Doris Lessing Three-Book Edition: The Golden Notebook, The Grass is Singing, The Good Terrorist. Doris Lessing
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once. You must see that for yourself.’
‘Fifteen years!’ said Dick, his lean dark face flushed, ‘fifteen years!’ He even bent down, unconsciously, and picked up a handful of earth, and held it in his hand, as if claiming his own. It was an absurd gesture. Charlie’s face put on a jeering little smile.
‘But, Turner, you will be coming back to it.’
‘It won’t be mine,’ said Dick, and his voice broke. He turned away, still clutching his soil. Tony Marston also turned away, and pretended to be inspecting the condition of the field; he did not want to intrude on this grief. Charlie, who had no such scruples, looked impatiently at Dick’s working face. Yet with a tinge of respect. He respected the emotion he could not understand. Pride of ownership, yes: that he knew; but not this passionate attachment to the soil, as such. He did not understand it; but his voice softened.
‘It will be as good as yours. I won’t upset your farm. You can go on with it, when you come back, just as you like.’ He spoke with his usual rough good-humour.
‘Charity,’ said Dick, in that remote grieved voice.
‘It’s not charity. I’m buying it as a business concern. I want the grazing. I will run my cattle here with yours, and you can go on with your crops as you like.’
Yet he was thinking it was charity, was even a little surprised at himself for this complete betrayal of his business principles. In the minds of all three of them the word ‘charity’ was written in big black letters, obscuring everything else. And they were all wrong. It was an instinctive self-preservation. Charlie was fighting to prevent another recruit to the growing army of poor whites, who seem to respectable white people so much more shocking (though not pathetic, for they are despised and hated for their betrayal of white standards, rather than pitied) than all the millions of black people who are crowded into the slums or on to the dwindling land reserves of their own country.
At last, after much argument, Dick agreed to leave at the end of a month, when he had shown Tony how he liked things done on ‘his’ land. Charlie, cheating a little, booked the railway journey for three weeks ahead. Tony went back to the house with Dick, agreeably surprised that he had not been in the country more than a couple of months before finding a job. He was given a thatched, mud-walled hut at the back of the house. It had been a store-hut at one stage, but was now empty. There were scattered mealies on the floor still, which had escaped the broom; on the walls were ant tunnels of fine red granules which had not been brushed away. There was an iron bedstead, supplied by Charlie, a cupboard made of boxes and curtained over with that peculiarly ugly, blue native stuff, and a mirror over a basin on a packing-case. Tony did not mind these things in the least. He was in a mood of elation, a fine romantic mood, and things like bad food or sagging mattresses were quite unimportant to him. Standards that would have shocked him in his own country seemed more like exciting indications of a different sense of values, here.
He was twenty. He had had a good, conventional education, and had faced the prospect of becoming some kind of a clerk in his uncle’s factory. To sit on an office stool was not his idea of life; and he had chosen South Africa as his home because a remote cousin of his had made five thousand pounds the year before out of tobacco. He intended to do the same, and better, if he could. In the meantime he had to learn. The only thing he had against this farm was that it had no tobacco; but six months on a mixed farm would be experience, and good for him. He was sorry for Dick Turner, whom he knew to be unhappy; but even this tragedy seemed to him romantic; he saw it, impersonally, as a symptom of the growing capitalization of farming all over the world, of the way small farmers would inevitably be swallowed by the big ones. (Since he intended to be a big one himself, this tendency did not distress him.) Because he had never yet earned his own living, he thought entirely in abstractions. For instance, he had the conventionally ‘progressive’ ideas about the colour bar, the superficial progressiveness of the idealist that seldom survives a conflict with self-interest. He had brought with him a suitcase full of books, which he stacked round the circular wall of his hut: books on the colour question, on Rhodes and Kruger, on farming, on the history of gold. But, a week later, he picked up one of them and found the back eaten out by white ants. So he put them back in the suitcase and never looked at them again. A man cannot work twelve hours a day and then feel fresh enough for study.
He took his meals with the Turners. Otherwise, he was expected to pick up enough knowledge in a month to keep this place running for six, until Dick returned. He spent all day with Dick on the lands, rising at five, and going to bed at eight. He was interested in everything, well-informed, fresh, alive – a charming companion. Or perhaps Dick might have found him so ten years before. As it was he was not responsive to Tony, who would start a comfortable discussion on miscegenation, perhaps, or the effects of the colour bar on industry only to find Dick staring, with abstract eyes. Dick was concerned, in Tony’s presence, only to get through these last days without losing his last shreds of self-respect by breaking down, by refusing to go. And he knew he had to go. Yet his feelings were so violent, he was in such a turmoil of unhappiness, that he had to restrain crazy impulses to set fire to the long grass and watch the flames destroy the veld he knew so well that each bush and tree was a personal friend; or to pull down the little house he had built with his own hands and lived in so long. It seemed a violation that someone else would give orders here, someone else would farm his soil and perhaps destroy his work.
As for Mary, Tony hardly saw her, He was disturbed by her, when he had time to think about the strange, silent, dried-out woman who seemed as if she had forgotten how to speak. And then, it would appear that she realized she should make an effort, and her manner would become odd and gauche. She would talk for a few moments with a grotesque sprightliness that shocked Tony and made him uncomfortable. Her manner had no relation to what she was saying. She would suddenly break into one of Dick’s slow, patient explanations about a plough or a sick ox, with an irrelevant remark about the food (which Tony found nauseating) or about the heat at this time of the year. ‘I do so like it when the rains come,’ she would say conversationally, giggle a little, and relapse suddenly into a blank, staring silence. Tony began to think she wasn’t quite all there. But then, these two had had a hard time of it, so he understood; and in any case, living here all by themselves for so long was enough to make anyone a bit odd.
The heat in that house was so great that he could not understand how she stood it. Being new to the country he felt the heat badly; but he was glad to be out and away from that tin-roofed oven where the air seemed to coagulate into layers of sticky heat. Although his interest in Mary was limited, it did occur to him to think that she was leaving for a holiday for the first time in years, and that she might be expected to show symptoms of pleasure. She was making no preparations that he could see; never even mentioned it. And Dick, for that matter, did not talk about it either.
About a week before they were due to leave, Dick said to Mary over the lunch table, ‘How about packing?’ She nodded, after two repetitions of the question, but did not reply.
‘You must pack, Mary,’ said Dick gently, in that quiet hopeless voice with which he always addressed her. But when he and Tony returned that night, she had done nothing. When the greasy meal was cleared away, Dick pulled down the boxes and began to do the packing himself. Seeing him at it, she began to help; but before half an hour was gone, she had left him in the bedroom, and was sitting blankly on the sofa.
‘Complete nervous breakdown,’ diagnosed Tony, who was just off to bed. He had the kind of mind that is relieved by putting things into words: the phrase was an apology for Mary; it absolved her from criticism. ‘Complete nervous breakdown’ was something anyone might have; most people did, at some time or another. The next night, too, Dick packed, until everything was ready. ‘Buy yourself some material and make a dress or two,’ said Dick diffidently, for he had realized, handling her things, that she had, almost literally, ‘nothing to wear’. She nodded, and took out of a drawer a length of flowered cotton stuff that had been taken over with the stock from the store. She began to cut it out, then remained still, bent over it, silent, until Dick touched her shoulder and roused her to come to bed. Tony, witness of this scene, refrained from looking at Dick. He was grieved for them both. He had learned to like Dick very much; his feeling for him was sincere and personal. As for Mary, while he