Martha Quest. Doris Lessing

but this represented the family: the Jewish classics, books on Palestine, Poland and Russia; this was the source of the rapidly diverging streams which were Solly and Joss; and these new books would be in their shared bedroom. Into this room it was impossible to go, since she was now Miss Quest; and the glance she directed towards Joss was troubled.

      He had been watching her, and, at the glance, he lifted from a table beside him a large pile of books and handed them to her. Again she felt that flush of delight; for he must have prepared them for her. He remarked calmly, ‘Take these, good for your soul.’

      She looked at the titles, and was at once indignant, as a child might be if a teacher urged her to study subjects she had mastered the year before.

      ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked sardonically. ‘Not up your street?’

      She said, ‘But I know all this.’ At once she wished the words unsaid, for they sounded conceited. What she meant was, ‘I agree with all the things these books represent.’

      He studied her, gave an incredulous grimace, and then fired the following questions at her, in the offhand indifferent manner of the initiate to a breed utterly without the law:

      ‘You repudiate the colour bar?’

      ‘But of course.’

      ‘Of course,’ he said sardonically. And then: ‘You dislike racial prejudice in all its form, including anti-Semitism?’

      ‘Naturally’ – this with a touch of impatience.

      ‘You are an atheist?’

      ‘You know quite well that I am.’

      ‘You believe in socialism?’

      ‘That goes without saying,’ she concluded fervently; and suddenly began to laugh, from that sense of the absurd which it seemed must be her downfall as a serious person. For Joss was frowning at the laugh, and apparently could see nothing ridiculous in a nineteen-year-old Jewish boy, sprung from an orthodox Jewish family, and an adolescent British girl, if possible even more conventionally bred, agreeing to these simple axioms in the back room of a veld store in a village filled with people to whom every word of this conversation would have the force of a dangerous heresy.

      ‘You sound as if you were asking a catechism,’ she explained, giggling irrepressibly.

      He frowned again; and at once she felt indignant that he might be surprised because she had made the same intellectual journey he had. ‘So what are you going to do about it?’ he demanded practically. Also, he sounded aggressive; she was beginning to feel childish and wrong for having laughed; she felt she had hurt him.

      ‘I don’t know,’ she said, and there was an appeal in it. She raised her eye to his and waited. Because of the look on his face, she at once became conscious of the picture she presented, standing there in front of him, a young girl in a green linen frock that emphasized every line in her body.

      ‘I suppose you are all right,’ he conceded slowly, looking at her with approval; and she felt the unfairness of it. This was an intellectual discussion, wasn’t it? Why, then, that note in his voice?

      Her look at him was now as aggressive as his had been. ‘It’s all very well for you, you’re a man,’ she said bitterly, and entirely without coquetry; but he said flippantly, even suggestively, ‘It will be all quite well for you too!’

      He laughed, hoping she might laugh with him. But she stared at him in dismayed outrage, then muttered, ‘Oh, go to hell,’ and for the second time left that room, and went out into the glaring sunlight. No sooner had she gone than she understood she had been as touchy and thin-skinned as she had said he was, and almost went back. Pride forbade it; and she went into the village.

      The place had a deserted look. Four in the afternoon: the sky was huge and cloudless, the sun loomed swollen through a reddish haze, and the tin roofs reflected a dulled and sombre light. It was likely to rain soon; but now the long brown pond had shrunk within lips of cracked mud to a narrow scummy puddle. Outside the bar stood half a dozen big cars, outside the station about twenty shabbier cars. Among them was the Van Rensbergs’; and they were packed with children of all ages.

      What the British referred to as ‘the Afrikaans element’ had come in for their mail.

      Now, it is quite easy to remark the absurdities and contradictions of a country’s social system from outside its borders, but very difficult if one has been brought up in it; and for Martha, who must have seen that sight dozens of times before, it was a moment of illumination, perhaps because she was feeling sore and rejected under Joss’s treatment of her; and there was something in that bearing and character of those people kin to what she felt.

      On mail days there were cars of every degree of wealth, from the enormous American cars of the tobacco farmers down to eccentric creations like the Quests’, but the owners of these cars met together without any consciousness of degree. English and Scotch, Welsh and Irish, rich and poor, it was all backslapping and Christian names, a happy family atmosphere which had a touch of hysterical necessity in it, since the mail days, gymkhanas and dances were false tokens of community – for what is a community if not people who share their experience? The fact was, this district was divided into several separate communities, who shared nothing but Christian names, cards at Christmas, and a member of Parliament. The eastern part of the district, all along the flanks and slopes of Jacob’s Burg, was where the tobacco families lived, and here the common denominator was wealth; they were regarded by the rest with tolerance, for they went in for bottle parties, divorces, and modern restlessness. North and west of the Quests’ farm Scots families were settled, mostly related, hard-working, modest, sociable people who visited a great deal among themselves. Half a dozen Irish inhabited the slopes of the Oxford Range; but this was not a group; one cannot think of the Irish except as picturesque individualists. Near them were five farms where lived a collection of the English eccentrics who reach their richest bloom only in the colonies. Colonel Castairs, for instance, who lived by himself in a ranging stone mansion, sleeping all day and reading all night, preparing himself to write that history of melancholia through the ages which he would one day begin; he was now over seventy. There was Lord Jamie, who walked naked around his farm, and ate only fruit and nuts; and quarrelled bitterly with his wife because she clothed their children, for he held the view that even so much as a diaper on a baby was an insult to God who created Adam and Eve. There was a story that once he had come raking into the village on a great black horse, quite naked, with his wild red beard and his mane of red hair sparking fire in the sunlight, a great rough-cast man, whose fiercely innocent blue eyes stared out from the waving locks of his hair like the eyes of an inquiring savage. He dismounted from his horse, and went into the store to buy a pound of tobacco, a bottle of whisky, and the weekly newspaper; and it seemed that everyone in the store greeted him as casually as if he were as decently dressed as they. Then they began talking about the weather; and so it had never happened again; and the incident retreated into the fabulous past of kaffir wars, and pioneers, and violence. How exciting life must have been then, sighed the people in the district, remembering their distant origins – and yet the district had not been settled much more than thirty years. How wonderful if that wild man on the black horse appeared again in his scandalous glory! How wonderful if Commander Day walked into the store (as he had once, in the golden age) flanked by his two half-tamed leopards, with his three native concubines behind him – but alas, alas, he did not, they did not, the time for the creation of legends was past.

      For many years, between this essential group of gentle maniacs and the Quests’ farm there had been hundreds of acres of empty ground, considered too poor to farm. On its verge, sharing a boundary with the Quests, were the Van Rensbergs, like the solitary swallow which would one day make a summer; for five years before another Afrikaans family arrived, rocking along the track in a hooded wagon, a vehicle which had, to this district, only literary associations from the Great Trek. Soon there came another family, and then another … And now, inside this district whose pattern of living was a large farm and two or three children, with a governess and maybe an assistant, grew up a close-knit, isolated community of Dutch people, who worked fifty and a hundred acres where the British used thousands, and made their farming