The Grass is Singing

After a pause she asked, ‘Have you paid it back?’

‘All but fifty pounds.’

‘Next season, I suppose?’ Her voice was too gentle, too considerate.

‘With a bit of luck.’

She saw on his face that queer grin of his, more a baring of the teeth than a smile: self-critical, assessing, defeated. She hated to see it.

They finished what they had to do: collecting mail from the post office and buying meat for the week. Walking over caked dried mud, which showed where puddles lay from the beginning of the rainy season to its end, shading her eyes with her hand, Mary refrained from looking at Dick, and made sprightly remarks in a strained voice. He attempted to reply, in the same tone; which was so foreign to them both that it deepened the tension between them. When they returned to the verandah of the store, which was crowded with sacks and packing-cases, he knocked his leg against the pedal of a leaning bicycle, and began to swear with a violence out of proportion to the small accident. People turned to look; and Mary walked on, her colour deepening. In complete silence they got into the car and drove away over the railway lines and past the post office on the way home. In her hand she had the pamphlet on bees. She picked it up from the counter because most days, at about lunch-time, she heard a soft swelling roar over the house, and Dick had told her it was swarming bees passing. She had thought she might make some pocket money from bees. But the pamphlet was written for English conditions, and was not very helpful. She used it as a fan, waving away the flies that buzzed round her head and clustered at last on the canvas roof. They had come in from the butchery with the meat. She was thinking uneasily of that note of contempt in the man’s voice, which contradicted all her previous ideas of Dick. It was not even contempt, more amusement. Her own attitude towards him was fundamentally one of contempt, but only as a man; as a man she paid no attention to him, she left him out of account altogether. As a farmer she respected him. She respected his ruthless driving of himself, his absorption in his work. She believed that he was going through a necessary period of struggle before achieving the moderate affluence enjoyed by most farmers. In her feeling for him, in relation to his work, was admiration, even affection.

She who had once taken everything at its face value, never noticing the inflection of a phrase, or the look on a face which contradicted what was actually being said, spent the hour’s drive home considering the implications of that man’s gentle amusement at Dick. She wondered for the first time, whether she had been deluding herself. She kept glancing sideways at Dick, noticing little things about him she blamed herself for not noticing before. As he gripped the steering wheel, his lean hands, burnt coffee-coloured by the sun, shook perpetually, although almost imperceptibly. It seemed to her a sign of weakness, that trembling; the mouth was too tight-set. He was leaning forward, gripping the wheel, gazing down the narrow winding bush track as if trying to foresee his own future.

Back in the house, she flung the pamphlet down on the table and went to unpack the groceries. When she came back, Dick was absorbed in the pamphlet. He did not hear her when she spoke. She was used to this absorption of his: he would sometimes sit through a meal without speaking, not noticing what he ate, sometimes laying down his knife and fork before the plate was empty, thinking about some farm problem, his brow heavy with worry. She had learned not to trouble him at these times. She took refuge in her own thoughts; or, rather, she lapsed into her familiar state, which was a dim mindlessness. Sometimes they hardly spoke for days at a time.

After supper, instead of going to bed as usual at about eight, he sat himself down at the table under the gently-swaying, paraffin-smelling lamp, and began making calculations on a piece of paper. She sat and watched him, her hands folded. This was now her characteristic pose: sitting quietly, as though waiting for something to wake her into movement. After an hour or so, he pushed away the scraps of paper, and hitched up his trousers with a gay, boyish movement she had not seen before.

‘What do you say about bees, Mary?’

‘I don’t know anything about them. It’s not a bad idea.’

‘I’ll go over tomorrow to see Charlie. His brother-in-law kept bees in the Transvaal, he told me once.’ He spoke with new energy; he seemed to have new life.

‘But this book is for England,’ she said, turning it over dubiously. It seemed to her a flimsy foundation for such a change in him; a flimsy basis for even a hobby like bees.

But after breakfast next day Dick drove off to see Charlie Slatter. He returned frowning, his face obstinate but whistling jauntily. Mary was struck by that whistle: it was so familiar. It was a trick of his; he stuck his hands in his pockets, little-boy fashion, and whistled with a pathetic jauntiness when she lost her temper and raged at him because of the house, or because of the clumsiness of the water arrangements. It always made her feel quite mad with irritation, because he could not stand up to her and hold his own.

‘What did he say?’ she asked.

‘He’s wet-blanketing the whole thing. Because his brother-in-law failed it’s no reason I will.’

He went off to the farm instinctively making his way to the tree plantation. This was a hundred acres of some of the best ground on his farm, which he had planted with young gums a couple of years before. It was this plantation that had so annoyed Charlie Slatter – perhaps because of an unacknowledged feeling of guilt that he himself never put back in his soil what he took from it.

Dick often stood at the edge of the field, watching the wind flow whitely over the tops of the shining young trees, that bent and swung and shook themselves all day. He had planted them apparently on an impulse; but it was really the fruition of a dream of his. Years before he bought the farm, some mining company had cut out every tree on the place, leaving nothing but coarse scrub and wastes of grass. The trees were growing up again, but over the whole three thousand acres of land there was nothing to be seen but stunted second growth: short, ugly little trees from mutilated trunks. There wasn’t a good tree left on the farm. It wasn’t much, planting a hundred acres of good trees that would grow into straight white-stemmed giants; but it was a small retribution; and this was his favourite place on the farm. When he was particularly worried, or had quarrelled with Mary, or wanted to think clearly, he stood and looked at his trees; or strolled down the long aisles between light swaying branches that glittered with small polished leaves like coins. Today he considered bees; until, quite late, he realized he had not been near the farm-work all day, and with a sigh he left his plantation and went to the labourers.

At lunch-time he did not speak at all. He was obsessed by bees. At last he explained to the doubtful Mary that he reckoned he could make a good two hundred pounds a year. This was a shock to her; she had imagined he was thinking of a few beehives as a profitable hobby. But it was no good arguing with him: one cannot argue against figures, and his calculations were impeccable proof that those two hundred pounds were as good as made. And what could she say? She had no experience of this kind of thing; only her instinct told her to distrust bees on this occasion.

For a good month Dick was oblivious, gone into a beautiful dream of rich honeycombs and heavy dark clusters of fruitful bees. He built twenty beehives himself; and planted an acre of a special kind of grass near the bee-allotment. He took some of his labourers off their usual work, and sent them over the veld to find swarming bees, and spent hours every evening in the golden dusk, smoking out swarms to try and catch the queen bee. This method, he had been told, was the correct one. But a great many of the bees died, and he did not find the queens. Then he began planting his hives all over the veld near swarms he located, hoping they would be tempted. But not a bee ever went near his hives; perhaps because they were African bees, and did not like hives made after an English pattern. Who knows? Dick certainly did not. At last a swarm settled in a hive. But one cannot make two hundred a year from one swarm of bees. Then Dick got himself badly stung, and it seemed as if the poison drove the obsession from his system. Mary, amazed and even angry, saw that the brooding abstraction had gone from his face, for he had spent weeks of time and quite a lot of money. Yet, from one day to the next, he lost interest in bees. On the whole, Mary was relieved to see him go back to normal, thinking about his crops and his farm again. It had been like a temporary madness, when he was quite unlike himself.

It was about six months later that the whole thing happened again. Even then she could not really believe it when she saw him poring over a farming magazine, where there was a particularly tempting article about the profitability of pigs, and heard him say, ‘Mary, I am going to buy some pigs from Charlie.’

She said sharply, ‘I hope you are not going to start that again.’

‘Start what again?’

‘You know very well what I mean. Castles in the air about making money. Why don’t you stick to your farm?’

‘Pigs are farming, aren’t they? And Charlie does very well from his pigs.’ Then he began to whistle. As he walked across the room to the verandah, to escape her angry accusing face, it seemed to her that it was not a tall, spare, stooping man whom she saw, only; but also a swaggering little boy, trying to keep his end up after cold water had been poured over his enthusiasm. She could distinctly see that little boy, swaggering with his hips and whistling, but with a defeated look about his knees and thighs. She heard the whistling from the verandah, a little melancholy noise, and suddenly felt as if she wanted to cry. But why, why? He might very well make money from pigs. Other people did. But all the same, she pinned her hopes to the end of the season, when they would see how much money they had made. It ought not to be so bad: the season had been good, and the rains kind to Dick.

He built the pigstyes up behind the house among the rocks of the kopje. This was to save bricks, he said; the rocks supplied part of the walls; he used big boulders as a framework on which to tack screens of grass and wood. He had saved pounds of money, he told her, building them this way.

‘But won’t it be very hot here?’ asked Mary. They were standing among the half-built styes, on the kopje. It was not very easy to climb up here, through tangled grass and weeds that clung to one’s legs, leaving them stuck all over with tiny green burs, as clinging as cat’s claws. There was a big euphorbia tree branching up into the sky from the top of the kopje, and Dick said it would provide shade and coolness. But they were now standing in a warm shade from the thick, fleshy, candlelike branches, and Mary could feel her head beginning to ache. The boulders were too hot to touch: the accumulated sunshine of months seemed stored in that granite. She looked at the two farm dogs, who lay prostrate at their feet, panting, and remarked: ‘I hope pigs don’t feel the heat.’

‘But I tell you, it won’t be hot,’ he said. ‘Not when I have put up some sunbreaks.’

‘The heat seems to beat out of the ground.’

‘Well, Mary, it’s all very well to criticize, but this way I have saved money. I couldn’t have afforded to spend fifty pounds on cement and bricks.’

‘I am not criticizing,’ she said hastily, because of the defensive note in his voice.

He bought six expensive pigs from Charlie Slatter, and installed them in the rock-girt styes. But pigs have to be fed; and this is a costly business, if food has to be bought for the purpose. Dick found that he would have to order many sacks of maize. And he decided they should have all the milk his cows produced except for the very minimum required for the house. Mary, then, went to the pantry each morning to see the milk brought up from the cowsheds, and to pour off perhaps a pint for themselves. The rest was set to go sour on the table in the kitchen; because Dick had read somewhere that sour milk had bacon-making qualities fresh milk lacked. The flies gathered over the bubbling crusty white stuff, and the whole house smelled faintly acrid.

And then, when the little piglets arrived, and grew, it would be a question of transporting them and selling them, and so on…These problems, however, did not arise, for the piglets, when born, died again almost immediately. Dick said disease had attacked his pigs: it was just his luck; but Mary remarked drily that she thought they disliked being roasted before their time. He was grateful to her for the grimly humorous remark: it made laughter possible and saved the situation. He laughed with relief, scratching his head ruefully, hitching up his pants; and then began to whistle his melancholy little plaint. Mary walked out of the room, her face hard. The women who marry men like Dick learn sooner or later that there are two things they can do: they can drive themselves mad, tear themselves to pieces in storms of futile anger and rebellion; or they can hold themselves tight and go bitter. Mary, with the memory of her own mother recurring more and more frequently, like an older, sardonic double of herself walking beside her, followed the course her upbringing made inevitable. To rage at Dick seemed to her a failure in pride; her formerly pleasant but formless face was setting into lines of endurance; but it was as if she wore two masks, one contradicting the other; her lips were becoming thin and tight, but they could tremble with irritation; her brows drew together, but between them there was a vulnerable sensitive patch of skin that would flame a sullen red when she was in conflict with her servants. Sometimes she would present the worn visage of an indomitable old woman who has learnt to expect the worst from life, and sometimes the face of defenceless hysteria. But she was still able to walk from the room, silent in wordless criticism.

It was only a few months after the pigs had been sold that she noticed one day, with a cold sensation in her stomach, that familiar rapt expression on Dick’s face. She saw him standing on the verandah, staring out over the miles of dull tawny veld to the hills, and wondered what vision possessed him now. She remained silent, however, waiting for him to turn to her, boyishly excited because of the success he already knew in imagination. And even then she was not really, not finally, despairing. Arguing against her dull premonitions, she told herself that the season had been good, and Dick quite pleased; he had paid a hundred pounds off the mortgage, and had enough in hand to carry them over the next year without borrowing. She had become adjusted, without knowing it, to his negative judging of a season by the standard of the debts he had not incurred. And when he remarked one day, with a defiant glance at her, that he had been reading about turkeys, she forced herself to appear interested. She said to herself that other farmers did these things and made money. Sooner or later Dick would strike a patch of luck: the market would favour him, perhaps; or the climate of his farm particularly suit turkeys, and he would find he had made a good profit. Then he began to remind her, already defending himself against the accusations she had not made, that he had lost very little over the pigs, after all (he had apparently forgotten about the bees); and it had been a costless experiment. The styes had cost nothing at all, and the boys’ wages amounted only to a few shillings. The food they had grown themselves, or practically all of it. Mary remembered the sacks of maize they had bought, and that finding money to pay boys’ wages was his greatest worry, but still kept her mouth shut and her eyes turned away, determined not to provoke him into further passions of hostile self-defence.

She saw more of Dick during the few weeks of the turkey-obsession than she had since she married him, or ever would again. He was hardly down on the farm at all; but spent the whole day supervising the building of the brick houses and the great wire runs. The fine-meshed wire cost over fifty pounds. Then the turkeys were bought, and expensive incubators, and weighing machines, and all the rest of the paraphernalia Dick thought essential; but before even the first lot of eggs were hatched, he remarked one day that he thought of using the runs and the houses, not for turkeys, but for rabbits. Rabbits could be fed on a handful of grass, and they breed like – well, like rabbits. It was true that people did not have much taste for rabbit-flesh (this is a South African prejudice), but tastes could be acquired, and if they sold the rabbits at five shillings each, he reckoned they could make a comfortable fifty or sixty pounds a month. Then, when the rabbits were established, they could buy a special breed of Angora rabbits, because he had heard the wool fetched six shillings a pound.

At this point, unable to control herself and hating herself for it, Mary lost her temper – lost it finally and destructively. Even as she raged against him, her feeling was of cold self-condemnation because she was giving him the satisfaction of seeing her thus. But it was a feeling he would not have understood. Her anger was terrible to him, though he told himself continually that she was in the wrong and had no right to thwart his well-meant but unfortunate efforts. She raged and wept and swore, till at last she was too weak to stand, and remained lolling in the corner of the sofa, sobbing, trying to get her breath. And Dick did not hitch up his pants, start to whistle or look like a harried little boy. He looked at her for a long time as she sat there, sobbing; and then said sardonically, ‘OK boss.’ Mary did not like that; she did not like it at all; for his sarcastic remark said more about their marriage than she had ever allowed herself to think, and it was unseemly that her contempt of him should be put so plainly into words: it was a condition of the existence of their marriage that she should pity him generously, not despise him.

But there was no more talk about rabbits or turkeys. She sold the turkeys, and filled the wire runs with chickens. To make some money to buy herself some clothes, she said. Did he expect her to go about in rags like a kaffir. He did not expect anything, apparently, for he did not even reply to her challenge. He was again preoccupied. There was no hint of apology or defensiveness in his manner when he informed her that he intended to start a kaffir store on his farm. He simply stated the fact, not looking at her, in a matter-of-fact take-it-or-leave-it voice. Everyone knew that kaffir stores made a pile of money, he said. Charlie Slatter had a store on his farm; a lot of farmers did. They were goldmines of profit. Mary shrank from the word ‘goldmines’ because she had found a series of crumbling weed-covered trenches behind the house one day, which he had told her he had dug years before in an effort to discover the Eldorado he had been convinced was hidden beneath the soil of his farm. She said quietly. ‘If there is a store on Slatter’s place, only five miles off, there is no point in having another here.’

‘I have a hundred natives here always.’

‘If they earn fifteen bob a month you are not going to become a Rockefeller on what they spend.’

‘There are always natives passing through,’ he said stubbornly.

He applied for a trading licence and got it without difficulty. Then he built a store. It seemed to Mary a terrible thing, an omen and a warning, that the store, the ugly menacing store of her childhood, should follow her here, even to her home.

But it was built a few hundred yards from the house itself, consisting of a small room bisected by a counter, with a bigger room behind to hold the stock. To begin with what stock they needed could be contained on the shelves of the store itself, but as the thing expanded, they would need the second room.

Mary helped Dick lay out the goods, sick with depression, hating the feel of the cheap materials that smelled of chemicals, and the blankets that seemed rough and greasy on the fingers even before they were used. They hung up the jewellery of garish glass and brass and copper, and she set them swinging and tinkling, with a tight-lipped smile, because of her memories of childhood, when it had been her greatest delight to watch the brilliant strings of beads swaying and shimmering. She was thinking that these two rooms added to the house would have made their life comfortable: the money spent on the store, the turkey-runs, the pigstyes, the beehives, would have put ceilings into the house, would have taken the terror out of the thought of the approaching hot season. But what was the use of saying it? She felt like dissolving in hopeless foreboding tears; but she said not a word, and helped Dick with the work till it was finished.

When the store was ready, and filled to the roof with kaffir goods, Dick was so pleased he went into the station and bought twenty cheap bicycles. It was ambitious, because rubber rots; but then, he said, his natives were always asking him for advances to buy bicycles; they could buy them from him. Then the question arose who was to run the store? When it really gets going, he said, we can engage a storeman. Mary shut her eyes and sighed. Before they had even started, when it looked as if it would be a long time before they had paid off the capital spent on it, he was talking about a storeman who would cost at the very least thirty pounds a month. Why not engage a native? she asked. You can’t trust niggers further than you can kick them, he said, as far as money is concerned. He said that he had taken it for granted that she would run the store; she hadn’t anything to do in any case. He made this last remark in the harsh resentful voice that was, at this time, his usual way of addressing her.

Mary replied sharply that she would rather die than set foot inside it. Nothing would make her, nothing.

‘It wouldn’t hurt you,’ said Dick. ‘Are you too good to stand behind a counter, then?’

‘Selling kaffir truck to stinking kaffirs,’ she said.

But that was not her feeling – not then, before she had started the work. She could not explain to Dick how that store smell made her remember the way she had stood, as a very small girl, looking fearfully up at the rows of bottles on the shelves, wondering which of them her father would handle that night; the way her mother had taken coins out of his pockets at nights, when he had fallen asleep in a chair snoring, mouth open, legs sprawling; and how the next day she would be sent up to the store to buy food that would not appear on the account at the month’s end. These things she could not explain to Dick, for the good reason that he was now associated in her mind with the greyness and misery of her childhood, and it would have been like arguing with destiny itself. At last she agreed to serve in the store; there was nothing else she could do.

Now, as she went about her work, she could glance out of the back door and see the new shining roof among the trees; and from time to time she walked far enough along the path to see whether there was anyone waiting to buy. By ten in the morning half a dozen native women and their children were sitting under the trees. If she disliked native men, she loathed the women. She hated the exposed fleshiness of them, their soft brown bodies and soft bashful faces that were also insolent and inquisitive, and their chattering voices that held a brazen fleshy undertone. She could not bear to see them sitting there on the grass, their legs tucked under them in that traditional timeless pose, as peaceful and uncaring as if it did not matter whether the store was opened, or whether it remained shut all day and they would have to return tomorrow. Above all, she hated the way they suckled their babies, with their breasts hanging down for everyone to see; there was something in their calm satisfied maternity that made her blood boil. ‘Their babies hanging on to them like leeches,’ she said to herself shuddering, for she thought with horror of suckling a child. The idea of a child’s lips on her breasts made her feel quite sick; at the thought of it she would involuntarily clasp her hands over her breasts, as if protecting them from a violation. And since so many white women are like her, turning with relief to the bottle, she was in good company, and did not think of herself, but rather of these black women, as strange; they were alien and primitive creatures with ugly desires she could not bear to think about.

When she saw there were perhaps ten or twelve of them waiting there, making a bright-coloured group against the green trees and grass, with their chocolate flesh and vivid headcloths and metal ear-rings, she took the keys off the hook in the wardrobe (they were put there so the native servant should not know where they were and take himself to the store to steal when she was not looking) and shading her eyes with her hand, she marched off along the path to get the unpleasant business finished. She would open the door with a bang, letting it swing back hard against the brick wall, and enter the dark store, her nose delicately crinkled against the smell. Then the women slowly crowded in, fingering the stuffs, and laying the brilliant beads against their dark skins with little exclamations of pleasure, or of horror, because of the price. The children hung to their mothers’ backs (like monkeys, Mary thought) or clutched their skirts, staring at the white-skinned Mary, clusters of flies in the corners of their eyes. Mary would stand there for half an hour perhaps, holding herself aloof, drumming with her fingers on the wood, answering questions about price and quality briefly. She would not give the women the pleasure of haggling over the price. And after a few moments she felt she could not stay there any longer, shut into the stuffy store with a crowd of these chattering evil-smelling creatures. She said sharply, in the kitchen kaffir, ‘Hurry up now!’ One by one, they drifted away, their gaiety and the pleasure quite subdued, sensing her dislike of them.