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On the whole, eggs were more predictable; though it was important not to drive too fast, and to stop frequently, so that the engine might cool, as otherwise the water might boil the clotted egg off the bottom of the radiator, and then …
After lunch Mr Quest called peremptorily, ‘May! Matty! Come on, the engine’s started, we must go.’ And Mrs Quest, half laughing, half grumbling, ran to the car, adjusting her hat, while Martha followed unhurriedly, with a look of exhausted resignation.
The car was poised at the edge of a flattish space, on the brow of the hill. Mr Quest sat urgently forward, clasping the brake with one hand, hugging the steering wheel with the other.
‘Now!’ he exclaimed, letting go the brake. Nothing happened. ‘Oh, damn it all,’ he groaned, as if this were the last straw. ‘Come on, then.’ And he and Mrs Quest began swinging back and forth in their seats, so the car was joggled inch by inch over the edge, and slid precariously down the rutted pebbly road to the foot of the hill, where there was a great ditch. Into this it slid, and stopped. ‘Oh, damn it all,’ Mr Quest said again, on a final note, and looked around at his women in an aggrieved way.
He tried the starter, without much hope. It worked at once, and the car flew up over the edge of the ditch in a screeching bounce, and down the track between the mealie fields. The maize stood now in its final colouring, a dead silvery gold, dry as paper, and its whispering against the wind was the sound of a myriad fluttering leaves. Below this Hundred Acres Field lay the track, the old railroad track, and now Mr Quest stopped the car, got out, took off the radiator cap, and peered in. There was a squelchy bubbling noise, and a faintly rotten smell. ‘It’s all right so far,’ he said, with satisfaction, and off they went.
Halfway, they stopped again. ‘At three and a half miles, the petrol ought to show …’ murmured Mr Quest, looking at the petrol gauge. For it was seven miles to the station. Or rather, it was five and three-quarters; but just as it was seven miles to the Dumfries Hills (in fact, six) and seven to Jacob’s Burg (at least nine), so the distance to the station must be seven miles, for to have a house in the dead centre of a magically determined circle offers satisfaction beyond all riches, and even power. But a poetical seven miles is one thing, and to check one’s petrol gauge by it another; and Mr Quest frowned and said, ‘I’d better take the thing to the garage. I cannot understand – if these people can make an engine to last a lifetime, why is everything else so shoddy?’
At the station, Mrs Quest descended at Socrates’ with her shopping lists, and Mr Quest drove off to the garage. Martha lagged on the veranda until her mother had forgotten her in her eager talk with the other women at the counter, and then walked quickly to the belt of trees which hid the kaffir store. It was a large square brick erection, with a simple pillared veranda. Martha went through the usual crowd of native women with their babies on their backs, pushed aside the coloured bead curtain at the door, and was inside the store. It had a counter down the centre, and on it were jars of bright sweets, and rolls of cotton goods. There were sacks of grain and sugar around the walls, bicycles, cans of paraffin, monkey nuts. Over the counter, cheap beads, strips of biltong, mouth organs and glass bangles dangled and swung together. The smell was of sweat and cheap dyes and dust, and Martha sniffed it with pleasure.
Old Mr Cohen nodded at her, with a distance in his manner, and, having asked politely after her parents, who owed him fifty pounds, waited for an order.
‘Is Solly in?’ she asked rather too politely.
The old man allowed his eyebrows to lift, before replying, ‘He’s in, for anyone who wants to see him.’
‘I would like to see him,’ she said, almost stammering.
‘You used to know the way,’ he said laconically, and nodded at the closed flap of the counter, under which she had ducked as a child. She had expected him to lift it for her now; clumsily, she tried to move it, while he watched her. Then, taking his time, he lifted it, and moved aside so that she might go through.
She found herself saying, ‘You’re mistaken, I didn’t mean …’
His eyes snapped around at her, and he said sarcastically, ‘Didn’t mean what?’ He at once turned away to serve a native child, who was so red with dust from the road that his black skin had a rusty look, some acid-green sweets from a jar.
Martha walked into the back room, and found the Cohen boys reading, one in each of the two big easy chairs, which she privately thought in unpleasant taste, as was the whole room, which was very small, and crowded with glossy furniture and bright china ornaments; there was an effect of expensive ostentation, like the display window of a furniture store. And in this ugly and tasteless room sat Solly and Joss, the intellectuals, reading (as she took care to see) Plato and Balzac, in expensive editions.
After a startled look at her, they looked at each other, and after a long pause Solly remarked, ‘Look who’s here!’ while Joss returned, ‘Well, well!’ and they both waited, with blandly sarcastic faces, for her to speak.
She said, ‘I’ve brought back a book of yours,’ and held it out.
Solly said, ‘My grateful thanks,’ extended a hand, and took it.
Joss was pretending to read, and this annoyed her; for, as Mrs Van Rensberg had suggested, he had once been her particular friend. But it was also a relief, and she said, rather flirtatiously, to Solly, ‘May I sit down?’ and sat forthwith.
‘She’s got to be quite a smart girl, h’m?’ said Solly to Joss, as the boys openly and rudely examined her.
As a result of her quarrels with Mrs Quest, she was now making her own clothes. Also, she had starved herself into a fashionable thinness which, since she was plump by nature, was not to everyone’s taste. Apparently not to the Cohen boys’, for they continued, as if she were not present:
‘Yellow suits her, doesn’t it, Solly?’
‘Yes, Joss and that cute little slit down the front of the dress, too.’
‘But too thin, too thin, Solly, it comes of giving up that rich and unhealthy Jewish food.’
‘But better thin and pure, Joss, than fat and gross and contaminated by –’
‘Oh, shut up,’ she said, in discomfort; and they raised their eyebrows and shook their heads and sighed. ‘I know you think …’ she began, and once again found it hard to continue.
‘Think what?’ they demanded, almost together, and with precisely the keen, sarcastic intonation their father had used.
‘It isn’t so,’ she stammered, sincerely, looking at them in appeal; and for a moment thought she was forgiven, for Joss’s tone was quite gentle as he began: ‘Poor Matty, did your mummy forbid you to come and see us, then?’
The shock of the words, after the deceptively gentle tone, which reached her nerves before the sense, caused her eyes to fill with tears. She said, ‘No, of course she didn’t.’
‘Mystery,’ said Joss, beginning the game again, nodding at Solly; who sighed exaggeratedly and said, ‘We’re not to know, dear, dear.’
Suddenly Martha said not at all as she had intended, but with a mixture of embarrassment and coyness, ‘Mrs Van Rensberg was gossiping.’ She glanced at Joss, whose dark face slowly coloured; and he looked at her with a dislike that cut her.
‘Mrs Van Rensberg was gossiping,’ said Solly to Joss; and before the exchange could continue, she cut in: ‘Yes, and I suppose it was silly, but I couldn’t – take it.’ The defiant conclusion ended on a shortened breath; this interview was not as she had imagined.
‘She couldn’t take it,’ sighed Joss to Solly.
‘She couldn’t take it,’ Solly sighed back; and with the same movement, they picked up their books, and began to read.
She remained where she was, her eyes pleading with their averted faces, trying to subdue the flood of colour she could feel tingling to the roots of her hair, and when, after a long silence, Solly remarked in a detached voice, ‘She couldn’t take us, but she’s still here,’ Martha got up, saying angrily, ‘I’ve apologized, you’re making a mistake. Why do you have to be so thin-skinned?’ She went to the door.
Behind her back, they began laughing, a loud and unpleasant laughter. ‘She’s cut us dead for two years, and she says we’re thin-skinned.’
‘I didn’t cut you – why must you talk about me as if I weren’t here?’ she said, and stumbled out, past Mr Cohen. She found the flap of the counter down, and had to wait, speechless, for him to lift it, for she was on the verge of crying.
He looked at her with what she thought was a tinge of kindliness; but he opened the flap, nodded quietly, and said, ‘Good afternoon, Miss Quest.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, with the effect of pleading, and walked back up the dusty path to the village, as the bead curtain swung and rattled into stillness behind her.
She walked over the railway tracks, which gleamed brightly in the hot sunlight, to the garage, where Mr Quest was in absorbed conversation with Mr Parry. He was repeating urgently, ‘Yes there’s going to be a war, it’s all very well for you people …’
Mr Parry was saying, ‘Yes, Captain Quest. No, Captain Quest.’ In the village, the war title was used, though Mr Quest refused it, saying it was not fair to the regular soldier. Martha used to argue with him reasonably, thus: ‘Are you suggesting that it is only the peace-time soldier who deserves his title? Do you mean that if civilians get conscripted and killed it’s on a different level from …’ and so on and so on – ah, how exasperating are the rational adolescents! For Mr Quest gave his irritable shrug of aversion and repeated, ‘I don’t like being Captain, it’s not fair when I haven’t been in the Army for so long.’ What Martha thought privately was, How odd that a man who thinks about nothing but war should dislike being Captain; and at this point, the real one, was of course never mentioned during those reasonable discussions.
Mr Parry was listening nervously to Mr Quest, while his eyes anxiously followed his native assistant, who was dragging an inner tube through the hot dust. At last he could not bear it, saying, ‘Excuse me, but …’ he darted forward and shouted at the native, ‘Look you, Gideon, how many times have I told you …’ He grabbed the tyre from the man’s hand, and took it over to a tub of water. Gideon shrugged, and went off to the cool interior of the garage, where he sat on a heap of outer tyres, and began making patterns on the dust with a twig. ‘Look you, Gideon …’ shouted Mr Parry; but Gideon wrinkled his brows and pretended not to hear. Mr Parry’s Welsh speech had lost nothing of its lilt and charm; but the phrases had worn slack; his ‘Look you’ sounded more like ‘Look ye’; and when he used the Welsh ‘whatever’, it came haphazard in his speech, with a surprised, uncertain note.
Mr Quest, disappointed of a listener, came to the car, climbed in, and said, ‘They don’t listen. I was telling him the Russians are going to join with the Germans and attack us. I know they are. Just after the war – my war – I met a man in a train who said he had seen with his own eyes the way the Russians were kidnapping German scientists and forcing them to work in their factories so they could learn how to make tanks to smash the British Empire. I said to Parry here …’
Martha heard these words somewhere underneath her attention, which was given to her own problems. Mr Quest looked over his shoulder at her, and said sarcastically, ‘But don’t let me bore you with the Great Unmentionable. Your time’ll come, and then I can say I told you so.’
Martha turned her face away; her lids stung with tears; she felt the most rejected and desolate creature in the world. It occurred to her that the Cohen boys might have felt like this when she (or so it had appeared) rejected them; but she dismissed the thought at once. The possessors of this particular form of arrogance may know its underside is timidity; but they seldom go on to reflect that the timidity is based on the danger of thinking oneself important to others, which necessitates a return of feeling. She was saying to herself that she could not imagine the clever and self-sufficient Cohen brothers caring about her one way or the other. But we were friends all our childhood, a voice said inside her; and that other voice answered coldly, Friends are whom you choose, not the people forced on you by circumstances. And yet she was nearly crying with misery and humiliation and friendlessness, in the hot back seat of the car, while grains of sunlight danced through the fractured roof, and stung her flesh like needles. For the first time, she said to herself that the Cohens were almost completely isolated in the district. The farmers nodded to them, offered remarks about the weather, but never friendship. The Greek family maintained a complicated system of friendship with the other Greeks from stores all along the railway line. The Cohens had relations in the city, no one nearer.
At last Mr Parry found a trail of bubbles sizzling up through the dirty water from the tube, and shouted to Gideon, ‘Come ye, now, you lazy black loafer, and do it quick whateffer you do, and listen well, now.’
Gideon indolently lifted himself and went to mend the puncture, while Mr Parry came back to the car in order to resume his conversation with Mr Quest.
‘Sorry, Captain, but if you want a good job, you do it yourself, whateffer else, it’s no good trusting the blacks, they’ve no pride in their work.’
‘As I was saying, you people have your heads buried in the sand. Anyone can see war is coming. If it’s not this year, it’ll be the next, as soon as they’re strong enough.’
‘You think the Jerries’ll have another shot at us?’ asked Mr Parry, polite but doubtful, and turned so that he might keep an eye on Gideon.
Another native came loping across the railway tracks and stopped by the car. ‘Baas Quest?’ he asked.
Mr Quest, once again interrupted, turned his darkly irritable eyes on him. But Martha recognized him: he was the Cohens’ cook; and she reached for the parcel he held.
‘For me,’ she said, and asked the man to wait. He went off to help Gideon with the tyre.
The parcel was a book from Joss, entitled The Social Aspect of the Jewish Question, and inside was a note: ‘Dear Matty Quest, This will be good for your soul, so do, do read it. Yours thin-skinnedly, Joss.’
She was filled with outrageous delight. It was forgiveness. She interrupted her father once again to borrow a pencil, and wrote: ‘Thanks for the book. As it happened, I borrowed it from you and of course agreed with it, three years ago. But I shall read it again and return it next time we come to the station.’ She was determined that would be very soon.
Next mail day she suggested that they should make the trip, but her father refused, with an air of being exploited.
‘Why do you want to go?’ asked Mrs Quest curiously; and Martha said, ‘I want to see the Cohen boys.’
‘You’re making friends with them?’ demurred Mrs Quest.
‘I thought we always were friends with them,’ said Martha scornfully; and since this put the argument on that hypocritical level where it was maintained that of course the Quests did not think Jews, or even shopkeepers, beneath them, and the only reason they did not continually meet was an inconvenience of some sort, Mrs Quest could not easily reply.
Martha telephoned the McDougalls to ask if they were going to the station. They were not. She asked the Van Rensbergs; Marnie said awkwardly that Pop didn’t often go to the station these days. Finally she telephoned Mr McFarline, the old miner from the small working in the Dumfries Hills; and he said yes, he was going to town tomorrow. She told her mother she would get a lift back (for ‘town’ in this case meant the city, not the station, as it sometimes did), and added, with the apparently deliberate exaggeration which was so infuriating, ‘If I don’t get a lift, I’ll walk.’ Which of course was absurd, infringed one of the taboos – ‘a young white girl walking alone’, etc. – and was calculated to provoke an argument. The argument immediately followed; and both women appealed to Mr Quest
‘Why shouldn’t she walk?’ demanded Mr Quest vaguely. ‘When I was a young man in England, I used to walk thirty miles an afternoon and think nothing of it.’
‘This isn’t England,’ said Mrs Quest tremulously, filled with horrid visions of what might happen to Martha if she encountered an evil native.
Martha came back with, ‘I walk miles and miles all over the farm, but that doesn’t matter for some reason. How can you be so illogical?’
‘Well, I don’t like it, and you promised not to go more than half a mile from the house.’
Martha laughed angrily, and chose this moment to say what until now she had been careful to keep dark: ‘Why, I often walk over to the Dumfries Hills, or even to Jacob’s Burg, I’ve been doing it for years.’
‘Oh, my dear,’ said Mrs Quest helplessly. She had known quite well that Martha was doing this, but to be told so now was another thing. ‘What would happen if a native attacked you?’
‘I should scream for help,’ said Martha flippantly.
‘Oh, my dear …’
‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous,’ said Martha angrily. ‘If a native raped me, then he’d be hung and I’d be a national heroine, so he wouldn’t do it, even if he wanted to, and why should he?’
‘My dear, read the newspapers, white girls are always being ra – attacked.’
Now, Martha could not remember any case of this happening; it was one of the things people said. She remarked, ‘Last week a white man raped a black girl, and was fined five pounds.’
Mrs Quest said hastily, ‘That’s not the point; the point is girls get raped.’
‘Then I expect they want to be,’ said Martha sullenly; and caught her breath, not because she did not believe the truth of what she said, but because of her parents’ faces: she could not help being frightened. For they were united for once, in genuine emotion, and began lecturing her on the consequences of her attitude. It ended with ‘and so they’ll drive us into the sea, and then the country will be ruined, what would these ignorant blacks do without us.’ And the usual inconsequent conclusion: ‘They have no sense of gratitude at all for what we do for them.’ It had all been said so often that it rang stale and false for both sides; and Martha remained silent in a way which they could take as an agreement, for comfort’s sake.
Next morning she was waiting down on the track, by the signpost in the long grass, for Mr McFarline; and they made the journey to the station in just over ten minutes.
Mr McFarline was a charming and wicked old Scotsman, who lived alone on his mine, which he worked in a way which cost him the very minimum in money, but a good deal in human life. There were always accidents on his mine. Also, his native compound was full of half-caste children, his own. He was extremely wealthy, and very popular. He gave generously to charity, and was about to stand for Parliament for one of the town constituencies. Because of the work in connection with getting himself elected, he often went into town.
As the car raced dangerously through the trees, he squeezed Martha’s knee in an experimental way and tried to put his hand up her skirt. She held the skirt down, and moved coolly away to the other side of the car, as if she had not noticed the action. So he took his hand away, and concentrated on showing her how nearly it was possible to escape death, with perfect sangfroid, at every bend of the road. He took the paint off his back mud-guard at the last raking turn; and they stopped before Sock’s store in a billowing cloud of dust. Martha’s heart was beating wildly for several reasons. No one had ever tried to put his hand up her skirt before, and she was petrified at the wild driving. She looked confused and alarmed; and the old Scotsman decided to see her as the little girl he had known for years. He took a ten-shilling note from his stuffed wallet, and gave it to her.
‘For when you go back to school,’ he said bluffly.
Martha almost handed it back; but was unable to partly because ten shillings was such a large sum for her, and partly because of a feeling which she described to herself as: If I refuse it, he will think it’s because of the way he tried to touch me. She thanked him politely for the lift, and he roared away over the railway track on the road to the city, singing, ‘You’re a bonny lassie …’
She had the book on the Jewish question (which she had not re-read, thinking it unnecessary to gild the already sound coinage of her opinions) under her arm. She went over to the kaffir store. Mr Cohen greeted her, and lifted the counter for her. He was a short, squat man; his hair was a close-growing, crinkling cap of black; his skin was pallid and unhealthy. He had, she thought secretly, the look of a toad, or something confined and light-shunning; and in fact he was hardly ever away from his counter; but the commercial look of the small shopkeeper was tempered in him by purpose and dignity, which was not only because of his ancient culture, but because this penniless immigrant from Central Europe had chosen such a barren place, such exile, for the sake of his brilliant sons. His eyes were black and wise and shrewd, and it was impossible not to like him. And yet Martha found him repulsive, and was guilty; it was strange that she could find the oily fatness of the Greek Socrates repulsive without any sense of guilt at all, but this question of anti-Semitism, this shrinking nerve, put her on guard against herself, so that her manner with Mr Cohen was always strained.
In the back room Martha found Solly, alone; and was pleased that the brotherly solid act could not be repeated. Besides, there was something uneasy and false in it, for there was a strong current of antagonism between the two brothers, a temperamental difficulty which expressed itself politically – Solly being a Zionist, while Joss was a Socialist. Solly was a lanky, tall youth, with a big head on a long thin neck, and big bony hands at the end of long arms; he was altogether knobbly and unintegrated, and his enormous, sombre black eyes brooded abstractedly on the world around him in a way that gave Martha a feeling of kinship to him; but this was perhaps not an altogether welcome relationship, reminding her, as it did, of her father. If she was to fight the morbid strain in herself, which was her father’s gift, then how could she admire Solly wholeheartedly, as she wished to do? On the whole, she was easier with Joss, who was short and compact and robust, with humorous direct eyes and a sarcastic practicality, as if he were always saying, ‘Well, and what’s the fuss about, it’s all quite easy!’
Solly took the book, without any sign of the hostility of the previous meeting; and no sooner had she sat down than Mrs Cohen came in with a tray. The older Cohens were strictly kosher, and the sons were lax. For years Mrs Cohen had been scrupulously sorting her crockery and cutlery, washing them herself, forbidding the native servants even to touch them; but at the table, Joss and Solly, usually deep in bitter argument, would reach for the wrong knives, and stack the plates carelessly about them, while Mrs Cohen scolded and pleaded. By now she had learned to say, ‘I’m too old to learn new ways,’ and with a sorrowful tolerance, she continued to wash and sort her things, but made no comment if her sons misused them. It was a compromise in which Martha could see no sense at all; if her own parents had been guilty of unreasonable behaviour, how irritably would she have argued with them! In Mrs Cohen, however, it merely struck her as charming. The mere sight of the plump old Jewish woman, with her fine, dark sad eyes, made her feel welcomed; and she at once accepted, enthusiastically, when she was bidden, ‘You’ll stay eat with us?’ In a few moments they were talking as if she had never absented herself from the family for two years.
Solly was leaving shortly to study medicine in Cape Town, and Mrs Cohen was urging him to live with her cousin there. But Solly wanted independence, a life of his own; and since this vital point was never mentioned, the argument went on endlessly about buses and transport and inconvenience; and it reminded Martha of her own home, where this kind of surface bickering was equally futile.
Joss came in, gave Martha an ambiguous look, and forbore to comment, in a way which made her voice rise to a jaunty brightness. He was intending to study law, but was staying at home with his parents until they could move into town, which they planned to do. The store was to be sold. This solicitude for his father and mother only struck Martha as a kind of betrayal to the older generation; she found it extraordinary; even more strange that he sided with his parents against Solly’s desire to fend for himself. He sounded more like an uncle than a brother.
They sat down to table, and Mrs Cohen asked, ‘And when are you going back to your studies, Matty? Your mother must be worrying herself.’
Martha replied awkwardly, ‘My eyes aren’t better yet,’ and lowered them towards her plate. When she raised them, she found Joss critically studying her in the way she had feared.
‘What’s wrong with them?’ he inquired bluntly. She gave an uncomfortable movement with her shoulders, as if to say, ‘Leave me alone.’ But in this family everything was discussed; and Joss said to Solly, ‘Her eyes are strained, well, well!’
Solly refused, this time, to make the alliance against her, and asked, ‘What’s it got to do with you?’
Joss raised his brows, and said, ‘Me? Nothing. She used to be such a bright girl. Pity.’
‘Leave her alone,’ said Mr Cohen unexpectedly, ‘she’s all right.’ Martha felt a rush of warmth towards him, which as usual she could not express, but dropped her eyes, and even looked sullen.
‘Of course she’s all right,’ said Joss carelessly; but there was a note in his voice …
Martha looked quickly at him, and at once interpreted his agreement as a reference to her own appearance; and this she half resented, and half welcomed. Since her incarnation as a fairly successful imitation of a magazine beauty, the Cohen boys were the first males she had tried herself against. But she had never said to herself that her careful make-up and the new green linen had been put on to impress them, and therefore she felt it as a false note that either should mention or even react to her appearance – a confusion of feeling which left her silent, and rather sulky. After the meal, Mr Cohen went back to the shop, and Mrs Cohen to her kitchen, with the mis-handled crockery; and the three young people were left together. Conversation was difficult, and soon Martha felt she should leave. But she lingered; and it was Solly who at last went out; and at once she and Joss were at ease, as she and Solly were, by themselves: it was three of them together that set up the jarring currents.
At once Joss inquired, ‘And now what’s all this about not going to university?’
The direct question, which she had never put to herself, left her silent; but he persisted. ‘You can’t hang about this dorp doing nothing.’
She said, ‘But you are at home, too.’
His look said that she must see this was no analogy; he tried not to sound bitter as he remarked, ‘My parents have no friends in the village. It’ll be different when they’re in town.’
Again she was silent, feeling apologetic for herself and for her parents. She got up and went to the bookcase, to see what was new in it; 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.’
