The Grass is Singing. Doris Lessing
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that would flame a sullen red when she was in conflict with her servants. Sometimes she would present the worn visage of an indomitable old woman who has learnt to expect the worst from life, and sometimes the face of defenceless hysteria. But she was still able to walk from the room, silent in wordless criticism.
It was only a few months after the pigs had been sold that she noticed one day, with a cold sensation in her stomach, that familiar rapt expression on Dick’s face. She saw him standing on the verandah, staring out over the miles of dull tawny veld to the hills, and wondered what vision possessed him now. She remained silent, however, waiting for him to turn to her, boyishly excited because of the success he already knew in imagination. And even then she was not really, not finally, despairing. Arguing against her dull premonitions, she told herself that the season had been good, and Dick quite pleased; he had paid a hundred pounds off the mortgage, and had enough in hand to carry them over the next year without borrowing. She had become adjusted, without knowing it, to his negative judging of a season by the standard of the debts he had not incurred. And when he remarked one day, with a defiant glance at her, that he had been reading about turkeys, she forced herself to appear interested. She said to herself that other farmers did these things and made money. Sooner or later Dick would strike a patch of luck: the market would favour him, perhaps; or the climate of his farm particularly suit turkeys, and he would find he had made a good profit. Then he began to remind her, already defending himself against the accusations she had not made, that he had lost very little over the pigs, after all (he had apparently forgotten about the bees); and it had been a costless experiment. The styes had cost nothing at all, and the boys’ wages amounted only to a few shillings. The food they had grown themselves, or practically all of it. Mary remembered the sacks of maize they had bought, and that finding money to pay boys’ wages was his greatest worry, but still kept her mouth shut and her eyes turned away, determined not to provoke him into further passions of hostile self-defence.
She saw more of Dick during the few weeks of the turkey-obsession than she had since she married him, or ever would again. He was hardly down on the farm at all; but spent the whole day supervising the building of the brick houses and the great wire runs. The fine-meshed wire cost over fifty pounds. Then the turkeys were bought, and expensive incubators, and weighing machines, and all the rest of the paraphernalia Dick thought essential; but before even the first lot of eggs were hatched, he remarked one day that he thought of using the runs and the houses, not for turkeys, but for rabbits. Rabbits could be fed on a handful of grass, and they breed like – well, like rabbits. It was true that people did not have much taste for rabbit-flesh (this is a South African prejudice), but tastes could be acquired, and if they sold the rabbits at five shillings each, he reckoned they could make a comfortable fifty or sixty pounds a month. Then, when the rabbits were established, they could buy a special breed of Angora rabbits, because he had heard the wool fetched six shillings a pound.
At this point, unable to control herself and hating herself for it, Mary lost her temper – lost it finally and destructively. Even as she raged against him, her feeling was of cold self-condemnation because she was giving him the satisfaction of seeing her thus. But it was a feeling he would not have understood. Her anger was terrible to him, though he told himself continually that she was in the wrong and had no right to thwart his well-meant but unfortunate efforts. She raged and wept and swore, till at last she was too weak to stand, and remained lolling in the corner of the sofa, sobbing, trying to get her breath. And Dick did not hitch up his pants, start to whistle or look like a harried little boy. He looked at her for a long time as she sat there, sobbing; and then said sardonically, ‘OK boss.’ Mary did not like that; she did not like it at all; for his sarcastic remark said more about their marriage than she had ever allowed herself to think, and it was unseemly that her contempt of him should be put so plainly into words: it was a condition of the existence of their marriage that she should pity him generously, not despise him.
But there was no more talk about rabbits or turkeys. She sold the turkeys, and filled the wire runs with chickens. To make some money to buy herself some clothes, she said. Did he expect her to go about in rags like a kaffir. He did not expect anything, apparently, for he did not even reply to her challenge. He was again preoccupied. There was no hint of apology or defensiveness in his manner when he informed her that he intended to start a kaffir store on his farm. He simply stated the fact, not looking at her, in a matter-of-fact take-it-or-leave-it voice. Everyone knew that kaffir stores made a pile of money, he said. Charlie Slatter had a store on his farm; a lot of farmers did. They were goldmines of profit. Mary shrank from the word ‘goldmines’ because she had found a series of crumbling weed-covered trenches behind the house one day, which he had told her he had dug years before in an effort to discover the Eldorado he had been convinced was hidden beneath the soil of his farm. She said quietly. ‘If there is a store on Slatter’s place, only five miles off, there is no point in having another here.’
‘I have a hundred natives here always.’
‘If they earn fifteen bob a month you are not going to become a Rockefeller on what they spend.’
‘There are always natives passing through,’ he said stubbornly.
He applied for a trading licence and got it without difficulty. Then he built a store. It seemed to Mary a terrible thing, an omen and a warning, that the store, the ugly menacing store of her childhood, should follow her here, even to her home.
But it was built a few hundred yards from the house itself, consisting of a small room bisected by a counter, with a bigger room behind to hold the stock. To begin with what stock they needed could be contained on the shelves of the store itself, but as the thing expanded, they would need the second room.
Mary helped Dick lay out the goods, sick with depression, hating the feel of the cheap materials that smelled of chemicals, and the blankets that seemed rough and greasy on the fingers even before they were used. They hung up the jewellery of garish glass and brass and copper, and she set them swinging and tinkling, with a tight-lipped smile, because of her memories of childhood, when it had been her greatest delight to watch the brilliant strings of beads swaying and shimmering. She was thinking that these two rooms added to the house would have made their life comfortable: the money spent on the store, the turkey-runs, the pigstyes, the beehives, would have put ceilings into the house, would have taken the terror out of the thought of the approaching hot season. But what was the use of saying it? She felt like dissolving in hopeless foreboding tears; but she said not a word, and helped Dick with the work till it was finished.
When the store was ready, and filled to the roof with kaffir goods, Dick was so pleased he went into the station and bought twenty cheap bicycles. It was ambitious, because rubber rots; but then, he said, his natives were always asking him for advances to buy bicycles; they could buy them from him. Then the question arose who was to run the store? When it really gets going, he said, we can engage a storeman. Mary shut her eyes and sighed. Before they had even started, when it looked as if it would be a long time before they had paid off the capital spent on it, he was talking about a storeman who would cost at the very least thirty pounds a month. Why not engage a native? she asked. You can’t trust niggers further than you can kick them, he said, as far as money is concerned. He said that he had taken it for granted that she would run the store; she hadn’t anything to do in any case. He made this last remark in the harsh resentful voice that was, at this time, his usual way of addressing her.
Mary replied sharply that she would rather die than set foot inside it. Nothing would make her, nothing.
‘It wouldn’t hurt you,’ said Dick. ‘Are you too good to stand behind a counter, then?’
‘Selling kaffir truck to stinking kaffirs,’ she said.
But that was not her feeling – not then, before she had started the work. She could not explain to Dick how that store smell made her remember the way she had stood, as a very small girl, looking fearfully up at the rows of bottles on the shelves, wondering which of them her father would handle that night; the way her mother had taken coins out of his pockets at nights, when he had fallen asleep in a chair snoring, mouth open, legs sprawling; and how the next day she would be sent up to the store to buy food that would not appear on the account at the month’s end. These things she could not explain to Dick, for the good reason