The Grass Is Singing

by Doris Lessing

  “I told you I only wanted tea,” she said sharply.

  He answered quietly: “Madame ate no breakfast, she must eat.” On the tray there was even a handleless cup with flowers in it: crude yellows and pinks and reds, bush flowers, thrust together clumsily, but making a strong burst of color on the old stained cloth.

  As she sat there, her eyes bent down, and he straightened himself after setting down the tray, what troubled her most was this evidence of his desire to please her, the propitiation of the flowers. He was waiting for a word of approval and pleasure from her. She could not give it; but the rebuke that sprang to her lips remained unspoken, and without speaking she pulled the tray to her and began to eat.

  There was now a new relation between them. For she felt helplessly in his power. Yet there was no reason why she should. Never ceasing for one moment to be conscious of his presence about the house, or standing silently at the back against the wall in the sun, her feeling was one of a strong and irrational fear, a deep uneasiness, and even—though this she did not know, would have died rather than acknowledge—of some dark attraction. It was as though the act of weeping before him had been an act of resignation—resignation of her authority; and he had refused to hand it back. Several times the quick rebukes had come to her lips, and she had seen him look at her deliberately, not accepting it, but challenging her. Only once, when he had really forgotten to do something and was in the wrong, had he worn his old attitude of blank submissiveness. Then he accepted, because he was at fault. And now she began to avoid him. Whereas before she had made herself follow up his work, and had inspected everything he did, now she hardly went to the kitchen, and left the care of the house to him. Even the keys she left on a shelf in the store-room, where he could find them to open the grocery cupboard as he needed. And she was held in balance, not knowing what this new tension was that she could not break down.

  Twice he asked her questions, in that new familiar friendly voice of his.

  Once it was about the war. “Did Madame think it would be over soon?” She was startled. To her, living out of contact with everything, not even reading the weekly newspaper, the war was a rumor, something taking place in another world. But she had seen him poring over the old newsprint spread on the kitchen table as covering. She answered stiffly that she did not know. And again, some days later, as if he had been thinking in the interval, he asked: “Did Jesus think it right that people should kill each other?” This time she was angry at the implied criticism, and she answered coldly that Jesus was on the side of the good people. But all day she burned with her old resentment, and at night asked Dick: “Where does Moses come from?”

  “Mission boy,” he replied. “The only decent one I’ve ever had.” Like most South Africans, Dick did not like mission boys, they “knew too much.” And in any case they should not be taught to read and write: they should be taught the dignity of labor and general usefulness to the white man.

  “Why?” he asked suspiciously. “No trouble again, I hope?”

  “No.”

  “Has he been cheeky?”

  “No.”

  But the mission background explained a lot: that irritatingly well-articulated “madame,” for instance, instead of the usual “missus,” which was somehow in better keeping with his station in life.

  That “madame” annoyed her. She would have liked to ask him to drop it. But there was nothing disrespectful in it: it was only what he had been taught by some missionary with foolish ideas. And there was nothing in his attitude towards her she could take hold of. But although he was never disrespectful, he forced her now to treat him as a human being; it was impossible for her to thrust him out of her mind like something unclean, as she had done with all the others in the past. She was being forced into contact, and she never ceased to be aware of him. She realized, daily, that there was something in it that was dangerous, but what it was she was unable to define.

  Now she dreamed through her broken nights, horrible, frightening dreams. Her sleep, once an instantaneous dropping of a black curtain, had become more real than her waking. Twice she dreamed directly of the native, and on each occasion she woke in terror as he touched her. On each occasion in her dream he had stood over her, powerful and commanding, yet kind, but forcing her into a position where she had to touch him. And there were other dreams, where he did not enter directly, but which were confused, terrifying, horrible, from which she woke sweating in fear, trying to put them out of her mind. She became afraid to go to sleep. She would lie in the dark, tense beside Dick’s relaxed sleeping body, forcing herself to remain awake.

  Often, during the day, she watched him covertly, not like a mistress watching a servant work, but with a fearful curiosity, remembering those dreams. And every day he looked after her, seeing what she ate, bringing her meals without her ordering them, bringing her little gifts of a handful of eggs from the compound fowls, or a twist of flowers from the bush.

  Once, when it was long past sundown and Dick had not returned, she said to Moses, “Keep the dinner hot. I am going to see what has happened to the boss.”

  When she was in the bedroom fetching her coat, Moses knocked at the door, and said that he would go and find out; Madame should not walk around in the dark bush by herself.

  “All right,” she said helplessly, and took her coat off.

  But there was nothing wrong with Dick. He had been held up over an ox that had broken its leg. And when, a week later, he was again long after his time in coming, and she was worried, she made no effort to find out what was wrong, fearing that the native might again, quite simply and naturally, take the responsibility for her welfare. It had come to this: that she watched her actions from one point of view only; would they allow Moses to strengthen that new human relationship between them, in a way she could not counter, and which she could only try to avoid.

  In February, Dick fell ill again with malaria. As before, it was a short, sudden attack, and bad while it lasted. As before, she reluctantly sent a note by bearer to Mrs. Slatter, asking them to fetch the doctor. It was the same doctor. He looked at the slatternly little house with raised eyebrows, and asked Mary why she had taken no notice of his former prescriptions. She did not answer. “Why have you not cut down the bush round the house where mosquitoes can breed?” “My husband could not spare the boys.” “But he can spare the time to be ill, eh?” The doctor’s manner was bluff, easy, but at bottom indifferent; he had learned, after years in a farming district, when to cut his losses as a doctor. Not his money, which he knew he would never see, but the patients themselves. These people were hopeless. The window curtains faded by the sun to a dingy gray, torn and not mended, proclaimed it. Everywhere there was evidence of breakdown in will. It was a waste of time even coming. But from habit he stood over the shivering, burning Dick and prescribed. He said Dick was worn out, a shell of a man, liable to get any disease going. He spoke as strongly as he could, trying to frighten Mary into action. But her attitude said listlessly, “What is the use?” He left at last with Charlie Slatter, who was sardonically disapproving; but unable to prevent himself from thinking that when he took over this place he would remove the wire from the chicken runs for his own, and that the corrugated iron of the house and buildings might come in useful some time.

  Mary sat up with Dick the first two nights of his illness, on a hard chair, to keep herself awake, holding the blankets close over the restless limbs. But Dick was not as bad as the last time; he was not afraid now, knowing what he was in for, and that the attack would run its course.

  Mary made no effort to supervise the farm work; but twice a day, so as to calm him, she drove herself round the farm on a formal and useless inspection. The boys were in the compound loafing. She knew it, and did not care. She hardly looked at the fields: the farm had become something that did not concern her.

  In the daytime, when she had finished preparing Dick’s cool drinks, which were all that he took, she sat idly by the bed and sank into her usual apath
etic state. Her mind wandered incoherently, dwelling on any scene from her past life that might push itself to the surface. But now it was without nostalgia or desire. And she had lost all sense of time. She set the alarm clock in front of her, to remind her of the regular intervals at which she must go and fetch Dick his drinks. Moses brought her the usual trays of food at the usual times, and she ate mechanically, not noticing what she ate, not noticing, even, that she sometimes put down her knife and fork after a couple of mouthfuls and forgot to finish what was before her. It was on the third morning that he asked, as she whisked an egg he had brought from the compound as a gift, into milk: “Did Madame go to bed last night?” He spoke with that simple directness that always left her disarmed, not knowing how to reply.

  She answered, looking down at the frothing milk, avoiding his eyes: “I must stay up with the boss.”

  “Did Madame stay up the other night?”

  “Yes,” she answered, and quickly went into the bedroom with the drink.

  Dick lay still, half delirious with fever, in an uncomfortable doze. His temperature had not dropped. He was taking this bout very hard. The sweat poured off him; and then his skin became dry and harsh and burning hot. Every afternoon the slender rod of quicksilver mounted in a trice up the frail glass tube, so she had hardly to keep it in his mouth at all, higher every time she looked at it, until by six in the evening it stood at 105. There it stayed until about midnight, while he tossed and muttered and groaned. In the early hours it dropped rapidly below normal, and he complained he was cold and needed more blankets. But he had all the blankets in the place piled over him. She heated bricks in the oven and wrapped them in cloth and put them by his feet.

  That night Moses came to the bedroom door and knocked on the wood frame as he always did. She confronted him through the parted folds of the embroidered hessian curtain.

  “Yes?” she asked.

  “Madame stay in this room tonight. I stay with boss.”

  “No,” she said, thinking of the long night spent in intimate vigil with this native. “No, you go back to the compound and sleep. I will stay with the boss.”

  He came forward through the curtain, so that she shrank back a little, he was so close to her. She saw that he held a folded mealie sack in one hand, presumably his preparation for the night. “Madame must sleep,” he said. “She is tired, yes?” She could feel the skin round her eyes drawn tight with strain and weariness; but she insisted in a hard nervous voice: “No, Moses. I must stay.” He moved to the wall where he placed his sack carefully in a space between two cupboards. Then he stood up and said, sounding wounded, even reproachful: “Madame not thinks I look after boss right, huh? I too sick sometimes. I keep blankets over boss, yes?” He moved to the bed, but not too close, and looked down at Dick’s flushed face. “I give him this drink when he wakes, yes?” And the half-humorous, half-reproachful voice left her disarmed against him. She looked at his face once, quickly, avoiding the eyes, then away. But it would not do to seem afraid to look at him; she glanced down at his hand, the big hand with the lighter palm hanging loosely at his side. He insisted again: “Madame think I not look after boss well?”

  She hesitated, and then said nervously, “Yes, but I must stay.”

  As if her nervousness and hesitation had been answer enough, the man stooped and straightened out the blankets over the sleeping man. “If boss is very sick, I call madame,” he said.

  She saw him standing by the window, blocking the square of star-strewn, bough-crossed sky, waiting for her to go. “Madame will be sick too, if she does not sleep,” he said.

  She went to her cupboard, where she took out her big coat. Before she left the room, she said, in order to assert her authority: “You will call me if he wakes.”

  She went instinctively to her refuge, the sofa, next door, where she spent so many of her waking hours, and sat helplessly, squeezed into one corner. She could not bear to think of the black man there all night, next door, so close to her, with nothing but the thin brick wall separating them.

  After a while she pushed a cushion to the head of the sofa, and lay down, covering her feet with the coat. It was a close night, and the air in the little room hardly stirred. The dull flame in the hanging lamp burned low, making a little intimate glimmer of light that sent up broken arcs of light into the darkness under the roof, illuminating a slope of corrugated metal, and a beam. In the room itself there was only a small yellow circle on the table beneath. Everything else was dark, there were only vague elongated shapes.

  She turned her head slightly to see the curtains at the window; they hung quite still; and, as she listened intently, the tiny night noises from the bush outside sounded suddenly as loud as her own thudding heart. From the trees a few yards away a bird called once, and insects creaked. She heard the movement of branches, as if something heavy was pushing its way through them; and thought with fear of the low crouching trees all about.

  She had never become used to the bush, never felt at home in it. Still, after all this time, she felt a stirring of alarm when she realized the strangeness of the encircling veld where little animals moved, and unfamiliar birds talked. Often in the night she woke and thought of the small brick house, like a frail shell that might crush inwards under the presence of the hostile bush. Often she thought how, if they left this place, one wet fermenting season would swallow the small cleared space, and send the young trees thrusting up from the floor, pushing aside brick and cement, so that in a few months there would be nothing left but heaps of rubble about the trunks of trees.

  She lay tense on the sofa, every sense alert, her mind quivering like a small hunted animal turned to face its pursuers. She ached all over with the strain. She listened to the night outside, to her own heart, and for sounds from the room next door. She heard the dry sound of horny feet moving over thin matting, a clink of glasses being moved, a low mutter from the sick man. Then she heard the feet move close, and a sliding movement as the native settled himself down on the sack between the cupboards. He was there, just through the thin wall, so close that if it had not been there his back would have been six inches from her face! Vividly she pictured the broad muscular back, and shuddered. So clear was her vision of the native that she imagined she smelled the hot acrid scent of native bodies. She could smell it, lying there in the dark. She turned her head over, and buried her face in a cushion.

  For a long time she could hear nothing, only the soft noise of steady breathing. She wondered, was it Dick? But then he muttered again, and as the native rose to adjust the coverings, the sound of breathing ceased. Moses returned, and again she heard the sliding of his back down the wall; and the regular breathing began again: it was he! Several times she heard Dick stir and call out, in that thick voice which was not his, but which came from his sick delirium, and each time the native roused himself to cross to the bed. In between she listened intently for the soft breathing which seemed, as she turned restlessly, to come from all over the room, first from just near her beside the sofa, then from a dark corner opposite. It was only when she turned and faced the wall that she could localize the sound. She fell asleep in that position, bent against the wall as if listening to a keyhole.

  It was a troubled, unrestful sleep, visited by dreams. Once she started awake at a movement, and saw the dark bulk of the man part the curtains. She held her breath, but at the sound of her movement he turned his eyes quickly towards her, and away; then he passed soundlessly out of the other door into the kitchen. He was only going out for a few minutes on his own business. Her mind followed him as he crossed the kitchen, opened the door and vanished into the dark alone. Then she turned her head to the cushion again, shuddering, as she had when she imagined that native smell. She thought: soon he will be coming back. She lay still, so as to seem asleep. But he did not come immediately, and after a few minutes’ waiting she went to the dim bedroom where Dick lay motionless, in a tormented jumble of limbs. She felt his forehead: it was damp and cold, so she knew it
must be well after midnight. The native had taken all the blankets off a chair, and heaped them over the sick man. Now the curtains moved behind her, and a cool breeze struck her neck. She shut the pane nearest the bed, and stood still, listening to the suddenly loud ticking of the clock. Leaning down to gaze at its faintly illuminated dial, she saw it was not yet two o’clock, but she felt that the night had been continuing for a very long time. She heard a noise from the back and quickly, as if guilty, went to lie down. Then she heard again the hard feet on the floor as Moses passed her to his station on the other side of the wall, and saw him looking at her to see if she was asleep. Now she felt she was wide awake, and could not sleep. She was chilly, but did not want to rise to look for further covering. Again she imagined she smelled the warm odor, and to dispel the sensation turned her head softly to see the curtains blowing as the fresh night air poured in. Dick was quite still now; there was no sound form the other room except that faint rhythm of breathing.

  She drifted off to sleep, and this time dreamed immediately, horribly.

  She was a child again, playing in the small dusty garden in front of the raised wood-and-iron house, with playmates who in her dream were faceless. She was first in the game, a leader, and they called her name and asked her how they should play. She stood by the dry-smelling geranium plants, in the sun, with the children all about her. She heard her mother’s sharp voice call for her to come in, and went slowly out of the garden up on to the veranda. She was afraid. Her mother was not there, so she went to the room inside. At the bedroom door she stopped, sickened. There was her father, the little man with the plump juicy stomach, beer-smelling and jocular, whom she hated, holding her mother in his arms as they stood by the window. Her mother was struggling in mock protest, playfully expostulating. Her father bent over her mother, and at the sight, Mary ran away.