from her mother, when she had had those scenes over money with her father. It was not the voice of Mary, the individual (who after all really did not care so much about the bath or whether the native stayed or went), but the voice of the suffering female, who wanted to show her husband she just would not be treated like that. In a moment she would begin to cry, as her mother had cried on these occasions, in a kind of dignified, martyred rage.

Dick said curtly, white with fury, ‘I told you when I married you what you could expect. You can’t accuse me of telling you lies. I explained everything to you. And there are farmers’ wives all over the country living no better, and not making such a fuss. And as for ceilings, you can whistle for them. I have lived in this house for six years and it hasn’t hurt me. You can make the best of it.’

She gasped in astonishment. Never had he spoken like that to her. And inside she went hard and cold against him, and nothing would melt her until he said he was sorry and craved her forgiveness.

‘That boy will stay now, I’ve seen to that. Now treat him properly and don’t make a fool of yourself again,’ said Dick.

She went straight into the kitchen, gave the boy the money he was owed, counting out the shillings as if she grudged them, and dismissed him. She returned cold and victorious. But Dick did not acknowledge her victory.

‘It is not me you are hurting, it is yourself,’ he said. ‘If you go on like this, you’ll never get any servants. They soon learn the women who don’t know how to treat their boys.’

She got the supper herself, struggling with the stove, and afterwards when Dick had gone to bed early, as he always did, she remained alone in the little front room. After a while, feeling caged, she went out into the dark outside the house, and walked up and down the path between the borders of white stones which gleamed faintly through the dark, trying to catch a breath of cool air to soothe her hot cheeks. Lightning was flickering gently over the kopjes; there was a dull red glow where the fire burned; and overhead it was dark and stuffy. She was tense with hatred. Then she began to picture herself walking there up and down in the darkness, with the hated bush all around her, outside that pigsty he called a house, having to do all her own work – while only a few months ago she had been living her own life in town, surrounded by friends who loved her and needed her. She began to cry, weakening into self-pity. She cried for hours, till she could walk no more. She staggered back into bed, feeling bruised and beaten. The tension between them lasted for an intolerable week, until at last the rains fell, and the air grew cool and relaxed. And he had not apologized. The incident was simply not mentioned. Unresolved and unacknowledged, the conflict was put behind them, and they went on as if it had not happened. But it had changed them both. Although his assurance did not last long, and he soon lapsed back into his old dependence on her, a faint apology always in his voice, he was left with a core of resentment against her. For the sake of their life together she had to smother her dislike of him because of the way he had behaved, but then, it was not so easy to smother; it was put against the account of the native who had left, and, indirectly, against all natives.

Towards the end of that week a note came from Mrs Slatter, asking them both for an evening party.

Dick was really reluctant to go, because he had got out of the way of organized jollification; he was ill at ease in crowds. But he wanted to accept for Mary’s sake. She, however, refused to go. She wrote a formal note of thanks, saying she regretted, etc.

Mrs Slatter had asked them on an impulse of real friendliness, for she was still sorry for Mary, in spite of her stiff angular pride. But the note offended her: it might have been copied out of a letter-writing guide. This kind of formality did not fit in with the easy manners of the district, and she showed the note to her husband with raised eyebrows, saying nothing.

‘Leave her,’ said Charlie Slatter. ‘She’ll come off her high horse. Got ideas into her head, that’s what’s wrong with her. She’ll come to her senses. Not that she’s much loss. The pair of them need some sense shaken into them. Turner is in for trouble. He is so up in the air that he doesn’t even burn fireguards! And he is planting trees. Trees! He is wasting money planting trees while he is in debt.’

Mr Slatter’s farm had hardly any trees left on it. It was a monument to farming malpractice, with great gullies cutting through it, and acres of good dark earth gone dead from misuse. But he made the money, that was the thing. It enraged him to think it was so easy to make money, and that damned fool Dick Turner played the fool with trees. On a kindhearted impulse, that was half exasperation, he drove over one morning to see Dick, avoiding the house (because he did not want to meet that stuck-up idiot Mary) looking for him on the lands. He spent three hours trying to persuade Dick to plant tobacco, instead of mealies and little crops. He was very sarcastic about those ‘little crops’, the beans and cotton and sunhemp that Dick liked. And Dick steadily refused to listen to Charlie. He liked his crops, the feeling of having his eggs in several baskets. And tobacco seemed to him an inhuman crop: it wasn’t farming at all, it was a sort of factory thing, with the barns and the grading sheds and the getting up at nights to watch barn temperatures.

‘What are you going to do when the family starts coming along?’ asked Charlie brusquely, his matter-of-fact little blue eyes fixed on Dick.

‘I’ll get out of the mess my own way,’ said Dick obstinately.

‘You are a fool.’ said Charlie. ‘A fool. Don’t say I didn’t tell you. Don’t come to me for loans when your wife’s belly begins to swell and you need cash.’

‘I have never asked you for anything,’ replied Dick, wounded, his face dark with pride. There was a moment of sheer hatred between the two men. But somewhere, somehow, they respected each other, in spite of their difference in temperament – perhaps because they shared the same life, after all? And they parted cordially enough, although Dick could not bring himself to match Charlie’s bluff good-humour.

When Charlie had gone he went back to the house, sick with worry. Sudden strain and anxiety always went to the nerves of his stomach, and he wanted to vomit. But he concealed it from Mary, because of the cause of his worry. Children were what he wanted now that his marriage was a failure and seemed impossible to right. Children would bring them close together and break down this invisible barrier. But they simply could not afford to have children. When he had said to Mary (thinking she might be longing for them) that they would have to wait, she had assented with a look of relief. He had not missed that look. But perhaps when he got out of the wood, she would be pleased to have children.

He drove himself to work harder, so that things could be better and children would be possible. He planned and schemed and dreamed all day, standing on his land watching the boys work. And in the meantime matters in the house did not improve. Mary just could not get on with natives, and that was the end of it. He had to accept it; she was made like that, and could not be altered. A cook never lasted longer than a month, and all the time there were scenes and storms of temper. He set his teeth to bear it, feeling obscurely that it was in some way his fault, because of the hardships of her life; but sometimes he would rush from the house, inarticulate with irritation. If only she had something to fill her time – that was the trouble.

6 (#ulink_49d9a6ab-d66a-5045-89e0-1ef78dee7a01)

It was by chance that Mary picked up a pamphlet on beekeeping from the counter of the store one day, and took it home with her; but even if she had not, no doubt it would have happened some other way. But it was that chance which gave her her first glimpse into Dick’s real character: that, and a few words she overheard the same day.

They seldom went into the station seven miles away; but sent in a native twice a week to fetch their post and groceries. He left at about ten in the morning, with an empty sugar sack swung over his shoulders, and returned after dusk with the sack bulging, and oozing blood from the parcel of meat. But a native, although conveniently endowed by nature with the ability to walk long distances without feeling fatigue, cannot carry sacks of flour and mealiemeal; and once a month the trip was made by car.

Mary had given her order, seen the things put into the car, and was standing on the long verandah of the store among piled crates and sacks, waiting for Dick to finish his business. As he came out, a man she did not know stopped him and said, ‘Well, Jonah, your farm flooded again this season, I suppose?’ She turned sharply to look: a few years ago she would not have noticed the undertone of contempt in the lazy rallying voice. Dick smiled and said, ‘I have had good rains this year, things are not too bad.’

‘Your luck changed, eh?’

‘Looks like it.’

Dick came towards her, the smile gone, his face strained.

‘Who was that?’ she asked.

‘I borrowed two hundred pounds from him three years ago, just after we were married.’

‘You didn’t tell me?’

‘I didn’t want to worry you.’