The Grass is Singing (24 page)

The real reason why the Slatters, particularly Charlie, maintained their interest in the Turners, was that they wanted Dick's farm still: more even than they had. And, since it was Charlie's intervention that precipitated the tragedy, though he cannot be blamed for it, it is necessary to explain about his farming. Just as World War II produced its fabulously wealthy tobacco barons, so the First World War enriched many farmers because of the sharp rise in the price of maize. Until World War I, Slatter had been poor; after it, he found himself rich. And once a man is rich, when he has the temperament of a Slatter, he gets richer and richer. He was careful not to invest his money in farming: farming he did not trust as an investment. Any surplus went into mining shares; and he did not improve his farm more than was essential for the purpose of making money from it. He had five hundred acres of the most beautiful rich dark soil, which in the old days had produced twenty-five and thirty bags of mealies to the acre. Year after year he had squeezed that soil, until by now he got five bags an acre if he was lucky. He never dreamed of fertilizing. He cut down his trees (such as remained when the mining companies had done) to sell as firewood. But even a farm as rich as his was not inexhaustible; and while he no longer needed to make his thousands every year, his soil was played out, and he wanted more. His attitude to the land was fundamentally the same as that of the natives whom he despised; he wanted to work out one patch of country and move on to the next. And he had cultivated all the cultivable soil. He needed Dick's farm badly, because the farms that bounded his on the other sides were taken up. He knew exactly what he wanted to do with it. Dick's farm consisted of a little bit of everything. He had a hundred acres of that wonderful dark soil; and it was not played out, because he had looked after it. He had a little soil suitable for tobacco. And the rest was good for grazing.

It was the grazing Charlie wanted. He did not believe in pampering cattle by feeding them in winter. He turned them out to fend for themselves, which was all very well

when the grass was good, but he had so many cattle and the grazing was thin and poor. So Dick provided the only outlet. For years Charlie had been planning for when Dick would be bankrupt. But then Dick obstinately refused to go bankrupt. `How does he do it?' people asked irritably; for everyone knew that he never seemed to make any money, always had bad seasons, was always in debt. `Because they live like pigs and they never buy anything,' said Mrs Slatter tartly; by now she felt that Mary could go and drown herself, for all she cared.

Perhaps they would not have been so indignant and as irritated if Dick had been suitably conscious of his failure. If he had come to Charlie and asked for advice, and pleaded incapacity, it would have been different. But he did not. He sat tight on his debts and his farm, and -ignored Charlie. To whom it occurred one day that he had not seen Dick at all for over a year. `How time flies!' said Mrs Slatter, when he pointed this out; but after working it out, they agreed it was nearer two years; time, on a farm, has a way of prolonging itself unnoticed. That same afternoon Charlie drove over to the Turners. He was feeling a little guilty. He had always considered himself as Dick's mentor, as a man with much longer experience and greater knowledge. He felt responsible for Dick, whom he had watched right from the time he first began to farm. As he drove, he kept a sharp eye for signs of neglect. Things seemed neither better nor worse. The fireguards along the boundary were there, but they would protect the farm from a small, slow burning fire, not a big one with the wind behind it. The cowsheds, while not actually falling down, had been propped up by poles, and the thatched roofs were patched like darned stockings, the grass all different colours and stages of newness, reaching untidily to the ground in untrimmed swathes. The roads needed draining: they were in a deplorable state. The big plantation of gum trees past which the road wept had been burnt by a veld-fire in one corner; they stood pale and spectral in the strong yellow afternoon sunlight, their leaves hanging stiffly down, their trunks charred black.

Everything was just the same: ramshackle, but not exactly hopeless.

He found Dick sitting on a big stone by the tobacco barns, which were now used as store-sheds, watching his boys stack the year's supply of meal out of reach of the ants on strips of iron supported by bricks. Dick's big floppy farm hat was pulled over his face, and he looked up to nod at Charlie, who stood beside him, watching the operations, his eyes narrowed; he was noting that the sacks in which the meal was held were so rotten with age that they were unlikely to last out the season.

'What can I do for you?' asked Dick, with his usual defensive politeness. But his voice was uncertain; it sounded unused. And his eyes, peering painfully out of the shadow of the hat, were bright and anxious.

`Nothing,' said Charlie curtly, giving him a slow, irritated look. `Just came to see how you were doing. Haven't seen you for months.'

To which there came no reply. The natives were finishing work. The sun had gone down, leaving a wake of sultry red over the kopjes, and the dusk was creeping over the fields from the edges of the bush. The compound, visible among the trees half a mile away as a group of conical shapes, was smoking gently, and there was a small glow of fire behind dark trunks. Someone was beating a drum; the monotonous tom-tom noise sounded the end of the day. The boys were swinging their tattered jackets over their shoulders and filing away along the edge of the lands. 'Well,' said Dick, getting up with a painful stiff movement, `that's another day finished.' He shivered sharply. Charlie examined him: big trembling hands as thin as spines; thin hunched shoulders set in a steady shiver. And it was very hot: the ground was glowing out warmth and the red flush in the sky was fiery. `Got fever?' asked Charlie. `No, don't think so. Blood getting thin after all these years.'

`More than thin blood is wrong with you,' retorted Charlie, who seemed to find it a personal triumph that Dick should have fever. Yet he looked at him kindly, his big bristly face with its little squashed-looking features intent and steady. `Get fever much these days? Had it since I brought the quack to see you?'

`I get it quite often these days,' said Dick. `I get it every year. I had it twice last year.'

'Wife look after you?'

A. worried look came on Dick's face. `Yes,' he said. `How is she?'

`Seems much the same: `Has she been ill?'

No, not ill. But she's not too good. Seems nervy. She's run down. Been on the farm too long.' And then, in a rush, as if he could not keep it to himself another moment, `I am worried sick about her.'

`But what's the trouble?' Charlie sounded neutral; yet he never took his eyes off Dick's face. The two men were still standing in the dusk under the tall shape of the barn. A sweetish moist smell came from the open door; the smell of freshly-ground mealies. Dick shut the door, which was half off its hinges, by lifting it into place with his shoulder. He locked it. There was one screw in the triangular flange of the hasp: a strong man could have wrenched it off the frame. `Come up to the house?' he asked Charlie, who nodded, and then inquired, looking around: `Where's your car?'

`Oh, I walk these days.' `Sold it?’

'Yes. Cost too much to run. I send in the wagon now to the station when I want something.'

They climbed into Charlie's monster of a car, which balanced and clambered over the rutted tracks too small for it. The grass was growing back over the roads now that Dick had no car.

Between the low, tree-covered rise where the house was, arid where the barns stood among bush, were lands which had not been cultivated. It looked as if they had been allowed to lie fallow, but Charlie, looking closely through the dusk, could see that among the grass and low bushes were thin, straggling mealies. He thought at first they had seeded themselves; but they seemed to be regularly planted. `What's this?' he asked, `what's the idea?'

`I was trying out a new idea from America.' `What idea?'

`The bloke said there was no need to plough or to cultivate. The idea is to plant the grain among ordinary vegetation and let it grow of itself.'

`Didn't work out, hey?'

'No,' said Dick blankly. `I didn't bother to reap it. I thought I might as well leave it to do the soil some good…' His voice tailed off.

`Experiment,' said Charlie briefly. It was significant that he sounded neither exasperated nor angry. He seemed detached; but kept glancing curiously, with an undercurrent of uneasiness, at Dick, whose face was obstinately set and miserable. `What was that you were saying about your wife?'

`She's not well.'

'Yes, but why, man?'

Dick did not answer for a while. They passed from the open lands, where the golden evening glow still lingered on the leaves, to the bush, where it was dense dusk. The big car zoomed up the hill, which was steep, its bonnet reaching up into the sky. `I don't know,' said Dick at last. `She's different lately. Sometimes I think she's much better. It's difficult to tell with women how they are. She's not the same.'

'But in what way?' persisted Charlie.

`Well, for instance. Once, when she first came to the farm she had more go in her. She doesn't seem to care. She doesn't care about anything. She simply sits and does nothing. She doesn't even trouble herself about the chickens and things like that. You know she used to make a packet out of them every month or so. And she doesn't care what the boy does in the house. Once she used to drive me mad nagging. Nag, nag, nag, all day. You know how women get when they've been too long on the farm. No self control.!

'No woman knows how to handle niggers,' said Charlie. `Well, I am quite worried,' stated Dick, laughing miserably. `I should be quite pleased if she did nag.'

`Look here, Turner,' said Charlie abruptly. `Why don't you give up this business and get off the place? You are not doing yourself or your wife any good.'

`Oh, we rub along.' `You are ill, man.' `I am all right.'

They stopped outside the house. A glimmer of light came from within, but Mary did not appear. A second light sprang up in the bedroom. Dick had his eyes on it. `She's changing her dress,' he said; and he sounded pleased. `No one has been here for so long.'

`Why don't you sell out to me? I'll give you a good price for it.'

`Where should I go,' asked Dick in amazement.

`Get into town. Get off the land. You are no good on the land. Get yourself a steady job in town somewhere.'

`I keep my end up,' said Dick resentfully.

The thin shape of a woman appeared against the light, on the verandah. The two men got out of the car and went inside.

"Evening, Mrs Turner.' `Good evening,' said Mary.

Charlie examined her closely when they were inside the lighted room, more closely because of the way she had said, `Good evening.' She remained standing uncertainly in front of him, a dried stick of a woman, her hair that had been bleached by the sun into a streaky mass falling round a scrawny face and tied on the top of her head with a blue ribbon. Her thin, yellowish neck protruded out of a dress that she had apparently just put on. It was a frilled raspberry-coloured cotton; and in her ears were long red earrings like boiled sweets, that tapped against her neck in short swinging jerks. Her blue eyes, which had once told anyone who really took the trouble to look into them that Mary Turner was not really `stuck-up', but shy, proud, and sensitive, had a new light in them. `Why, good evening!' she said girlishly.

`Why, Mr Slatter, we haven't had the pleasure of seeing you for a long time.' She laughed, twisting her shoulder in a horrible parody of coquetry.

Dick averted his eyes, suffering. Charlie stared at her rudely: stared and stared until at last she flushed and turned away, tossing her head. `Mr Slatter doesn't like us,' she informed Dick socially, `or otherwise, he would come to see us more often.'

She sat herself down in the corner, of the old sofa, which had gone out of shape and become a thing of lumps and hollows with a piece of faded blue stuff stretched over it.

Charlie, his eyes on that material, asked: 'How is the store going?'

`We gave it up, it didn't pay,' said Dick brusquely. `We are using up the stock ourselves.'

Charlie looked at Mary's ear-rings, and at the sofa-cover, which was of the material always sold to natives, an ugly patterned blue that has become a tradition in South Africa, so much associated with `kaffir-truck' that it shocked Charlie to see it in a white man's house. He looked round the place, frowning. The curtains were torn; a windowpane had been broken and patched with paper; another had cracked and not been mended at all; the room was indescribably broken down and faded. Yet everywhere were little bits of stuff from the store, roughly-hemmed, draping the back of a chair, or tucked in to form a chair seat. Charlie might have thought that this small evidence of a desire to keep up appearances was a good sign; but all his rough and rather brutal good humour was gone; he was silent, his forehead dark.

`Like to stay to supper?' asked Dick at last.

`No thanks,' said Charlie; then changed his mind out of curiosity. `Yes, I will.'

Unconsciously the two men were speaking as if in the presence of an invalid; but Mary scrambled out of her seat, and shouted from the doorway: 'Moses! Moses!'

Then, since the native did not appear, she turned and smiled at them with social coyness, and said: `Excuse me, but you know what these boys are.'

She went out. The men were silent. Dick's face was averted from Charlie, who, since he had never become convinced of the necessity for tact, gazed intently at Dick, as if trying to force him into some explanation or statement.

Supper, when it was brought in by Moses, consisted of a tray of tea, some bread and rather rancid butter, and a chunk of cold meat. There was not a piece of crockery that was whole; and Charlie could feel the grease on the knife he held. He ate with distaste, making no effort to hide it, while Dick said nothing, and Mary made abrupt, unrelated remarks about the weather with that appalling coyness, shaking her ear-rings, writhing her thin shoulders, ogling Charlie with a conventional flirtatiousness.