The Lying Days (24 page)

Of course, this society which excited me much and quite impartially was made up to a large extent of people for whom it was only a stage in the process of becoming placid, conventional citizens. As you have to be fish before fetus, so for a time they were liberal before conformist. They flirted a little with the vague stirrings of a sense of beauty, just as the fetus remembers a prehuman life in the sea, and then put away the Bach
Chaconne
and the Mozart
Mass
like toys outgrown, and turned to the real business of having babies and bridge afternoons. They put Balzac and Dante and Martin Buber where they looked impressive in the bookcase, and became family men concentrated on the fluctuations of the stock exchange and the relative merits of Buicks and Cadillacs. Men and women, when they reached forty-five, they would sometimes like to mention that they had gone in for that sort of thing once; they had also had measles or mumps and had at one time thought of going on the stage—this with a kind of helpless, satisfied smile at the children
produced and the elegant house apparently grown up round them as unavoidably as a tortoise grows its shell.

They were unimportant. So were a great many others, who would never be writers, never be painters, never bring the legitimate stage to South Africa, or dance at Sadler's Wells, although they lived, talked and worked in what they believed was the manner of people who did these things. In fact, this set of eager, intense, earnest and gay people consisted mainly of the intelligent pseudo, the hangers-on who at the time were quite indistinguishable from the few who were something: the few who were of them and in their midst and were in reality to become the writers, the painters, the actors, the dancers and even the leaders all believed themselves to be.

I do not think there was anything at the time to suggest that Leo Castle, the dark boy with the spotty forehead (he was working as a window dresser in a department store then, and ate the wrong food irregularly), had any more chance of becoming a ballet dancer instead of a window dresser who danced in the chorus of visiting musical-comedy shows once a year than his friend John Frederic, who did the same. Yet a year or two later he was dancing
Comus
in London, and
The Rake's Progress
in New York, and in time a little book about him came out, showing him invested with all the satyrlike beauty of the male dancer at his best, in the company of people like Balanchine and Fonteyn. And Isa Welsh, always talking to some young man, with the tip of her tongue touching the corners of her mouth now and then as if she were a bashful adolescent.—Who would have believed that the book she was supposed to be writing would get finished and that she would divorce Tom and become one of the four or five important writers, writing intensely indigenous South African books from the self-imposed exile of England, America or Italy. Or Phil Hersh, wearing the same rather fluffy beard and haggard slouch as André, William Otter, or Hugo Uys; who would have marked him out for the painter of an epic of Africa as shocking and famous as Picasso's “Guernica”?

I have said that all the barriers were down, and so saying have slipped into a South African habit of thought more national than any ideology; more difficult to outgrow than love or loyalty.

—I spoke as if European society were all of Africa. I spoke with
the subconscious sense of the whole overwhelming Bantu race, waiting in submission outside the concepts of the white man. I spoke from our house on Atherton Mine, with Anna in her room in the back yard.

Among these people with whom I moved, the last great barrier was not down in the practical sense. How could it be? But it was coming down in their heads, an expansion in them was bursting through it. And even when it was achieved in the mind, in the moral sense and the sense of dignity, there remained the confusing pull of habit and use as well as the actual legal confines.

We were all like sleepers, coming awake from a long lull of acceptance. I know that I, who for all my childhood had lived surrounded by natives who simply attended our lives in one function or another—Anna, the gardenboys, above all, the stream of bare-breasted underground workers between the Compound and the shaft of the Mine—found with a real consciousness of strangeness and wonderment that I was beginning to think of them as individually human. They had passed before me almost as remote if not as interesting as animals in a zoo. I would not have been physically unkind to them because it was part of the strict pride of my upbringing that civilized people—what my parents would call “nice” people—were smug in their horror of squashing so much as a bug. If a hungry native came to our door, he was given food or even a sixpence. “At least
they
can't go and spend it in a bar,” my mother, who would not give money to white tramps for this reason, would say. Anna, who by qualification of long years of working for us, was known as being “almost like a white person,” might be granted some concern over her family, but as a general rule, emotion was denied them and personal relationships were suspect. They have half-a-dozen husbands; every girl off the street's a “sister.”—So they were casually denied love, jealousy, concern; everything that made us human. They were also denied entertainment (no swimming pools, libraries, radios), friendship—”I won't have
my
back yard made into a location,” Atherton women boasted. “I've told her, no friends hanging about the room, you can meet them outside if you want them”—and personal pride: we children would be called out to be amused by the sight of the servant going out dressed up in her Sunday
best.—In fact, everything that made our human state pleasant. And we white children had grown up innocently accepting and perpetuating this until now, when slowly we began to turn on ourselves, slowly we began to unravel what was tightly knit in us, to change the capacity of our hearts, the cast of our sense of humor, the limits of our respect. It was as painful and confusing as the attempt to change what has grown up with the flesh always is. And unlike the analyst, prizing down for the significant incident on which the complex and the cure are based, we could not triumph and say: There—it was everywhere, in the memory and the eye, the hand and the laugh.

It had begun for me with Joel and Mary Seswayo; I did not know which. Now when, the second or third time I went to the Welshs' flat, Isa said, “Would that African girl of yours like to come along next time, d'you think?” I felt as I did so often in the slightly uncomfortable, impermanent-looking homes of these young people, a sudden sense of my own climate blowing upon me. The way someone from an American city or a Scandinavian seaport comes in the course of a summer cruise to some unimportant little foreign island he has never heard of before and suddenly recognizes the warm breath off the beach more deeply than the streets of Chicago or Copenhagen. “Or do you think music'd be a bit much for her?”

The high English laugh of Jenny Marcus sailed out, a girl commanding attention in the pinkness and assertion of shape and flesh that sometimes precedes the ugly stage of pregnancy quite dazzlingly. “It's all right for you, Isa, you haven't got a servant. Whenever John wants to bring Nathoo Ram home for dinner I have to let Hilda go off. And he's only an Indian, that's not so bad. But the next day I always feel her looking at me in contempt; she knows he's been there. Nothing infuriates your own servant more than the idea that you've lowered yourself to eat with a non-European.”

“And Nathoo Ram, too.” Her husband turned his head from his own talk. “I always see him look anxiously into the kitchen and see with relief old Jen battling there. …”

“Well, I'll ask her—” I said to Isa.

A little man of twenty-four behind curly balding hair and glasses thick as bottle ends, said: “It's a confusion of social and color barriers,
surely? To Africans, if you entertain an African, you're entertaining a houseboy or a cook. You see? Nathoo Ram's not a lawyer, he's the vegetable hawker known by the generic of ‘Sammy.'” But the young man was someone whom Isa “allowed” to be in her flat, one of those persons who fail to catch the imagination and so to whom no one listens. They ignored from him suggestions that, coming from someone else, would have provoked an evening's wrangling. Now they were already talking of something else. He was left, as often, with the subject on his hands, discarded just when he had something to say on it. I should have liked to have heard him further, because what he had begun to say was a change of focus of the kind that interested me. But he was not interested in carrying on for me; already he was sitting silent and following the zigzag swerve of their new discussion with the quick eyes of a fan at a tennis match.

“Aren't we going to hear the Couperin?” John Marcus was asking from among the records. Only his wife seemed to hear him, and pulled a face at him across the room. With a tremendous shrug he put the record down and squatted at her side. She bent, hanging her hair over their faces, and they whispered and laughed into each other's ears and necks. Her mouth changing and her eyes crinkling with the look of someone being tickled, she looked out into the room but took no notice of it while he cupped his hand round her ear and she kept screwing up her face and saying, What?
What?

I was still being talked about by two people behind me. Or rather my acquaintance with Mary Seswayo was being used by the resourcefulness of Edna Schiller to illustrate her Communist argument. She was a good-looking Jewess with an intensely reasonable manner and eyebrows that raised up a little at their inner limits, inquiringly, like the puffy eyebrows of a puppy. Her attractive clothes and the large collection of earrings that she wore seemed an abstraction; you could not imagine her among hairpins and lipstick, choosing which she would wear, before a mirror. There was the feeling that somebody else dressed her. It was the same with the young man she had with her, a handsome young American who despite a yellow pull-over and a pair of veldschoen had his big head and neck set with the dummy like perfection of Hollywood. Some other Edna must find time for him, too.

Now she was talking of me as if I were not in the room at all. “She befriends this girl, but what does it mean?—Like you and your sports grounds and recreation centers and sewing classes. A waste of effort on charity. That's all it is, a useless palliative charity, useless in the historical sense. It's damaging, even. The simple African who is not yet politically conscious is lulled into another year or so of accepting things as they are—”

“But this native girl probably is politically conscious. She's seeking education, and the two go together. She may be one of the potential leaders you people are always looking for.”

Edna, once she had discovered the shortest distance from any subject to her own—and she had only one—was not to be deflected. “Unlikely. She will become a teacher and a bourgeoise and feel herself a little nearer to the whites instead of closer to the blacks. African leaders will come from the people.”

“Funny, in practice I thought that revolutionary leaders had usually come from the middle class?”

There was a groan from a young man lying on the divan near them. “For Christ's sake, don't start that. …”

“What it amounts to, then, is that you don't approve of ordinary, nonpolitical friendship between black and white individuals?”

“Approve, nothing,” said Edna, coming forward in her seat. “It's quite immaterial who your friends are, or what color. What I'm saying is, that even if they're black, it's unimportant to the struggle of the blacks against white supremacy.”

The young man sat up suddenly, with the dazed look of someone changing too quickly from the horizontal. “Christ, must
everything
be important to the struggle! Can't I sleep with a girl, get drunk …” He fell back and muffled his face in the cushion.

Edna used the same degree of intensity to bring home a small point in a casual discussion as she did faced with the defense of a whole doctrine before the snap of a dozen shrewd dissenters. Her zeal released her like liquor and she did not seem to know the rise of her own voice or the persistence of her vehemence. “If people would take a look at what is to be done. The work that a handful of us have to do. You can't tackle it in terms of soup kitchens. But, of course, I suppose people are afraid; can't blame them. But you get
used to it, it's amazing. I know my telephone's tapped. Twice last week there was a man asking questions in our building, some excuse about a survey, but we're so used to it now. As Hester Claasen says (Hester Claasen was a trade-union leader of great courage and the cachet of toughness), you can smell a dick a mile off.”

Isa, who was easily bored, and so had a reputation for sharpness, came wheeling a tea wagon from the kitchen. “Edna,” she asked, bending down to pick up a spoon, “exactly what is it you
do?
I mean, I know you hold meetings and so forth.” She stood up looking at Edna with a rather childish expression of simple inquiry.

“Do,” said Edna, “how do you mean? One can't answer a question like that offhand. It's difficult to know where to start. Assuming you know what we want to do—”

“Ah, yes,” Isa interrupted as if she had suddenly remembered the answer for herself, “I thought so. You sell three dozen copies of the
Guardian
in a native township once a week. Yes, Mike told me, you are pretty good as a newspaperboy, you sell at least three dozen. …” And she proceeded to hand round coffee in an assortment of containers from beer mugs to nursery beakers. I got a tarnished silver-plated one, inscribed DOWELL MACLOUD BETTER BALL FOURSOME ROYAL JOHANNESBURG CLUB 1926, with an unprintable comment scratched by pin underneath.

“She's intelligent, but she has no grasp whatever of politics, and that infuriates her.”—Edna was stirring her coffee and, with a flicker smile at her American, was now asking her companion if she was aware of what was really happening in China, and in the Indies? Like all Edna's questions, it was rhetorical.