The Grass Is Singing

by Doris Lessing

  11

  Mary awoke suddenly, as if some big elbow bad nudged her. It was still night. Dick lay asleep beside her. The window was creaking on its hinges, and when she looked into the square of darkness, she could see stars moving and flashing among the tree boughs. The sky was luminous; but there was an undertone of cold gray; the stars were bright; but with a weak gleam.

  Inside the room the furniture was growing into light. She could see a glimmer that was the surface of the mirror. Then a cock crowed in the compound, and a dozen shrill voices answered for the dawn. Daylight? Moonlight? Both. Both mingled together, and it would be sunrise in half an hour.

  She yawned, settled back on her lumpy pillows, and stretched out her limbs. She thought that usually her wakings were gray and struggling, a reluctant upheaval of her body from the bed’s refuge. Today she was vastly peaceful and rested. Her mind was clear, and her body comfortable. Cradled in ease she locked her hands behind her head and stared at the darkness that held the familiar walls and furniture. Lazily she created the room in imagination, placing each cupboard and chair; then moved beyond the house, hollowing it out of the night in her mind as if her hand cupped it.

  At last, from a height, she looked down on the building set among the bush—and was filled with a regretful, peaceable tenderness. It seemed as if she were holding that immensely pitiful thing, the farm with its inhabitants, in the hollow of her hand, which curved round it to shut out the gaze of the cruelly critical world. And she felt as if she must weep. She could feel the tears running down her cheeks, which stung rawly, and she put up her fingers to touch the skin. The contact of rough finger with roughened flesh restored her to herself. She continued to cry, but hopelessly for herself, though still from a forgiving distance. Then Dick stirred and woke, sitting up with ? jerk. She knew he was turning his head this way and that, in the dark, listening; and she lay quite still. She felt his hand touch her cheek diffidently. But that diffident, apologetic touch annoyed her, and she jerked her head back. “What is the matter, Mary?”

  “Nothing,” she replied.

  “Are you sorry you are leaving?”

  The question seemed to her ridiculous; nothing to do with her at all. And she did not want to think of Dick, except with that distant and impersonal pity. Could he not let her live in this last short moment of peace? “Go to sleep,” she said. “It’s not morning yet.”

  Her voice seemed to him normal; even her rejection of him was too familiar a thing to waken him thoroughly. In a minute he was asleep again, stretched out as’ if he had never stirred. But now she could not forget him: she knew he was laying there beside her, could feel his limbs sprawled against hers.

  She raised herself up, feeling bitter against him, who never left her in peace. Always he was there, a torturing reminder of what she had to forget in order to remain herself. She sat up straight, resting her head on locked hands, conscious again, as she had not been for a very long time, of that feeling of strain, as if she were stretched taut between two immovable poles. She rocked herself slowly back and forth, with a dim, mindless movement, trying to sink back into that region of her mind where Dick did not exist. For it had been a choice, if one could call such an inevitable thing a choice, between Dick and the other, and Dick was destroyed long ago.

  “Poor Dick,” she said tranquilly, at last, from her recovered distance from him; and a flicker of terror touched her, an intimation of that terror which would later engulf her. She knew it: she felt transparent, clairvoyant, containing all things. But not Dick. No; she looked at him, a huddle under blankets, his face a pallid glimmer in the growing dawn. It crept in from the low square of window, and with it came a warm, airless breeze. “Poor Dick,” she said, for the last time, and did not think of him again.

  She got out of bed and stood by the window. The low sill cut across her thighs. If she bent forward and down, she could touch the ground, which seemed to rise up outside, stretching to the trees. The stars were gone. The sky was colorless and immense. The veld was dim. Everything was on the verge of color. There was a hint of green in the curve of a leaf, a shine in the sky that was almost blue, and the clear starred outline of the poinsettia flowers suggested the hardness of scarlet.

  Slowly, across the sky, spread a marvelous pink flush, and the trees lifted to meet it, becoming tinged with pink and bending out into the dawn she saw the world had put on the color and shape. The night was over. When the sun rose, she thought, her moment would be over, this marvelous moment of peace and forgiveness granted her by a forgiving God. She crouched against the sill, cramped and motionless, clutching on to her last remnants of happiness, her mind as clear as the sky itself.

  But why, this last morning, had she woken peacefully from a good sleep, and not, as usually, from one of those ugly dreams that seemed to carry over into the day, so that there sometimes seemed no division between the horrors of the night and of the day? Why should she be standing there, watching the sunrise, as if the world were being created afresh for her, feeling this wonderful rooted joy? She was inside a bubble of fresh light and color, of brilliant sound and bird song. All around the trees were filled with shrilling birds, that sounded her own happiness and chorused it to the sky. As light as a blown feather she left that room and went outside to the veranda. It was so beautiful: so beautiful she could hardly stand still. The wonderful flushed sky, with red streaked and hazed against the intense blue; the beautiful still trees, with their load of singing birds; the vivid starry poinsettias cutting into the air with jagged scarlet.

  The red spread out from the center of the sky, seemed to tinge the smoke haze over the kopjes, and to light the trees with a hot sulphurous yellow. The world was a miracle of color, and all for her, all for her! She could have wept with release and lighthearted joy. And then she heard it, that sound she could never bear, the first cicada beginning to shrill somewhere in the trees. It was the sound of the sun itself, and how she hated the sun!

  It was rising now; there was sullen red curve behind a black rock, and a beam of hot yellow light shot up into the blue. One after another the cicadas joined the steady shrilling noise, so that now there were no birds to be heard, and that insistent low screaming seemed to her to be the noise of the sun, whirling on its hot core, the sound of the harsh brazen light, the sound of me gathering heat. Her head was beginning to throb, her shoulders to ache. The dull red disc jerked suddenly up over the kopjes, and the color ebbed from the sky; a lean, sun-flattened landscape stretched before her, dun-colored, brown and olive-green, and the smoke-haze was everywhere, lingering in the trees and obscuring the hills. The sky shut down over her, with thick yellowish walls of smoke growing up to meet it. The world was small, shut in a room of heat and haze and light.

  Shuddering, she seemed to wake, looking about her, touching dry lips with her tongue. She was leaning pressed back against the thin brick wall, her hands extended, palms upwards, warding off the day’s coming. She let them fall, moved away from the wall, and looked over her shoulder at where she had been crouching. “There,” she said aloud, “it will be there.” And the sound of her own voice, calm, prophetic, fatal, fell on her ears like a warning. She went indoors, pressing her hands to her head, to evade that evil veranda.

  Dick was awake, just pulling on his trousers to go and beat the gong. She stood, waiting for the clanging noise. It came, and with it the terror. Somewhere he stood, listening for the gong that announced the last day. She could see him clearly. He was standing under a tree somewhere, leaning back against it, his eyes fixed on the house, waiting. She knew it. But not yet, she said to herself, it would not be quite yet; she had the day in front of her.

  “Get dressed, Mary,” said Dick, in a quiet urgent voice. Repeated, it penetrated her brain, and she obediently went into the bedroom and began to put on her clothes. Fumbling for buttons she paused, went to the door, about to call for Moses, who would do up her buttons, hand her the brush, tie up her hair, and take the responsibility for her so that she need not
think for herself. Through the curtain she saw Dick and that young man sitting at the table, eating a meal she had not prepared. She remembered that Moses had gone: relief flooded her. She would be alone, alone all day. She could concentrate on the one thing left that mattered to her now. She saw Dick rise, with a grieved face, pull across the curtain; she understood that she had been standing in the doorway in her underclothes, in the full sight of that young man. Shame flushed her; but before the saving resentment could countermand the shame, she forgot Dick and the young man. She finished dressing, slowly, slowly, with long pauses between each movement—for had she not all day?—and at last went outside. The table was littered with dishes; the men had gone off to work. A big dish was caked with thick white grease; she thought that they must have been gone some time.

  Listlessly she stacked the plates, carried them into the kitchen, filled the sink with water, and then forgot what she was doing. Standing still, her hands hanging idly, she thought, “somewhere outside, among the trees, he is waiting.” She rushed about the house in a panic, shutting the doors, and all the windows, and collapsed at last on the sofa, like a hare crouching in a tuft of grass, watching the dogs come nearer. But it was no use waiting now: her mind told her she had all day, until the night came. Again, for a brief space, her brain cleared.

  What was it all about? she wondered dully, pressing her fingers against her eyes so that they gushed jets of yellow light. I don’t understand, she said, I don’t understand. . . . The idea of herself, standing above the house, somewhere on an invisible mountain peak, looking down like a judge on his court, returned; but this time without a sense of release. It was a torment to her, in that momentarily pitiless clarity, to see herself. That was how they would see her, when it was all over, as she saw herself now: an angular, ugly, pitiful woman, with nothing left of the life she had been given to use but one thought: that between her and the angry sun was a thin strip of blistering iron; that between her and the fatal darkness was a short strip of daylight.

  And time taking on the attributes of space, she stood balanced in mid-air, and while she saw Mary Turner rocking in the corner of the sofa, moaning, her fists in her eyes, she saw, too, Mary Turner as she had been, that foolish girl traveling unknowingly to this end. I don’t understand, she said again. I understand nothing. The evil is there, but of what it consists, I do not know. Even the words were not her own.

  She groaned because of the strain, lifted in puzzled judgment on herself, who was at the same time the judged, knowing only that she was suffering torment beyond description. For the evil was a thing she could feel: had she not lived with it for many years. How many? Long before she had ever come to the farm! Even that girl had known it. But what had she done? And what was it? What had she done? Nothing, of her own volition. Step by step, she had come to this, a woman without will, sitting on an old ruined sofa that smelled of dirt, waiting for the night to come that would finish her. And justly—she knew that. But why? Against what had she sinned?

  The conflict between her judgment on herself, and her feeling of innocence, of having been propelled by something she did not understand, cracked the wholeness of her vision. She lifted her head, with a startled jerk, thinking only that the trees were pressing in round the house, watching, waiting for the night. When she was gone, she thought, this house would be destroyed. It would be killed by the bush, which had always hated it, had always stood around it silently, waiting for the moment when it could advance and cover it, for ever, so that nothing remained. She could see the house, empty, its furnishings rotting. First would come the rats. Already they ran over the rafters at night, their long wiry tails trailing. They would swarm up over the furniture and the walls, gnawing and gutting till nothing was left but brick and iron, and the floors were thick with droppings. And then the beetles: great, black, armored beetles would crawl in from the veld and lodge in the crevices of the brick. Some were there now, twiddling with their feelers, watching with small painted eyes. And then the rains would break. The sky would lift and clear, and the trees grow lush and distinct, and the air would be shining like water. But at night the rain would drum down on the roof, on and on, endlessly, and the grass would spring up in the space of empty ground about the house, and the bushes would follow, and by the next season creepers would trail over the veranda and pull down the tins of plants, so that they crashed into pullulating masses of wet growth, and geraniums grew side by side with the blackjacks. A branch would nudge through the broken windowpanes, and, slowly, slowly, the shoulders of trees would press against the brick, until at last it leaned and crumbled and fell, a hopeless ruin, with sheets of rusting iron resting on the bushes. Under the tin, toads and long wiry worms like rats’ tails, and fat white worms, like slugs.

  At last the bush would cover the subsiding mass, and there would be nothing left. People would search for the house. They would come across a stone step propped against the trunk of a tree, and say, “This must be the Turners’ old house. Funny how quick the bush covers things over once they are left!” And, scratching round, pushing aside a plant with the point of a shoe, they would come upon a door handle wedged into the crotch of a stem, or a fragment of china in a silt of pebbles. And, a little further on, there would be a mound of reddish mud, swathed with rotting thatch like the hair of a dead person, which was all that remained of the Englishman’s hut; and beyond that, the heap of rubble that marked the end of the store. The house, the store, the chicken-runs, the hut— all gone, nothing left, the bush grown over all! Her mind was filled with green, wet branches, thick wet grass, and thrusting bushes. It snapped shut: the vision was gone.

  She raised her head and looked about her. She was sitting in that little room with the tin roof overhead, and the sweat was pouring down her body. With all the windows shut it was unbearable. She ran outside: what was the use of sitting there, just waiting, waiting for the door to open and death to enter? She ran away from the house, across the hard, baked earth where the grains of sand glittered, towards the trees. The trees hated her, but she could not stay in the house. She entered them, feeling the shade fall on her flesh, hearing the cicadas all about, shrilling endlessly, insistently. She walked straight into the bush, thinking: “I will come across him, and it will all be over.”

  She stumbled through swathes of pale grass, and the bushes dragged at her dress. She leaned at last against a tree, her eyes shut, her ears filled with noise, her skin aching. There she remained, waiting, waiting. But the noise was unbearable! She was caught up in a shriek of sound. She opened her eyes again. Straight in front of her was a sapling, its grayish trunk knotted as if it were an old gnarled tree. But they were not knots. Three of those ugly little beetles squatted there, singing away, oblivious of her, of everything, blind to everything but the life-giving sun. She came close to them, staring. Such little beetles to make such an intolerable noise! And she had never seen one before.

  She realized, suddenly, standing there, that all those years she had lived in that house, with the acres of bush all around her, and she had never penetrated into the trees, had never gone off the paths. And for all those years she had listened wearily, through the hot dry months, with her nerves prickling, to that terrible shrilling, and had never seen the beetles who made it. Lifting her eyes she saw she was standing in the full sun, that seemed so low she could reach up a hand and pluck it out of the sky: a big red sun, sullen with smoke, like a shining plow disc or a polished plate, ready for plucking. She reached up her hand; it brushed against a cluster of leaves, and something whirred away. With a little moan of horror she ran through the bushes and the grass, away back to the clearing. There she stood still, clutching at her throat.

  A native stood there, outside the house. She put her hand to her mouth to stifle a scream. Then she saw it was another native, who held in his hand a piece of paper. He held it as illiterate natives always handle printed paper: as if it is something that might explode in their faces. She went towards him and took it. It said: “Shall not
be back for lunch. Too busy clearing things up. Send down tea and sandwiches.” This small reminder from the outer world hardly had the power to rouse her. She thought irritably that here was Dick again; and holding the paper in her hand she went back into the house, opening the windows with an angry jerk. What did the boy mean by not keeping the windows open when she had told him so many times. . . . She looked at the paper; where had it come from? She sat on the sofa, her eyes shut.

  Through a gray coil of sleep she heard a knocking on the door and started up; then she sat down again, trembling, waiting for him to come. The knock sounded again. Wearily she dragged herself up and went to the door. Outside stood the native. “What do you want?” she asked. He indicated, through the door, the paper lying on the table. She remembered that Dick had asked for tea. She made it, filled a whisky bottle with it, and sent the boy away, forgetting all about the sandwiches. The thought was in her mind that the young man would be thirsty; he was not used to the country.

  The phrase, “the country,” which was more of a summons to consciousness than even Dick was, disturbed her, like a memory she did not want to revive. But she continued to think about the youth. She saw him, behind shut lids, with his very young, unmarked, friendly face. He had been kind to her; he had not condemned her. Suddenly she found herself clinging to the thought of him. He would save her! She would wait for him to return.

  She stood in the doorway looking down over the sweep of sere, dry vlei. Somewhere in the trees he was waiting; somewhere in the vlei was the young man, who would come before the night to rescue her. She stared, hardly blinking, into the aching sunlight. But what was the matter with the big land down there, which was always an expanse of dull red at this time of year! It was covered over with bushes and grass.