The Grass Is Singing

by Doris Lessing

  She felt that she must do something, and at once, to restore her poise. Her eyes happened to fall on a candlebox under the table, where the scrubbing brushes and soap were kept, and she said to the boy: “Scrub this floor.” She was shocked when she heard her own voice, for she had not known she was going to speak. As one feels when in an ordinary social conversation, kept tranquil by banalities, some person makes a remark that strikes below the surface, perhaps in error letting slip what he really thinks of you, and the shock sweeps one off one’s balance, causing a nervous giggle or some stupid sentence that makes everyone present uncomfortable, so she felt: she had lost her balance; she had no control over her actions.

  “I scrubbed it this morning,” said the native slowly, looking at her, his eyes smouldering.

  She said, “I said scrub it. Do it at once.” Her voice rose on the last words. For a moment they stared at each other, exposing their hatred; then his eyes dropped, and she turned and went out, slamming the door behind her.

  Soon she heard the sound of the wet brush over the floor. She collapsed on the sofa again, as weak as if she had been ill. She was familiar with her own storms of irrational anger, but she had never known one as devastating as this. She was shaking, the blood throbbed in her ears, her mouth was dry. After a while, more composed, she went to the bedroom to fetch herself some water; she did not want to face the native Moses.

  Yet, later, she forced herself to rise and go to the kitchen; and, standing in the doorway, surveyed the wet streaked floor as if she had truly come to inspect it. He stood immobile just outside the door, as usual, gazing out to the clump of boulders where the euphorbia tree stuck out its gray-green, fleshy arms into vivid blue sky. She made a show of peering behind cupboards, and then said, “It is time to lay the table.”

  He turned, and began laying out glass and linen, with slow and rather clumsy movements, his great black hands moving among the small instruments. Every movement he made irritated her. She sat tensed, wound up, her hands clenched. When he went out, she relaxed a little, as if a pressure had been taken off her. The table was finished. She went to inspect it; but everything was in its right place. But she picked up a glass and took it to the back room.

  “Look at this glass, Moses,” she commanded.

  He came across and looked at it politely: it was only an appearance of looking, for he had already taken it from her to wash it. There was a trace of white fluff from the drying towel down one side. He filled the sink with water, and whisked in soapsuds, just as she had taught him, and washed the glass while she watched. When it was dry she took it from him and returned to the other room.

  She imagined him again standing silent at the door in the sun, looking at nothing, and she could have screamed or thrown a glass across the room to smash on the wall. But there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that she could give him to do. She began a quiet prowl through the house: everything, though shabby and faded, was clean and in its place. That bed, the great connubial bed which she had always hated, was smooth and uncrumpled, the coverlets turned back at the corners in a brave imitation of the inviting beds in modern catalogues. The sight of it gritted on her, reminding her of the hated contact in the nights with Dick’s weary muscular body, to which she had never been able to accustom herself.

  She turned from it, clenching her hands, and saw her face suddenly in the mirror. Faded, tousled, her lips narrowed in anger, her eyes hot, her face puffed and blotched with red, she hardly recognized herself. She gazed, shocked and pitiful; and then she cried, weeping hysterically in great shuddering gasps, trying to smother the sound for fear the native at the back might hear her. She cried for some time; then, as she lifted her eyes to dry them, saw the clock. Dick would be home soon. Fear of his seeing her in this state stilled her convulsing muscles. She bathed her face, combed her hair, powdered the dark creased skin round the eyes.

  That meal was as silent as all their meals were, these days. He saw her reddened, crumpled face, and her blood-suffused eyes, and knew what was wrong. It was always because of rows with her servants that she cried. But he was weary and disappointed; it had been quite a long time since the last fight, and he had imagined she might be getting over her weakness. She ate nothing, keeping her head bent down; and the native moved about the table through the meal like an automaton, his body serving them because it must, his mind not there.

  But the thought of this man’s efficiency, and the sight of Mary’s swollen face, suddenly goaded Dick. He said, when the native was out of the room: “Mary, you must keep this boy. He is the best we ever had.” She did not look up, even then, but remained, apparently deaf, quite still. Dick saw that her thin, sun-crinkled hand was shaking. He said again, after a silence, his voice ugly with hostility: “I can’t stand any more changing of servants. I’ve had enough. I’m warning you, Mary.” And again she did not reply; she was weak with the tears and anger of the morning, and afraid that if she opened her mouth she might weep anew. He looked at her in some astonishment, for as a rule she would have snapped back some complaint of theft, or bad behavior. He had been braced to meet it. Her continued silence, which was pure opposition, drove him to insist on an assent from her. “Mary,” he said, like a superior to a subordinate, “did you hear what I said?” “Yes,” she said at last sullenly, with difficulty.

  When he left, she went immediately to the bedroom so as to avoid the sight of the native clearing the table, and slept away four hours of unendurable time.

  9

  And so the days passed, through August and September, hot hazy days with slow winds blowing in sultry, dusty gusts from the encircling granite kopjes. Mary moved about her work like a woman in a dream, taking hours to accomplish what would formerly have taken her a few minutes. Hatless under the blazing sun, with the thick cruel rays pouring on to her back and shoulders, numbing and dulling her, she sometimes felt as if she were bruised all over, as if the sun had bruised her flesh to a tender swollen covering for aching bones. She would turn giddy as she stood, and send the boy for her hat.

  Then, with relief, as if she had been doing hard physical labor for hours, instead of wandering aimlessly among the chickens without seeing them, she would collapse into a chair, and sit unmoving, thinking of nothing; but the knowledge of that man alone in the house with her lay like a weight at the back of her mind. She was tight and controlled in his presence; she kept him working as long as she could, relentless over every speck of dust and every misplaced glass or plate, that she noticed.

  The thought of Dick’s exasperation, and his warning that he could stand no more changes of servants, a challenge which she had not the vitality to face, caused her to hold herself like a taut-drawn thread, stretched between two immovable weights: that was how she felt, as if she were poised, a battleground for two contending forces. Yet what the forces were, and how she contained them, she could not have said. Moses was indifferent and calm against her as if she did not exist, except in so far as he obeyed her orders; Dick, formerly so good-natured and easy to please, now complained continually over her bad management; for she would nag at the boy in that high nervous voice of hers over a chair that was two inches out of its right place, and fail to notice that the ceiling was shrouded in cobwebs.

  She was letting everything slide, except what was forced on her attention. Her horizon had been narrowed to the house. The chickens began to die; she murmured something about disease; and then understood that she had forgotten to feed them for a week. Yet she had wandered, as usual, through the runs, with a basket of grain in her hand. As they died, the scrawny fowls were cooked and eaten. For a short while, shocked at herself, she made an effort and tried to keep her mind on what she was doing.

  Yet, not long after, the same thing happened: she had not noticed the drinking troughs were empty. Fowls were lying over the baked earth, twitching feebly in death for lack of water. And then she could no longer be troubled. For weeks they lived on chicken, till the big wire runs were empty. And now there were no eggs. Sh
e did not order them from the store, because they were so expensive. Her mind, nine-tenths of the time, was a soft aching blank. She would begin a sentence and forget to finish it. Dick became accustomed to the way she would say three words, and then, her face becoming suddenly null and empty, lapse into silence. What she had been going to say had gone clean out of her head. If he gently prompted her to continue, she looked up, not seeing him, and did not answer. It grieved him so that he could not protest over the abandonment of her chickens, which had kept them going with a little ready money up till now.

  But as far as the native was concerned, she was still responsive. This was the small part of her mind that was awake. All those scenes she would have liked to stage, but did not dare, for fear of the boy’s leaving and Dick’s anger, she acted out in her mind. Once she was roused by a noise, and realized it was herself, talking out loud in the living room in a low angry voice. In her fantasy, the native had forgotten to clean the bedroom that morning, and she was raging at him, thinking up cruel cutting phrases in her own language that he could not possibly have understood, even if she had said them to him. The sound of that soft, disjointed, crazy voice was as terrifying as the sight of herself in the mirror had been. She was afraid, jerked back into herself, shrinking from the vision of herself talking like a mad woman in the corner of the sofa.

  She got up softly and went to the door between the living room and the kitchen, looking through to see if the boy was near and could have heard. There he stood, as always, leaning against the outer wall; and she could see only his big shoulder bulging underneath the thin cloth, and his hand hanging idly down, the fingers curled softly inwards over the pinkish-brown palm. And he did not move. She told herself he could not have heard; and pushed the thought of the two open doors between herself and him out of her mind. She avoided him all that day, moving restlessly about the rooms as if she had forgotten how to remain still. She wept all that afternoon lying on the bed, with a hopeless convulsive sobbing; so that she was worn out when Dick came home. But this time he noticed nothing; he was worn out himself, wanting only sleep.

  The next day, when she was giving out supplies from the cupboard in the kitchen (which she tried to remember to keep locked, but which, more often than not, remained open without her noticing it, so that this business of putting out amounts needed for the day was really futile), Moses, who was standing beside her with the tray, said he wanted to leave at the end of the month. He spoke quietly and directly, but with a trace of hesitation, as if he were setting himself to face opposition. She was familiar with this note of nervousness, for whenever a boy gave notice, although she always felt a sharp relief because the tensions that were created between herself and every servant would be dissolved by his going, she also felt indignant, as if it were an insult to herself. She never let one go without long argument and expostulation.

  And now, she opened her mouth to remonstrate, but became silent; her hand dropped from the door of the cupboard, and she found herself thinking of Dick’s anger. She could not face it. She simply could not go through scenes with Dick. And it was not her fault this time; had she not done everything she could to keep this boy, whom she hated, who frightened her? To her horror she discovered she was shaking with sobs again, there in front of the native! Helpless and weak, she stood beside the table, her back towards him, sobbing. For some time neither of them moved; then he came round where he could see her face, looking at her curiously, his brows contracted in speculation and wonder. She said at last, wild with panic: “You mustn’t go!” And she wept on, repeating over and over again, “You must stay! You must stay!” And all the time she was filled with shame and mortification because he was seeing her cry.

  After a while she saw him go across to the shelf where the water-filter stood to fill a glass. The slow deliberation of his movements galled her, because of her own lost control; and when he handed the glass to her she did not lift her hand to take it, feeling that his action was an impertinence which she should choose to ignore. But in spite of the attitude of dignity she was striving to assume, she sobbed out again, “You mustn’t go,” and her voice was an entreaty. He held the glass to her lips, so that she had to put up her hand to hold it, and with the tears running down her face she took a gulp. She looked at him pleadingly over the glass, and with renewed fear saw an indulgence for her weakness in his eyes.

  “Drink,” he said simply, as if he were speaking to one of his own women; and she drank.

  Then he carefully took the glass from her, put it on the table, and, seeing that she stood there dazed, not knowing what to do, said: “Madame lie down on the bed.” She did not move. He put out his hand reluctantly, loathe to touch her, the sacrosanct white woman, and pushed her by the shoulder; she felt herself gently propelled across the room towards the bedroom. It was like a nightmare where one is powerless against horror: the touch of this black man’s hand on her shoulder filled her with nausea; she had never, not once in her whole life, touched the flesh of a native. As they approached the bed, the soft touch still on her shoulder, she felt her head beginning to swim and her bones going soft. “Madame He down,” he said again, and his voice was gentle this time, almost fatherly. When she dropped to a sitting position on the bedside, he gently held her shoulder and pushed her down. Then he took her coat off the door where it hung, and placed it over her feet. He went out, and the horror retreated; she lay there numbed and silent, unable to consider the implications of the incident.

  After a while she slept, and it was late afternoon when she woke. She could see the sky outside the square of window, banked with thunderous blue clouds, and lit with orange light from the sinking sun. For a moment she could not remember what had happened; but when she did the fear engulfed her again, a terrible dark fear. She thought of herself weeping helplessly, unable to stop; of drinking at that black man’s command; of the way he had pushed her across the two rooms to the bed; of the way he had made her lie down and then tucked the coat in round her legs. She shrank into the pillow with loathing, moaning out loud, as if she had been touched by excrement. And through her torment she could hear his voice, firm and kind, like a father commanding her.

  After a while, when the room was quite dark, and only the pale walls glimmered, reflecting the light that still glowed in the tops of the trees, though their lower boughs held the shadows of dusk, she got up, and put a match to the lamp. It flared up, steadied, glowed quietly. The room was now a shell of amber light and shadows, hollowed out of the wide tree-filled night. She powdered her face, and sat a long time before the mirror, feeling unable to move. She was not thinking, only afraid, and of what she did not know. She felt she could not go out till Dick returned and supported her against the presence of the native. When Dick came, he said, looking at her with dismay, that he had not woken her at lunch time, and that he hoped she was not ill. “Oh no,” she said. “Only tired. I am feeling . . .” Her voice tailed off, the blank look settled on her face. They were sitting in the dim arc of light from the swinging lamp, the boy quietly moving about the table. For a long time she kept her eyes lowered, though, with his entrance, an alertness came back to her features. When she made herself look up, and peer hurriedly into his face, she was reassured, for there was nothing new in his attitude. As always, he behaved as if he were an abstraction, not really there, a machine without a soul.

  Next morning she made herself go into the kitchen and speak normally; and waited fearfully for him to say again that he wanted to leave. But he did not. For a week things went on until she realized he was not going; he had responded to her tears and appeal. She could not bear to think she had got her way by these methods; and because she did not want to remember it, she slowly recovered. Relieved, released from the torturing thought of Dick’s anger, with the memory of her shameful collapse gone from her mind, she began again to use that cold biting voice, to make sarcastic comments on the native’s work. One day he turned to her in the kitchen, looked at her straight in the face and said in a voice tha
t was disconcertingly hot and reproachful: “Madame asked me to stay. I stay to help Madame. If Madame cross, I go.”

  The note of finality checked her; she felt helpless. Particularly as she had been forced to remember why he was here at all. And then, the resentful heat of his voice said that he considered she was unjust. Unjust! She did not see it like that.

  He was standing beside the stove, waiting for something to finish cooking. She did not know what to say. He moved over to the table, while he waited for her reply, he picked up a cloth with which to grasp the hot iron of the oven door handle. Without looking at her, he said: “I do the work well, yes?” He spoke in English, which as a rule she would have flamed into temper over; she thought it impertinence. But she answered in English, “Yes.”

  “Then why Madame always cross?”

  He spoke, this time, easily, almost familiarly, good-humoredly as if he were humoring a child. He bent to open the oven, with his back to her, and took out a tray of the crisp light scones, that were so much better than she could make herself. He began turning them out, one by one, on to a wire tray to cool. She felt as if she should go at once, but did not move. She was held, helpless, watching his big hands flip those little scones on to the tray. And she said nothing. She felt the usual anger rise within her, at the tone he used to her; at the same time she was fascinated, and out of her depth; she did not know what to do with this personal relation. So, after a while, since he did not look at her, and moved quietly about his work, she went away without replying.

  When the rains broke in late October, after six weeks of destroying heat, Dick, as always at this time of the year, stayed away from the midday meal because of the pressure of work. He left about six in the morning and returned at six at night, so there was only one meal to be cooked: breakfast and lunch were sent to him on the fields. As she had done before, in previous years, Mary told Moses that she would not take lunch, and that he could bring her tea: she felt she could not be troubled to eat. On the first day of Dick’s long absences, instead of the tray of tea, Moses brought her eggs, jam and toast. These he set carefully down on the small table beside her.