The Grass is Singing

6

It was by chance that Mary picked up a pamphlet on beekeeping from the counter of the store one day, and took it home with her; but even if she had not, no doubt it would have happened some other way. But it was that chance which gave her her first glimpse into Dick’s real character: that, and a few words she overheard the same day.

They seldom went into the station seven miles away; but sent in a native twice a week to fetch their post and groceries. He left at about ten in the morning, with an empty sugar sack swung over his shoulders, and returned after dusk with the sack bulging, and oozing blood from the parcel of meat. But a native, although conveniently endowed by nature with the ability to walk long distances without feeling fatigue, cannot carry sacks of flour and mealiemeal; and once a month the trip was made by car.

Mary had given her order, seen the things put into the car, and was standing on the long verandah of the store among piled crates and sacks, waiting for Dick to finish his business. As he came out, a man she did not know stopped him and said, ‘Well, Jonah, your farm flooded again this season, I suppose?’ She turned sharply to look: a few years ago she would not have noticed the undertone of contempt in the lazy rallying voice. Dick smiled and said, ‘I have had good rains this year, things are not too bad.’

‘Your luck changed, eh?’

‘Looks like it.’

Dick came towards her, the smile gone, his face strained.

‘Who was that?’ she asked.

‘I borrowed two hundred pounds from him three years ago, just after we were married.’

‘You didn’t tell me?’

‘I didn’t want to worry you.’

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.