The Grass Is Singing

by Doris Lessing

  “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-humor.

  “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 packingcase. 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 color 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 color 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 color 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 plow 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 him; 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 the 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 was sorry for her, what could be said about a woman who simply wasn’t there? “A case for a psychologist,” he said again, trying to reassure himself. For that matter, Dick would benefit by treatment himself. The man was cracking up, he shivered perpetually, his face was so thin the bone-structure showed under the skin. He was not fit to work at all, really; but he insisted on spending every moment of day-light on the fields; he could not bear to leave them when dusk came. Tony had to bring him away; his task now was almost one of a male nurse, and he was beginning to look forward to the Turners’ departure.

  Three days before they were to leave, Tony asked to stay behind for the afternoon, because he was not feeling well. A touch of the sun, perhaps; he had a bad headache, his eyes hurt, and nausea moved in the pit of his stomach. He stayed away from the midday meal, lying in his hut which, though warm enough, was cold compared to that oven of a house. At four o’clock in the afternoon he woke from an uneasy aching sleep, and was very thirsty. The old whisky bottle that was usually filled with drinking water was empty; the boy had forgotten to fill it. Tony went out into the yellow glare to fetch water from the house. The back door was open, and he moved silently, afraid to wake Mary, whom he had been told slept every afternoon. He took a glass from a rack, and wiped it carefully, and went into the living room for the water. A glazed earthenware filter stood on the shelf that served as sideboard. Tony lifted the lid and peered in: the dome of the filter was slimy with yellow mud, but the water trickled out of the tap clear, though tasting stale and tepid.

  He drank, and drank again, and, having filled this bottle, turned to leave. The curtain between this room and the bedroom was drawn back, and he could see in. He was struck motionless by surprise. Mary was sitting on an upended candlebox before the square of mirror nailed on the wall. She was in a garish pink petticoat, and her bony yellow shoulders stuck sharply out of it. Beside her stood Moses, and, as Tony watched, she stood up and held out her arms while the native slipped her dress over them from behind. When she sat down again she shook out her hair from her neck with both hands, with the gesture of a beautiful woman adoring her beauty. Moses was buttoning up the dress; she was looking in the mirror. The attitude of the native was of an indulgent uxoriousness. When he had finished the buttoning, he stood back, and watched the woman brushing her hair. “Thank you, Moses,” she said in a high commanding voice. Then she turned, and said intimately: “You had better go now. It is time for the boss to come.”

  The native came out of the room. When he saw the white man standing there, staring at him incredulously, he hesitated for a moment and then came straight on, passing him on silent feet, but with a malevolent glare. The malevolence was so strong that Tony was momentarily afraid.

  When the native had gone, Tony sat down on a chair, mopped his face which was streaming with the heat, and shook his head to clear it. For his thoughts were conflicting. He had been in the country long enough to be shocked; at the same time his “progressiveness” was deliciously flattered by this evidence of white ruling-class hypocrisy. For in a country where colored children appear plentifully among the natives wherever a lonely white man is stationed, hypocrisy, as Tony defined it, was the first thing that had struck him on his arrival. But then, he had read enough about psychology to understand the sexual aspect of the color bar, one of whose foundations is the jealousy of the white man for the superior sexual potency of the native; and he was surprised at one of the guarded, a white woman, so easily evading this barrier. Yet he had met a doctor on the boat coming out, with years of experience in a country district, who had told him he would be surprised to know the number of white women who had relations with black men. Tony felt at the time that he would be surprised; he felt it would be rather like having a relation with an animal, in spite of his “progressiveness.”

  And then all these considerations went from his mind, and he was left simply with the fact of Mary, this poor, twisted woman, who was clearly in the last stages of breakdown, and who was at this moment coming out of the bedroom, one hand still lifted to her hair. And then he felt, at the sight of her face, which was bright and innocent, though with an empty, half-idiotic brightness, that all his suspicions were nonsense.

  When she saw him, she stopped dead, and stared at him with fear. Then her face, from being tormented, became slowly blank and indifferent. He could not understand this sudden change. But he said, in a jocular uncomfortable voice: “There was once an Empress of Russia who thought so little of her slaves, as human beings, that she used to undress naked in front of them.” It was from this point of view that he chose to see the affair; the other was too difficult for him.

  “Was there?” she said doubtfully at last, looking puzzled.

  “Does that native always dress and undress you?” he asked.

  Mary lifted her head sharply, and her eyes became cunning. “He has so little to do,” she said, tossing her head. “He must earn his money.”

  “It’s not customary in this country, is it?” he asked slowly, out of the depths of his complete bewilderment. And he saw, as he spoke, that the phrase “this country,” which is like a call to solidarity for most white people, meant nothing to her. For her, there was only the farm; not even that—there was only this house, and what was in it. And he began to understand with a horrified pity, her utter indifference to Dick; she had shut out everything that conflicted with her actions, that would revive the code she had been brought up to follow.

  She said suddenly, “They said I was not like that, not like that, not like that.” It was like a gramophone that had got stuck at one point.

  “Not like what?” he asked blankly.

  “Not like that.” The phrase was furtive, sly, yet triumphant. God, the woman is mad as a hatter! he said to himself. And then he thought, but is she, is she? She can’t be mad. She doesn’t behave as if she were. She behaves simply as if she lives in a world of her own, where other people’s standards don’t count. She has forgotten what her own people are like. But then, what is madness, but a refuge, a retreating from the world?

  Thus the unhappy and bewildered Tony, sitting on his chair beside the water filter, still holding his bottle and glass, staring uneasily at Mary, who began to talk in a sad quiet voice which made him say to himself, as she was speaking, changing his mind again, that she was not mad, at least, not at that moment. “It’s a long time since I came here,” she said, looking straight at him, in appeal. “So long I can’t quite remember. . . . I should have left long ago. I don’t know why I didn’t. I don’t know why I came. But things are different. Very different.” She stopped. Her face was pitiful; her eyes were painful holes in her face. “I don’t know anything. I don’t understand. Why is all this happening? I didn’t mean it to happen. But he won’t go away, he won’t go away.” And then, in a different voice, she snapped at him, “Why did you come here? It was all right before you came.” She burst into tears, moaning, “He won’t go away.”

  Tony rose to go to her: now his only emotion was pity; his discomfort was forgotten. Something made him turn. In the doorway stood the boy, Moses, looking in at them both, his face wickedly malevolent.

  “Go away,” said Tony, “go away at once.” He put his arm round Mary’s shoulders, for she was shrinking away and digging her fingers into his flesh.

  “Go away,” she said suddenly, over his shoulder at the native. Tony realized that she was trying to assert herself: she was using his presence there as a shield in a fight to get back a command she had lost. And she was speaking like a child challenging a grown-up person.

  “Madame want me to go?” said the boy quietly.

  “Yes, go away.”

  “Madame want me to go because of this boss?”

  It was not the words in themselves that made Tony rise to his feet and stride to the door, but the
way in which they were spoken. “Get out,” he said, half-choked with anger. “Get out before I kick you out.”

  After a long, slow, evil look the native went. Then he came back. Speaking past Tony, ignoring him, he said to Mary, “Madame is leaving this farm, yes?”

  “Yes,” said Maty faintly.

  “Madame never coming back?”

  “No, no, no,” she cried out.

  “And is this boss going too?”

  “No,” she screamed. “Go away.”

  “Will you go?” shouted Tony. He could have killed this native: he wanted to take him by his throat and squeeze the life out of him. And then Moses vanished. They heard him walk across the kitchen and out of the back door. The house was empty. Mary sobbed, her head on her arms. “He’s gone,” she cried, “he’s gone, he’s gone!” Her voice was hysterical with relief. And then she suddenly pushed him away, stood in front of him like a mad woman, and hissed, “You sent him away! He’ll never come back! It was all right till you came!” And she collapsed in a storm of tears. Tony sat there, his arm round her, comforting her. He was wondering only, “What shall I say to Turner?” But what could he say? The whole thing was better left. The man was half-crazy with worry as it was. It would be cruel to say anything to him—and in any case, in two days both of them would be gone from the farm.

  He decided that he would take Dick aside and suggest, only, that the native should be dismissed at once.

  But Moses did not return. He was not there that evening at all. Tony heard Dick ask where the native was, and her answer that “she had sent him away.” He heard the blank indifference of her voice: saw that she was speaking to Dick without seeing him.

  Tony, at last, shrugged in despair, and decided to do nothing. And the next morning he was off to the lands as usual. It was the last day; there was a great deal to do.