Martha Quest. Doris Lessing

for? One does not pity a person who knows what it is he chooses and why.

      Martha was watching him in a way which would allow her to pretend, to herself at least, that she was not; she was afraid he might go past her with another of his formal nods. He came straight towards her, however, extended the books, and said brusquely, ‘I thought you’d like these.’

      ‘How did you know I was still here?’ – with feminine obliquity.

      ‘I can see the store through the trees.’

      For a moment Martha was irrationally angry, as if she had been spied upon; then he asked, ‘How are you getting home?’ and she replied defiantly, ‘I’m walking.’ It seemed, however, that Joss could see no reason why she should not walk; and after a hesitation he merely said, ‘So long!’ and walked back across the dust. Martha was disappointed – he might have asked her back to his home, she thought. Then she understood that he was waiting for her to invite herself; and this confused her. She shrugged away the thought of Joss, who always made her feel deficient in proper feeling; and with the parcel of books under her arm, which gave her confidence, she walked away off Socrates’ veranda, and along the road home.

      She had never made this journey on foot; always by car, or, as a child, perched on top of the hot hairy grain sacks on the wagon. During the first mile she was remembering the creaking sway of the old wagon, which seemed always as if it might spring apart between the dragging weight of the sacks and the forward-heaving oxen; there was a place towards the front of the wagon where it seemed that the tension was localized, and here she liked to sit, shuddering with excitement, because of the groaning timbers under her, which always were on the point of flying asunder, but never did, carrying their burden mile after slow and labouring mile. She was remembering the alarming way the sacks shifted under her; heavy sacks they were, but sliding and subsiding easily with the sway of the vehicle. She remembered the pleasurable warm smell of the cow droppings falling plop, plop in the red dust, and releasing, deliciously, the odours of fresh grass; so that, although the wagon wheels perpetually flung up rivers of red sand, and she travelled in a column of whirling ruddy dust, the sweet perfumes of newly cudded grass mingled with it, mile after mile, as if the four-divided stomachs of the great oxen were filled with nothing but concentrated memories of hours of grazing along the water heavy vleis.

      Later, she hesitated outside the McDougall’s farm; for if she went in she would be given a wonderful Scotch tea of bannocks and griddle cakes and newly churned butter. But she did not go in, for the McDougalls had not yet noticed that she was now Miss Quest; they still treated her like a child, and this she could not bear.

      She walked more slowly now, not wanting the journey to end; she was savouring freedom: the station far behind, where she was convinced everyone remarked her, commented on her; the house not yet in sight, where the mere existence of her parents was like a reminder that she must be wary, ready to resist. Now there was no one to mark her, not a soul in sight; and she dawdled along the track, skipping from one run to another, and pulling from their delicate green sheaths the long sweet-tasting grass stems that are as pleasant to chew along a dusty road as sticks of sugar cane. She was happy because she was, for the moment, quite free; she was sad because before long she would reach home; these two emotions deepened together, and it flashed across her mind that this intense, joyful melancholy was a state of mind she had known in the past and – But at once she dismissed the thought; it passed as lightly as the shadow of a wing of a bird, for she knew that the experience associated with that emotion was not to be courted. One did not lie in wait for it; it was a visitor who came without warning. On the other hand, even the fact that the delicious but fearful expectation had crossed her mind at all was enough to warn it away; the visitor liked the darkness, this Martha knew, and she hastened to think of something else. At the same time, she was thinking that she had associated the experience with what she now, rather scornfully, called her ‘religious phase’; and becoming an atheist, which she had done from one day to the next, as easily as dropping a glove, had been painful only because she imagined she must pay the price for intellectual honesty by bidding farewell to this other emotion, this fabulous visitor. It seemed, then, that no such price had been asked of her, it seemed that –

      Martha caught herself up, already bad-tempered and irritable: she must not analyse, she must not be conscious; and here she was, watching the movements of her mind as if she were observing a machine. She noted, too, that she was walking very fast, quite blind to the beauties of the trees and grass. For it was evening, and very beautiful; a rich watery gold was lighting the dark greens of the foliage, the dark red of the soil, the pale blonde of the grass, to the solemn intensity of the sunset hour. She noted a single white-stemmed tree with its light cloud of glinting leaf rising abruptly from the solid-packed red earth of an anthill, all bathed in a magical sky-reflecting light, and her heart moved painfully in exquisite sadness. She consciously walked more slowly, consciously enjoyed the melancholy; and all at once found herself on a slight rise, where the trees opened across a wide reach of country; and the sight, a new one, caused her to forget everything else. She could see their house, crouched low on the green-shrouded hill, and between was an unbroken stretch of silver-gold mealies; it was perhaps five miles from where she stood to the Van Rensbergs’ boundary, a dark belt of trees behind which solemn blue sky rose like a wall. The mealies swayed and whispered, and the light moved over them; a hawk lay motionless on a current of blue air; and the confused and painful delirium stirred in her again, and this time so powerfully she did not fear its passing. The bush lay quiet about her, a bare slope of sunset-tinted grass moving gently with a tiny rustling sound; an invisible violet tree shed gusts of perfume, like a benediction; and she stood quite still, waiting for the moment, which was now inevitable. There was a movement at the corner of her eye, and she turned her head, cautiously, so as not to disturb what was swelling along her nerves, and saw a small buck, which had come from the trees and stood quietly, flicking its tail, a few paces away. She hardly dared to blink. The buck gazed at her, and then turned its head to look into the bush laying its ears forward. A second buck tripped out from the trees, and they both stood watching her; then they walked daintily across the ground, their hooves clicking sharp on the stones, the sun warm on their soft brown hides. They dropped their heads to graze, while their little tails shook from side to side impatiently, with flashes of white.

      Suddenly the feeling in Martha deepened, and as it did so she knew she had forgotten, as always, that what she had been waiting for like a revelation was a pain, not a happiness; what she remembered, always, was the exultation and the achievement, what she forgot was this difficult birth into a state of mind which words like ecstasy, illumination, and so on could not describe, because they suggest joy. Her mind having been formed by poetic literature (and little else), she of course knew that such experiences were common among the religious. But the fact was, so different was ‘the moment’ from what descriptions of other people’s ‘moments’ led her to believe was common, that it was not until she had come to accept the experience as ordinary and ‘incidental to the condition of adolescence’ as she put it sourly, and with positive resentment, that it occurred to her. Why, perhaps it is the same thing, after all? But if so, they were liars, liars one and all; and that she could understand, for was it not impossible for her to remember, in between, how terrible an illumination it was?

      There was certainly a definite point at which the thing began. It was not; then it was suddenly inescapable, and nothing could have frightened it away. There was a slow integration, during which she, and the little animals, and the moving grasses, and the sun-warmed trees, and the slopes of shivering silvery mealies, and the great dome of blue light overhead, and the stones of earth under her feet, became one, shuddering together in a dissolution of dancing atoms. She felt the rivers under the ground forcing themselves painfully along her veins, swelling them out in an unbearable pressure; her flesh was the earth, and suffered growth like a ferment; and her eyes stared, fixed like the eye of the sun. Not for one second longer (if the terms for time apply) could she have borne it; but then, with a sudden movement forwards and out, the whole process stopped; and that was ‘the moment’ which it was impossible to remember afterwards. For during that space of time (which was timeless) she understood quite finally her smallness, the unimportance of humanity. In her ears was an inchoate grinding, the great wheels of movement, and it was inhuman, like the blundering rocking movement of a bullock cart; and no part of that