The Grass is Singing (25 page)

To all this Charlie made no response. He said, `Yes, Mrs Turner. No, Mrs Turner.' And looked at her coldly, his eyes hard with contempt and dislike.

When the native came to clear away the dishes there was an incident that caused him to grind his teeth and go white with anger. They were sitting over the sordid relics of the meal, while the boy moved about the table, slackly gathering dishes together. Charlie had not even noticed him. Then Mary asked: 'Like some fruit, Mr Slatter? Moses, fetch the oranges. You know where they are.' Charlie looked up, his jaws moving slowly over the food in his mouth, his eyes alert and bright; it was the tone of Mary's voice when she spoke to the native that jarred on him: she was speaking to him with exactly the same flirtatious coyness with which she had spoken to himself.

The native replied, with a rough offhand rudeness: ' Oranges finished.'

`I know they are not finished. There were two left. I know they are not.' Mary was appealing, looking up at the boy, almost confiding in him.'

` Oranges finished,' he repeated, in that tone of surly indifference, but with a note of self-satisfaction, of conscious power that took Charlie's breath away. Literally, he could not find words. He looked at Dick, who was sitting staring down at his hands; and it was impossible to see what he was thinking, or whether he had noticed anything at all. He looked at Mary: her wrinkled yellow skin had an ugly flush under the eyes, and the expression on her face was unmistakably one of fear. She appeared to have understood that Charlie had noticed something; she kept glancing at him guiltily, smiling.

`How long have you had that boy?' asked Charlie at last, jerking his head at Moses, who was standing at the doorway with the tray, openly listening. Mary looked helplessly at Dick.

Dick said tonelessly, `About four years, I think.' `Why do you keep him?’

'He's a good boy,' said Mary, tossing her head. `He works well.'

`It doesn't seem like it,' said Charlie bluntly, challenging her with his eyes. But hers were evasive and uneasy. At the same time they held a gleam of secret satisfaction that sent the blood to Charlie's head. 'Why don't you get rid of him? Why do you let him speak to you like that?'

Mary did not reply. She had turned her head, and was looking over her shoulder at the doorway where Moses stood; and in her face was an ugly brainlessness that caused Charlie to shout out suddenly at the native: `Get away from there. Get on with your work.'

The big native disappeared, responding at once to the command. And then there was a silence. Charlie was waiting for Dick to speak, to say something that showed he had not completely given in. But his head was still bent, his face dumbly suffering. At last Charlie appealed direct to him, ignoring Mary as if she were not present at all. `Get rid of that boy,' he said. 'Get rid of him, Turner.'

'Mary likes him,' was the slow, blank response. `Come outside, I want to talk to you.'

Dick lifted his head and looked resentfully at Charlie; he resented that he was being forced to take notice of something he wanted to ignore. But he obediently hoisted his body out of the chair and followed Charlie outside. The two men went down the verandah steps, and as far as the shadow of the trees.

`You've got to get away from here,' said Charlie curtly. `How can I?' said Dick listlessly. `How can I when I am still in debt?' And then, as if it were still a question of money, with nothing else involved, he said: `I know other people don't seem to worry. I know there are plenty of farmers who are as hard up as I am and who buy cars and go for holidays. But I just can't do it, Charlie. I can't do it. I am not made that way.'

Charlie said: 'I'll buy your farm from you and you can stay here as manager, Turner. But you must go away first for a holiday, for at least six months. You must get your wife away.'

He spoke as if there could be no question of a refusal; he had been shocked out of self-interest. It was not even pity for Dick that moved him. He was obeying the dictate of the first law of white South Africa, which is: `Thou shalt not let your fellow whites sink lower than a certain point; because if you do, the nigger will see he is as goad as you are.' The strongest emotion of a strongly organized society spoke in his voice, and it took the backbone out of Dick's resistance. For, after all, he had lived in the country all his life; he was undermined with shame; he knew what was expected of him, and that he had failed. But he could not bring himself to accept Charlie's ultimatum. He felt that Charlie was asking him to give up life itself, which, for him, was the farm and his ownership of it.

`I'll take this place over as it stands, and give you enough to clear your debts. I'll engage a manager to run it till you get back from the coast. You must go away for six months at the very least, Turner. It doesn't matter where you go. I'll see that you have the money to do it. You can't go on like this, and that is the end of it.'

But Dick did not give in so easily. He fought for four hours. For four hours they argued, walking up and down beneath the trees.

Charlie drove away at last without going back to the house. Dick returned to it walking heavily, almost staggering, the spring of his living destroyed. He would no longer own the farm, he would be another man's servant. Mary was sitting in a lump in the corner of the sofa; the manner she had instinctively assumed in Charlie's presence, to preserve appearances and to hold her own, had gone. She did not look at Dick when he came in. For days at a time she did not speak to him. It was as if he did not exist for her. She seemed to be sunk fathoms deep in some dream of her own. She only came to life, only noticed what she was doing, when the native came in to do some little thing in the room. Then she never took her eyes off him. But what this meant Dick did not know: he did not want to know; he was beyond fighting it now.

Charlie Slatter did not waste time. He drove round the district from farm to farm, trying to find someone who would take over the Turners' place for a few months. He gave no explanations. He was extraordinarily reticent; he said merely that he was helping Turner to take his wife away. At last he heard of a young man just out from England, who wanted a job. Charlie did not mind who it was: anyone would do; the thing was too urgent. He at last drove into town himself to find him. He was not particularly impressed with the youth one way or the other; he was the usual type; the self-contained, educated Englishman who spoke in a la-di-da way as if he had a mouthful of pearls. He brought the young man back with him. He told him little; he did not know what to tell him. The arrangement was that he should take over the farm at once, within a week, letting the Turners go off to the coast; Charlie would arrange about the money; Charlie would tell him what to do on the farm: that was the plan. But when he went over to Dick, to tell him, he found that while he had become reconciled to the necessity of leaving, he could not be persuaded to leave at once.

Charlie, Dick, and the young man, Tony Marston, stood in the middle of a field; Charlie hot and angry and impatient (for he could not bear to be thwarted at the best of times), Dick stubborn and miserable, Marston sensitive to the situation and trying to efface himself.

`Damn it, Charlie, why kick me off like this? I've been here fifteen years!'

`For God's sake, man, I am not kicking you off. I want you to get off before -you should get off at once. You must see that for yourself.'

`Fifteen years!' said Dick, his lean dark face flushed, `fifteen years!' He even bent down, unconsciously and picked up a handful of earth, and held it in his hand, as if claiming his own. It was an absurd gesture. Charlie's face put on a jeering little smile.

`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 its 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-humour. `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 packing-case. 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 colour 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 colour 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 colour 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 We home 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 plough 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.