Martha Quest

  By now he had become shocked, and knew it. He was standing up, and his large, strongly featured face was hard, and his eyes had a look of lost illusions. He said warningly, still a little sentimental, ‘Kid, you’ll get yourself into trouble.’

  She gave a snort of scornful but agitated laughter, and demanded, ‘What sort of trouble?’

  He said, ‘I wouldn’t have believed it of you, kid, I wouldn’t have believed it.’ At the same time, the aggressive blue eyes were staring and uneasy. They were staring at her in the most perplexed way—here was a new phenomenon, it seemed; for he said slowly, ‘I like you, kid, I like you, let’s get hitched.’

  And now she stared incredulously at him, and began to laugh. She shook with helpless laughter, while he slowly reddened, and his eyes narrowed, and onto his face came a most unpleasant anger. Then he muttered something, flung himself out of the room and slammed the door.

  As soon as she heard that slam, she remembered Mrs Gunn, lying on her respectable widowed bed next door, and hoped she had not woken. She heard the stealthy creak of springs, and thought, Oh, damn him! And then, shaken with anger, scorn, and discomfort, she reminded herself (for it seemed it was necessary to do this) that she was in the right, while he was revoltingly in the wrong; while she slowly and neatly undressed, folded her clothes across a chair and got into bed. She said to herself that she would sleep the clock round, she would make up for weeks of sleeplessness.

  But she could not sleep at once. She was hot and restless and writhing with shame. She thought of Joss, and was reassured, for she was convinced that her ideas were his also. She said to herself that Perry and all the rest of them were a bunch of kids, messing about for years with every girl in the Club, saying, ‘Forgive me, kid,’ and ‘Please give me a break, kid’—and then he dared to look at her like that—and then asking her to marry him, as if—he was mad, he was crazy.

  At last she sat up, to light what must have been the fiftieth cigarette since sundown the evening before. The door opened, and the pale, apprehensive face of Mrs Gunn appeared, followed by her body.

  ‘Come in,’ said Martha, in a hard voice.

  ‘I thought I’d bring you in some tea,’ said Mrs Gunn, advancing with a brimming cup. She was looking furtively around the room—for evidence, thought Martha with angry scorn. ‘I heard voices,’ said Mrs Gunn delicately. ‘Did you have visitors?’

  ‘A young man brought me home,’ said Martha, ‘and he’s only just gone.’ Make what you like of that, she thought, staring at Mrs Gunn, who sighed, evaded her eyes, and said it looked like rain again, look at that sky! She added that Martha hadn’t been sleeping in her bed much lately, and…She glanced at Martha, who returned a calm look of defiance.

  Martha finished the tea and handed back the cup, thanking her landlady, and, saying she intended to sleep until tomorrow morning, lay down and turned her back. Mrs Gunn pulled the curtains across, shutting out the first gleams of sunlight, and murmured that she looked as if she could do with some sleep and that was a fact. She shuffled herself around the room in her loose slippers, stared at Martha’s clothes lying neatly over the chair and seemed to find comfort in them, for she said dubiously that she expected Martha could look after herself, and withdrew with the empty cup. Martha was already asleep.

  She woke to find Stella shaking her, saying gaily that she was a lazy girl, it was six in the evening, time for a drink, and afterwards they were going to the pictures. Martha grumblingly got out of bed and dressed. She did not ask who ‘they’ were; she was still thinking in terms of the group of six.

  ‘What happened with you and Perry?’ asked Stella, jealously, with a gay laugh.

  Martha laughed uncomfortably, and said they had quarrelled, to which Stella replied calmly that Perry was a great lump of a thing, anyway, and too dumb for Martha. Thus supported, Martha finally went out to the car, where Andrew and Donovan were silently waiting. Ruth, it seemed, was being kept in bed by her mamma. ‘One knows what these mammas are,’ Donovan said automatically, and gave his shrill laugh, but it was no good. They were flat and tired; it was all an anti-climax; even the vivacious Stella was daunted, and they separated early, after the pictures, irritable with each other and with themselves.

  Martha was thinking that it appeared she had quarrelled finally with Donovan, for he was cold and sarcastic with her, and Perry of course would avoid her in future.

  She went to bed determined to devote the first month of the new year to the Polytechnic; she reminded herself that in a month of really hard work she had accomplished more than many girls do in a year. Well then, it needed only determination. Determination, therefore, was what she intended to keep; and she went to the office next morning flat but calm in mind, saying to herself that the New Year’s festivities must be ignored. She would work on New Year’s Eve, she told herself, and believed she meant it.

  That same afternoon she was called to the telephone, to hear a voice she did not know. It was hesitant, and flattened, in the South African singsong manner, it was precise and formal, yet managed to leave the suggestion of something unpleasant, like a snigger. When Martha understood this was Adolph, her first impulse was to say no, she was engaged. Instead, she agreed to go out with him that evening. She put the telephone down thinking that her new regime would begin after the New Year.

  When he called for her, he had no plans for their evening, so she suggested they might go to the Mathews’s flat. He agreed, but in a way which made her ask doubtfully, ‘But you’re a friend of theirs, aren’t you?’ He shrugged, in a large fatalistic manner, and its exaggeration made her stare at him.

  ‘Why did you ring me up?’ she asked in that direct way of hers, for he looked anything but pleased with the situation; his reddish-brown eyes flickered continually towards her, while he drove in a way which suggested he was surprised to see her there. She was half offended; perhaps she had become affected, after all, by the adulation of the Sports Club men.

  ‘Why did you come and shake hands with me?’ he countered, turning those eyes full strength, very aggressively, onto her.

  ‘Shake hands—where?’ she stammered; for she was unaccountably offended that he mentioned the incident at all.

  ‘When I came to that table you were all thinking, Here comes that Jew,’ he said unpleasantly, but at the same time gave her a look which pleaded that she might deny it.

  She denied it at once, even more hotly because it was half true.

  He laughed disbelievingly, and said, ‘It was nice of you to shake hands with me like that.’

  ‘You exaggerate everything,’ she said uncomfortably. Then, when he laughed again, she said, ‘You talk as if—I mean, there are Jews at the Sports Club, aren’t there?’ For she had not noticed whether there were or not.

  ‘Oh, they tolerate me, I play for them when the rest of the band has had enough,’ he said sarcastically.

  ‘I think you’re unfair,’ she said, really offended, remembering Perry’s attitude.

  They were at the block of flats, and Dolly brought the car to a rest, holding it on the brakes, with the engine still running. ‘Well, shall we go up?’ he demanded.

  Again she was puzzled, because he was making a challenge out of it, and asked, ‘But you are a friend of theirs, surely?’

  He frowned, and then swiftly backed the car out again, saying, ‘I’ll take you down to the Knave of Clubs, Mrs Spore is a friend of mine.’

  ‘But it’s only six,’ she protested.

  ‘It’s open for me,’ he said, and it was a boast. They drove in silence along the five miles of tree-lined tarmac to the night club, a barn of a place—which had in fact been a tobacco warehouse—built against a low kopje. A black sign, ‘The Knave of Clubs’, was tied by fencing wire to the gate. The space in front of the building was filled with flowering cannas, red and yellow and orange—those fleshy, vulgar unambiguous plants whose masses of clear bright colour, showing against a building, or in a park, are as good as a sign, ‘For the Public’. Jacara
ndas, now in heavy green leaf, surrounded the garden. Inside, the brick walls had been left bare. Fine sacking was slung across the ceiling and held in place by wire, between which it bulged downwards. There was a bare wooden floor, and in one corner a large radio-gramophone.

  Martha sat on a wooden chair by a bare wooden table, while Adolph went to a door at the back, where he knocked. An elderly female head came out, pale-grey flesh around which hung pale-grey locks; and a pair of large black eyes surveyed Martha. ‘We want to dance a little,’ he said; and the woman called out, ‘Excuse me, duckie, I didn’t get the crowd out till six this morning, everyone’s mad this year, and I’m sleeping it off.’ The head disappeared, and Adolph came back with that uneasy set smile of his.

  ‘Like dancing?’ he asked.

  Martha hesitated. She did not feel easy about dancing; all she knew was that there were people with whom she could dance, and those who froze her into clumsy stiffness, and this had nothing to do with whether or not they were good dancers. ‘I can’t dance,’ she said hopefully at last; but he said, ‘I’ve watched you at the Club. You’ve got to learn to relax.’

  She laughed nervously, and fell back on the excuse that she’d never been taught.

  ‘I’ll teach you,’ he promised, smiling, while his eyes watched her closely in a way that made her feel uncomfortable. Never had a man looked at her in that way, though she had not the experience to describe, even to herself, what ‘that’ way was. She was, however, different from the young girl in earlier generations, in that she knew that everything was allowable. Now she was conscious of her body, and suppressed an impulse to close the opening of her dress, which was impossible in any case, since it was designed to stand open, showing her throat. She forced herself, then, to seem unconscious of his scrutinizing eyes, and felt the warmth of what she hoped was not a bright flush creep up over her face. He was smiling; he had noticed the blush, and was pleased; at once she made an angry movement—so angry she was surprised at herself, for what was there to be angry about? Almost at once, however, his face fell back into the uncertain smile; he unconsciously put out his hand, pleadingly, to check her movement away from him. They looked away from each other uncomfortably.

  A waiter came from the back premises, bowed over them, and said that Missus Spore had told him to come and ask what they wanted. His manner said that he resented being sent out before the proper time—no one came here before ten in the evening. He did not wear the white uniform, only a white cotton singlet and rather soiled long white trousers. But Adolph spoke to him in a friendly, almost intimate way, and asked after his family, so that the man began to smile. He took the liberal tip Adolph slid over to him, and said he could sell them a bottle of brandy, if they wanted. Adolph said yes, but he wasn’t going to pay more than in the shops, a joke which the waiter accepted as such, for he merely grinned, and soon the bottle of brandy arrived, with glasses and sandwiches.

  Martha sipped her brandy, feeling that her escort would offer her no further entertainment until it had done its work; this, as usual, made her feel resentful, and as usual she repressed it. Soon he put on a rhumba and made her dance. She felt self-conscious, dancing alone in this bare, ugly room, and with someone who was an expert. For he said he had been a professional. She knew at once that this was a man with whom she could not dance; her limbs were awkward and heavy, and the more she tried to loosen, the more she became conscious of every joint and muscle of her body.

  A tango was playing, and he was instructing her. ‘Look, your knees should be like this. Drop your shoulders like that.’

  It reminded her of Donovan, and suddenly she stopped, shook back her hair, laughed and said, ‘I’ll never make a dancer, you’d better resign yourself to it.’ Feeling, for some reason, triumphant and self-confident, she walked away from him back to the table. She was thinking that she did not like this man, and she wanted to go home.

  As this thought showed on her face, he said humbly, ‘I’m no company for you, am I?’

  The way he said it, half pleading and half sullen, struck her again. She was feeling very sorry for him, in an impatient, contemptuous way.

  ‘If the crowd at the Sports Club saw you with me they’d be annoyed,’ he offered, hoping she would contradict him.

  ‘What have the Sports Club crowd got to do with it?’

  ‘And your friend Donovan Anderson?’

  This seemed to her merely irrelevant; but she unconsciously rose to go, and he followed her, bringing the bottle of brandy.

  Again they drove silently. It was dark, the stars flashed out, the hills over which the town sprawled were defined by a deeper, intense black, and over them rose the luminous velvet black of the sky. She was frowning ahead of her; he kept glancing at her furtively.

  As he drove slowly past McGrath’s, he said, ‘You wouldn’t be seen dead with me in there, would you?’

  She replied coldly that she did not understand him; and it was true that it would not have occurred to her to be ashamed of him unless he had pointed it out; though this attitude was at bottom a sort of noblesse oblige—he had abased himself so thoroughly that she was feeling like a princess being kind to a ploughboy. She was quite unconscious of it, however; she only knew she was very sorry for him.

  ‘You seem to like being a pariah,’ she said, ironically; and now he laughed in appreciation of the irony, but at once slid back, and added aggressively that he was not ashamed of being a Jew. ‘No one suggested that you ought to be,’ she pointed out, again cold.

  Altogether, she was getting more and more angry and uncomfortable; and she walked into McGrath’s in a way which was, whether she knew it or not, defiantly calm. She waved to the people she knew, and when she saw Perry she smiled at him as if nothing had happened, receiving in return a curt nod. She found herself wondering whether if perhaps not only Perry but all the others were colder, less welcoming; she saw their eyes following not her but Adolph, who walked behind her; she dissolved in pity, and turned, protectively, so that they might walk through the room side by side, talking. But he did not hear what she said; on his face was a small, self-conscious smile; and she wanted to shake him into pride.

  When they were seated, he said, ‘I’ve played in this band.’

  She was going to reply, as if accepting information, ‘Have you?’ Then she understood, and said, with a dry smile that was already, after knowing him not more than three or four hours, like a tolerant, ironic comment, ‘Well, and why shouldn’t you?’

  Again his face was tormented by mingled sarcasm, gratitude and relief. Soon her impatience grew intolerable, and she suggested they should leave. The place was half empty, everyone was dancing up at the Club. Irrationally, she longed to be there. He said quickly, ‘You’d like to be dancing with the others, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘I could have gone if I’d wanted,’ she said, and got up from her chair, adding that she was tired and wanted to go to bed.

  She went home, and spent the evening reading. She hoped nervously that he had found her dull, and would not attempt to get in touch with her again. She even brought herself to believe this, so that she succeeded in feeling surprised when the telephone rang next day and he asked her to spend the evening with him. Because of this surprise she felt, she accepted, but in a hasty, confused way, which he complained about the moment he set eyes on her again.

  ‘Why did you sound so cold on the telephone?’

  ‘I didn’t—I didn’t mean to,’ she apologized.

  Again they went to the night club when it was still empty; and afterwards to the pictures, reversing the usual procedure; and again she said she wanted to go to bed early. By now she was in a condition of bewildered apathy; her emotions were in a turmoil. By turns she pitied him, hated him, felt protective, despised him, while all the time her imagination was at work, making him into an interesting and persecuted figure. She told herself he was intelligent, meaning simply that her image of him had this dubious, fantastic quality. She had discovered, through persistent qu
estioning, that he was a Polish Jew, that his parents had emigrated to South Africa during the gold rush, that his father had been a jeweller in Johannesburg. All this had a romantic air, she was fascinated, and tried to make him talk of it, but he answered stiffly and reluctantly. Finally, he doused the fires of her imagination, by saying, like any conventional British colonial, that he had come to this country at the earliest opportunity because it was British. He was now naturalized. Martha was thinking of the Cohen boys, she was wondering at the difference between them and this man; but by now her feelings were so deeply involved that she could not afford to think very clearly. She pitied him too much to say he was unpleasant and cowardly; she was ready to fight the world on his behalf—or at least her world.

  On the third evening of their acquaintance, she was sitting with him at McGrath’s when she understood that someone must be staring at her, because of her strong desire to turn her head. She turned it, and saw Stella and Andrew and Donovan, sitting by themselves in a corner and smiling pointedly at her. She waved and smiled; but Stella made insistent signs that she wanted to speak to her. Martha thought this was an invitation to both of them, and looked at Adolph, who, however, was watching her with a fixed and deadly smile.

  ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘She wants to speak to you.’

  Martha flushed at his tone, and promptly rose and went across to the other table, where she stood waiting by Stella’s side.

  ‘You’re a naughty girl,’ began Donovan. ‘You just have to be different, don’t you, Matty dear?’

  ‘Different about what?’ she said coldly, and turned pointedly away from him, looking at Stella. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘You shouldn’t be here with Dolly,’ said Stella, in that discreet womanly voice of hers, which was several tones lower than her usual one.