The Grass is Singing. Doris Lessing

at this point the servant came out on to the verandah behind them, and held out, without speaking, his contract of service. He wanted to leave: he was needed by his family in the kraal. Mary immediately lost her temper; her irritation found a permissible outlet in this exasperating native. Dick simply pulled her back, as if she were a thing of no account, and went out to the kitchen with the native. She heard the boy complain that he had been working since five o’clock that morning with no food at all, because he was only in the compound a few moments before he had been summoned back by the gong. He could not work like that; his child in his kraal was ill; he wanted to go at once. Dick replied, ignoring the unwritten rules for once, that the new missus did not know much about running a house yet, and that she would learn and that it would not happen again. Speaking like this to a native, appealing to him, was contrary to Dick’s ideas of relationship between white and black, but he was furious with Mary for her lack of consideration and tact.

      Mary was quite stupefied with rage. How dare he take the native’s part against her! When Dick returned she was standing on the verandah with her hands clenched and her face set.

      ‘How dare you!’ she said, her voice stifled.

      ‘If you must do these things, then you must take the consequences,’ said Dick wearily. ‘He’s a human being, isn’t he? He’s got to eat. Why must that bath be done all at once? It can be done over several days, if it means all that to you.’

      ‘It’s my house,’ said Mary. ‘He’s my boy, not yours. Don’t interfere.’

      ‘Listen to me,’ said Dick curtly. ‘I work hard enough, don’t I? All day I am down on the lands with these lazy black savages, fighting them to get some work out of them. You know that. I won’t come back home to this damned fight, fight, fight in the house. Do you understand? I will not have it. And you should learn sense. If you want to get work out of them you have to know how to manage them. You shouldn’t expect too much. They are nothing but savages after all.’ Thus Dick, who had never stopped to reflect that these same savages had cooked for him better than his wife did, had run his house, had given him a comfortable existence, as far as his pinched life could be comfortable, for years.

      Mary was beside herself. She said, wanting to hurt him, really wanting to hurt him for the first time, because of this new arrogance of his. ‘You expect a lot from me, don’t you?’ On the brink of disaster, she pulled herself up, but could not stop completely, and after a hesitation went on, ‘You expect such a lot! You expect me to live like a poor white in this pokey little place of yours. You expect me to cook myself every day because you won’t put in ceilings…’ She was speaking in a new voice for her, a voice she had never used before in her life. It was taken direct from her mother, when she had had those scenes over money with her father. It was not the voice of Mary, the individual (who after all really did not care so much about the bath or whether the native stayed or went), but the voice of the suffering female, who wanted to show her husband she just would not be treated like that. In a moment she would begin to cry, as her mother had cried on these occasions, in a kind of dignified, martyred rage.

      Dick said curtly, white with fury, ‘I told you when I married you what you could expect. You can’t accuse me of telling you lies. I explained everything to you. And there are farmers’ wives all over the country living no better, and not making such a fuss. And as for ceilings, you can whistle for them. I have lived in this house for six years and it hasn’t hurt me. You can make the best of it.’

      She gasped in astonishment. Never had he spoken like that to her. And inside she went hard and cold against him, and nothing would melt her until he said he was sorry and craved her forgiveness.

      ‘That boy will stay now, I’ve seen to that. Now treat him properly and don’t make a fool of yourself again,’ said Dick.

      She went straight into the kitchen, gave the boy the money he was owed, counting out the shillings as if she grudged them, and dismissed him. She returned cold and victorious. But Dick did not acknowledge her victory.

      ‘It is not me you are hurting, it is yourself,’ he said. ‘If you go on like this, you’ll never get any servants. They soon learn the women who don’t know how to treat their boys.’

      She got the supper herself, struggling with the stove, and afterwards when Dick had gone to bed early, as he always did, she remained alone in the little front room. After a while, feeling caged, she went out into the dark outside the house, and walked up and down the path between the borders of white stones which gleamed faintly through the dark, trying to catch a breath of cool air to soothe her hot cheeks. Lightning was flickering gently over the kopjes; there was a dull red glow where the fire burned; and overhead it was dark and stuffy. She was tense with hatred. Then she began to picture herself walking there up and down in the darkness, with the hated bush all around her, outside that pigsty he called a house, having to do all her own work – while only a few months ago she had been living her own life in town, surrounded by friends who loved her and needed her. She began to cry, weakening into self-pity. She cried for hours, till she could walk no more. She staggered back into bed, feeling bruised and beaten. The tension between them lasted for an intolerable week, until at last the rains fell, and the air grew cool and relaxed. And he had not apologized. The incident was simply not mentioned. Unresolved and unacknowledged, the conflict was put behind them, and they went on as if it had not happened. But it had changed them both. Although his assurance did not last long, and he soon lapsed back into his old dependence on her, a faint apology always in his voice, he was left with a core of resentment against her. For the sake of their life together she had to smother her dislike of him because of the way he had behaved, but then, it was not so easy to smother; it was put against the account of the native who had left, and, indirectly, against all natives.

      Towards the end of that week a note came from Mrs Slatter, asking them both for an evening party.

      Dick was really reluctant to go, because he had got out of the way of organized jollification; he was ill at ease in crowds. But he wanted to accept for Mary’s sake. She, however, refused to go. She wrote a formal note of thanks, saying she regretted, etc.

      Mrs Slatter had asked them on an impulse of real friendliness, for she was still sorry for Mary, in spite of her stiff angular pride. But the note offended her: it might have been copied out of a letter-writing guide. This kind of formality did not fit in with the easy manners of the district, and she showed the note to her husband with raised eyebrows, saying nothing.

      ‘Leave her,’ said Charlie Slatter. ‘She’ll come off her high horse. Got ideas into her head, that’s what’s wrong with her. She’ll come to her senses. Not that she’s much loss. The pair of them need some sense shaken into them. Turner is in for trouble. He is so up in the air that he doesn’t even burn fireguards! And he is planting trees. Trees! He is wasting money planting trees while he is in debt.’

      Mr Slatter’s farm had hardly any trees left on it. It was a monument to farming malpractice, with great gullies cutting through it, and acres of good dark earth gone dead from misuse. But he made the money, that was the thing. It enraged him to think it was so easy to make money, and that damned fool Dick Turner played the fool with trees. On a kindhearted impulse, that was half exasperation, he drove over one morning to see Dick, avoiding the house (because he did not want to meet that stuck-up idiot Mary) looking for him on the lands. He spent three hours trying to persuade Dick to plant tobacco, instead of mealies and little crops. He was very sarcastic about those ‘little crops’, the beans and cotton and sunhemp that Dick liked. And Dick steadily refused to listen to Charlie. He liked his crops, the feeling of having his eggs in several baskets. And tobacco seemed to him an inhuman crop: it wasn’t farming at all, it was a sort of factory thing, with the barns and the grading sheds and the getting up at nights to watch barn temperatures.

      ‘What are you going to do when the family starts coming along?’ asked Charlie brusquely, his matter-of-fact little blue eyes fixed on Dick.

      ‘I’ll get out of the mess my own way,’ said Dick obstinately.

      ‘You are a fool.’ said Charlie. ‘A fool. Don’t say I didn’t tell you. Don’t come to me for loans when your wife’s belly begins