Doris Lessing Three-Book Edition: The Golden Notebook, The Grass is Singing, The Good Terrorist. Doris Lessing
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for their negligence and laziness. After all, for several days they had done no work at all. And if she did what she had threatened, the whole lot of them would be docked two and sixpence, because none had obeyed her and appeared on the lands within the specified ten minutes. They were in the wrong; she was in the right; and the bossboy should be telling them so, not persuasively arguing with them and shrugging his shoulders – and even, once, laughing. At last he turned back to her, told her they were dissatisfied and demanded what was due. She said shortly and finally that she had said she would deduct that amount and she intended to keep her word. She would not change her mind. Suddenly angry, she added, without reflecting, that those who did not like it could leave. She went on with the business of arranging the little piles of notes and silver, taking no notice of the storm of talk outside. Some of them walked off to the compound, accepting the position. Others waited in groups till she had finished the paying, and then came up to the wall. One after another spoke to the bossboy, saying they wanted to leave. She felt a little afraid, because she knew how hard it was to get labour, and how this was Dick’s most persistent worry. Nevertheless, even while she turned her head to listen for Dick’s movements in the bed that was behind her through one thickness of wall, she was filled with determination and resentment, because they expected to be paid for work they had not done, and had gone visiting when Dick was ill; above all, that they had not come to the lands in that interval of ten minutes. She turned to the waiting group and told them that those of them who were contracted natives could not leave.
These had been recruited by what is the South African equivalent of the old press gang: white men who lie in wait for the migrating bands of natives on their way along the roads to look for work, gather them into large lorries, often against their will (sometimes chasing them through the bush for miles if they try to escape), lure them by the fine promises of good employment and finally sell them to the white farmers at five pounds or more per head for a year’s contract.
Of these boys she knew that some would be found to have run away from the farm during the next few days; and some would not be recovered by the police, for they would escape through the hills to the border and so out of reach. But she was not going to be swayed now by fear of their going and Dick’s labour troubles; she would rather die than show weakness. She dismissed them, using the police as a threat. The others, who were working on a monthly basis, and whom Dick kept with him by a combination of coaxing and good-humoured threats, she said could leave at the month’s end. She spoke to them directly – not through the medium of the bossboy – in cold clear tones, explaining with admirable logic how they were in the wrong, and how she was justified in acting as she did. She ended with a short homily on the dignity of work, which is a doctrine bred into the bones of every white South African. They would never be any good, she said (speaking in kitchen kaffir which some of them did not understand, being fresh from their kraals) until they learned to work without supervision, for the love of it, to do as they were told, to do a job for its own sake, not thinking about the money they would be paid for it. It was this attitude towards work that had made the white man what he was: the white man worked because it was good to work, because working without reward was what proved a man’s worth.
The phrases of this little lecture came naturally to her lips: she did not have to look for them in her mind. She had heard them so often from her father, when he was lecturing his native servants, that they welled up from the part of her brain that held her earliest memories.
The natives listened to her with what she described to herself as ‘cheeky’ faces. They were sullen and angry, listening to her (or what they could understand of her speech) with inattention, simply waiting for her to finish.
Then, brushing away their protests, which broke out as soon as her voice stopped, she got up with an abrupt dismissing gesture, lifted the little table with the paper bags of money stacked on it, and carried it inside. After a while she heard them moving off, talking and grumbling among themselves, and looking through the curtains saw their dark bodies mingling with the shadows of the trees before they disappeared. Their voices floated back: angry shouts now and imprecations against her. She was filled with vindictiveness and a feeling of victory. She hated them all, every one of them, from the headboy whose subservience irritated her, to the smallest child; there were some children working among the others who could be no more than seven or eight years old.
She had learned, standing in the sun watching them all day, to hide her hatred when she spoke to them, but she did not attempt to hide it from herself. She hated it when they spoke to each other in dialects she did not understand, and she knew they were discussing her and making what were probably obscene remarks against her – she knew it, though she could only ignore it. She hated their half-naked, thick-muscled black bodies stooping in the mindless rhythm of their work. She hated their sullenness, their averted eyes when they spoke to her, their veiled insolence: and she hated more than anything, with a violent physical repulsion, the heavy smell that came from them, a hot, sour animal smell.
‘How they stink,’ she said to Dick, in an explosion of anger that was the reaction from setting her will against theirs.
Dick laughed a little. He said, ‘They say we stink.’
‘Nonsense!’ she exclaimed, shocked that these animals should so presume.
‘Oh yes,’ he said, not noticing her anger. ‘I remember talking to old Samson once. He said: “You say we smell. But to us there is nothing worse than a white man’s smell.”’
‘Cheek!’ she began indignantly; but then she saw his still pale and hollowed face, and restrained herself. She had to be very careful, because he was liable to be touchy and irritable in his present stage of weakness.
‘What were you talking to them about?’ he asked.
‘Oh, nothing much,’ she said warily, turning away. She had decided not to tell him about the boys that were leaving until later, when he was really well.
‘I hope you are being careful with them,’ he said anxiously. ‘You have to go slow with them these days, you know. They are all spoilt.’
‘I don’t believe in treating them soft,’ she said scornfully. ‘If I had my way, I’d keep them in order with the whip.’
‘That’s all very well,’ he said irritably, ‘but where would you get the labour?’
‘Oh, they all make me sick,’ she said, shuddering.
During this time, in spite of the hard work and her hatred of the natives, all her apathy and discontent had been pushed into the background. She was too absorbed in the business of controlling the natives without showing weakness, of running the house and arranging things so that Dick would be comfortable when she was out. She was finding out, too, about every detail of the farm: how it was run and what was grown. She spent several evenings over Dick’s books when he was asleep. In the past she had taken no interest in this: it was Dick’s affair. But now she was analysing figures – which wasn’t difficult with only a couple of cash books – seeing the farm whole in her mind. She was shocked by what she found. For a little while she thought she must be mistaken; there must be more to it than this. But there was not. She surveyed what crops were grown, what animals there were, and analysed without difficulty the causes of their poverty. The illness, Dick’s enforced seclusion and her enforced activity, had brought the farm near to her and made it real. Before it had been an alien and rather distasteful affair from which she voluntarily excluded herself, and which she made no attempt to understand as a whole, thinking it more complicated than it was. She was now annoyed with herself that she had not tried to appreciate these problems before.
Now, as she followed the gang of natives up the field, she thought continually about the farm, and what should be done. Her attitude towards Dick, always contemptuous, was now bitter and angry. It was not a question of bad luck, it was simply incompetence. She had been wrong in thinking that those outbursts of wishful thinking over turkeys, pigs, etc., had been a kind of escape from the discipline of his work on the farm. He was all of a piece, everything he did showed the same traits. Everywhere she found things begun and left unfinished. Here it was a piece of land that had been half-stumped and then abandoned so that the young trees were growing up over it again; there it was a cowshed made half of brick