Doris Lessing Three-Book Edition: The Golden Notebook, The Grass is Singing, The Good Terrorist. Doris Lessing
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your fault. You lost me twenty of my best boys, and they’ll never come back. They are out somewhere else giving my farm a bad name, at this moment, because of your damned temper. They are just not coming to me now as they used. No, they all go into the towns where they loaf about doing nothing.’
And then, this familiar grievance carried him away, and he began to storm against the Government, which was under the influence of the nigger-lovers from England, and would not force the natives to work on the land, would not simply send out lorries and soldiers and bring them to the farmers by force. The Government never understood the difficulties of farmers! Never! And he stormed against the natives themselves, who refused to work properly, who were insolent – and so on. He talked on and on, in a hot, angry, bitter voice, the voice of the white farmer, who seems to be contending, in the Government, with a force as immovable as the skies and seasons themselves. But, in this storm of resentment, he forgot about the plans for next year. He returned to the house preoccupied and bitter, and snapped at the houseboy, who temporarily represented the genus native, which tormented him beyond all endurance.
Mary was worried by him at this time, so far as she could be worried in her numbed state. He would return with her at sundown tired and irritable, to sit in a chair smoking endlessly. By now he was a chain-smoker, though he smoked native cigarettes which were cheaper, but which gave him a perpetual cough and stained his fingers yellow to the middle joints. And he would fidget and jig about in the chair, as if his nerves simply would not relax. And then, at last, his body slackened and he lay limp, waiting for supper to come in, so that he could go to bed at last and sleep.
But the houseboy would enter and say there were farm boys waiting to see him, for permission to go visiting, or something of that kind, and Mary would see that tense look return to Dick’s face, and the explosive restlessness of his limbs. It seemed that he could not bear natives any more. And he would shout at the houseboy to get out and leave him alone and tell the farm natives to get to hell back to the compound. But in half an hour the servant would return, saying patiently, bracing himself against Dick’s irritation, that the boys were still waiting. And Dick would stub out the cigarette, immediately light another and go outside, shouting at the top of his voice.
Mary used to listen, her own nerves tense. Although this exasperation was so familiar to her, it annoyed her to see it in him. It irritated her extremely, and she would be sarcastic when he came back, and said, ‘You can have your troubles with the natives, but I am not allowed to.’
‘I tell you,’ he would say, glaring at her from hot, tormented eyes, ‘I can’t stand them much longer.’ And he would subside, shaking all over, into his chair.
But in spite of this perpetual angry undercurrent of hate, she was disconcerted when she saw him talking to his bossboy perhaps, on the lands. Why, he seemed to be growing into a native himself, she thought uneasily. He would blow his nose on his fingers into a bush, the way they did; he seemed, standing beside them, to be one of them; even his colour was not so different, for he was burned a rich brown, and he seemed to hold himself the same way. And when he laughed with them, cracking some joke to keep them good-humoured, he seemed to have gone beyond her reach into a crude horse-humour that shocked her. And what was to be the end of it, she wondered? And then an immense fatigue would grip her, and she thought dimly: ‘What does it matter, after all?’
At last she said to him that she saw no point spending all her time sitting under a tree with ticks crawling up her legs, in order to watch him. Especially when he took no notice of her.
‘But, Mary, I like you being there.’
‘Well, I’ve had enough of it.’
And she lapsed into her former habits, ceasing to think about the farm. The farm was the place from which Dick returned to eat and sleep.
And now she gave way. All day she sat numbly on the sofa with her eyes shut, feeling the heat beating in her brain. She was thirsty: it was too much of an effort to get a glass of water or to call the boy to fetch it for her. She was sleepy; but to get up from where she sat and climb on the bed was an exhausting labour. She slept where she was. Her legs felt, as she walked, that they were too heavy for her. To make a sentence was an overwhelming effort. For weeks on end she spoke to no one but Dick and the servant; and even Dick she saw for five minutes in the morning and for half an hour at night, before he dropped exhausted into bed.
The year moved through the cold bright months towards the heat; and, as it advanced the wind drove a rain of fine dust through the house, so that surfaces were gritty to the touch; and spiralling dust-devils rose in the lands below, leaving a shining wreckage of grass and maize husks hanging in the air like motes. She thought of the heat ahead with dread, but not able to summon up enough energy to fight it. She felt as if a touch would send her off balance into nothingness; she thought of a full complete darkness with longing. Her eyes closed, she imagined that the skies were blank and cold, without even stars to break their blackness.
It was at this time, when any influence would have directed her into a new path, when her whole being was poised, as it were, waiting for something to propel her one way or the other, that her servant, once again, gave notice. This time there was no row over a broken dish or a badly-washed plate: quite simply, he wanted to go home; and Mary was too indifferent to fight. He left, having brought in his place a native whom Mary found so intolerable that she discharged him after an hour’s work. She was left servantless for a while. Now she did not attempt to do more than was essential. Floors were left unswept, and they ate tinned food. And a new boy did not present himself. Mary had earned such a bad name among them as a mistress that it became increasingly difficult as time went on to replace those who left.
Dick, unable to stand the dirt and bad food any longer, said he would bring up one of the farm natives for training as a houseboy. When the man presented himself at the door, Mary recognized him as the one she had struck with the whip over the face two years before. She saw the scar on his cheek, a thin darker weal across the black skin. She stood irresolute in the doorway, while he waited outside, his eyes bent down. But the thought of sending him back to the lands and waiting for somebody else to be sent up; even this postponement tired her. She told him to come in.
That morning, because of some inward prohibition she did not try to explain, she could not work with him as was usually her custom on these occasions. She left him alone in the kitchen; and when Dick came up, said, ‘Isn’t there another boy that will do?’
Dick, without looking at her, and eating as he always did these days, in great gulps, as if there was no time, said: ‘He’s the best I could find. Why?’ He sounded hostile.
She had never told him about the incident of the whip, for fear of his anger. She said: ‘He doesn’t seem a very good type to me.’ As she spoke she saw that look of exasperation grow on his face, and added hastily, ‘But he will do, I suppose.’
Dick said, ‘He is clean and willing. He’s one of the best boys I have ever had. What more do you want?’ He spoke brusquely, almost with brutality. Without speaking again he went out. And so the native stayed.
She began on the usual routine of instruction, as cold-voiced and methodical as always, but with a difference. She was unable to treat this boy as she had treated all the others, for always, at the back of her mind, was that moment of fear she had known just after she had hit him and thought he would attack her. She felt uneasy in his presence. Yet his demeanour was the same as in all the others; there was nothing in his attitude to suggest that he remembered the incident. He was silent, dogged and patient under her stream of explanations and orders. His eyes he always kept lowered, as if afraid to look at her. But she could not forget it, even if he had; and there was a subtle difference in the way she spoke to him. She was as impersonal as she knew how to be; so impersonal that her voice was free, for a while, even of the usual undertone of irritation.
She used to sit quite still, watching him work. The powerful, broad-built body fascinated her. She had given him white shorts and shirts to wear in the house, that had been used by her former servants. They were too small for him; as he swept or scrubbed or bent to the stove, his muscles bulged and filled out the thin material of the sleeves until it seemed they would split. He appeared even taller and broader than he was because