Martha Quest

  In the afternoon, she was standing by the door, with the thermometer in her mouth, when she saw herself from outside, and at the same time remembered her father, medicine bottles stacked in hundreds by his bed—her father, whose image persistently composed itself in her mind as a worried, inward-looking man, standing moodily at a window but seeing nothing out of it, holding one wrist between the fingers of his other hand, to measure his pulse. The thought frightened her; she whipped out the thermometer, and stood hestitating, thinking, I’ll throw the thing away. She glanced at the silver thread, for she might as well have a look at it first, and then it slipped from her hand and broke. Before it fell, she had seen that it stood at a hundred. Well, she had a temperature, she was justified. Soberly, she swept up the glass, and said consolingly that she would never buy another thermometer, she would not fuss over her health. But it was a relief, nevertheless, to be slightly ill, to be able to go to bed.

  To bed she did not go. She put on a dressing-gown, arranged books, and prepared for a few days’ retreat from the world.

  A few days: looking back on that period of her life afterwards, what she felt was wistful envy of the self she had been; she envied her lost capacity for making the most of time—that was how she put it, as if time were a kind of glass measure which one could fill or not.

  She had left the farm a few weeks before; but put like that it was nonsense. Those few weeks seemed endless, one could not think of time—which is an affair of seconds, hours, days—in connection with it. It seemed she had been in town for years—no, that was another term for the divisions of the clock. What she had experienced since she got that momentous letter from Joss, which had released her from her imprisonment like the kiss of the prince in the fairy tales, was something quite different from the slow, measured years she had spent on the farm.

  She thought of farm time, that strict measuring rod, where life was kept properly defined—for there could be no nonsense when the seasons were used as boundaries. On the farm, it was January, she told herself, it was in the middle of the rainy season. After the rainy season came the dry season; and after that, again, the rains. But when she came to think of it, it was not so simple. What of the season of veld fires, which had a climate of its own: lowering, smoky horizons, the yellow thickness of the middle air, the black wastes of veld? It was an extra season inserted into the natural year. What of October, that ambiguous month, the month of tension, the unendurable month? Again, it was neither dry season nor wet for how can a month be called dry that is spent, minute by dragging minute, thinking of the approaching inevitable rain, watching a sky banked with clouds which must break, break soon? October was another season that was given, offered free, as it were, to vary a climate which is thought of as ‘dry season, wet season’. And so the rains break at last, if not in October, then in November, or even, when it comes to the worst, in December; the word ‘October’ does as well as any other to fix the terrible beckoning period of tension which comes in every year, comes inevitably; one cannot have the breaking of the rains without the time of preparation and agonizing waiting to which one gives the name ‘October’. And the word ‘October’ gave off to Martha (her birthday was in that month) a faint marshlight from another world, that seemingly real but illusionary gleam from literature: overseas, October was the closing of the year, in a final blaze of cold-scorched foliage followed by the ritual lighting of the fire on the hearth. No, it was not easy at all, to moor oneself safely, with the words that meant one thing only, to use names like lighthouses; these rocks shifted, as if they too floated treacherously on water.

  But now it was January. Christmas was over. Martha stood at her doorway behind a rather soiled lace curtain, and looked at the street. It was hot and wet. The puddles in the garden never had time to dry—to sink into the earth or lose themselves in the air. The sky sweltered with water; several times a day the clouds drove incontinently over the town, everything grew dark for a few minutes in a sudden grey drench of rain, and then the sun was exposed again, and the tarmac rocked off its waves of wet heat, the trees in the park quivered through waves of rising moisture. January, January in the town.

  On the farm, everything was vivid, a violent green, while the earth was a blaring red. The sky from Jacob’s Burg to the Oxford Range, from the Dumfries Hills away back, over the unbounded north, was a deep, soft hall of blue; and the clouds wheeled and deployed and marched day and night, flinging down hail, storming down rain, rolling and rocking to an orchestra of thunder, while the lightning danced about the thunderheads and quivered over the mountains. On the farm, the bush on the hill where the house stood was so soaked and lush that walking through it meant red mud to the ankles, and saturated branches springing loads of sparkling water at every step. On the farm, the cattle were grazing with nervous haste on the short, thick grass, which they knew would be tough and wiry in so short a time. For this was the season when it was impossible to remember the burning drought of the long dry season. The veld was like those blackened brittle sticks one picks off a rock on a kopje, apparently dead and ready to rot, which one places into water, only to find an hour later, that this lifeless twig has burst into crisp, vivid little leaves. In January, the drought-ridden, fire tortured veld was as teeming and steamy and febrile as a jungle. In the rotting trunks of trees the infant mosquitoes wriggled like miniature dragons; one might find the energetic creatures in the hollow of a big leaf, or in the imprint of a cow’s foot or the tangled wetness of a low-growing clump of grass.

  Last January, Martha’s eyes (fixed as usual on some image of herself in an urban setting—a college girl in Cape Town, perhaps?) were caught by a slow squirm on a branch which she was just about to allow to splash, like a sponge, across her already drenched head, and she saw, as if the deep-green substance of the leafage had taken on another form, two enormous green caterpillars, about seven inches long, the thickness of a wrist; pale green they were, a sickly intense green, smooth as skin, and their silky-paper surfaces were stretched to bursting as if the violence of this pulsating month was growing in them so fast (Martha could see the almost liquid substance swimming inside the frail tight skin) that they might burst asunder with the pressure of their growth before they could turn themselves, as was right and proper, into dry cases, like bits of stick, and so into butterflies or moths. They were loathsome, disgusting; Martha felt sick as she looked at these fat and seething creatures rolling clumsily on their light fronds of leaves, blind, silent, their heads indicated only by two small horns, mere bumpish projections of the greenish skin, like pimples—they were repulsive, but she was exhilarated. She went home singing.

  One might imagine I was homesick! she said to herself dryly; for she could not return to the farm again, not if it were the last thing she did. And yet, for the moment, it seemed she could not face the town either, for here she was, shut in her room with a dubious illness that could be described by courtesy as malaria. Why not? She had had malaria as a child, and everyone knew that ‘once it was in your blood…’ She had a ‘touch’ of malaria, then—as one might speak of a ‘touch’ of the sun—and she was not homesick. Everything was satisfactory, for she was telling herself that her experience with Adolph could be justified as such; one is not an honorary member of the youth of the 1920s without knowing that one is entitled to experience, if to nothing else. And it was true she was not ashamed of the affair with Adolph; she was ashamed—to that point where one bursts into inarticulate exclamations of disgust, alone in one’s room, one’s face burning—because of that scene with Stella. She told herself that never, not on any account, would she go near the Mathews’s flat again.

  On the third day of her retirement, she received a large and expensive bunch of flowers from Stella and Andrew, with a gay note saying that they had telephoned the office and heard she was ill. Martha was warmed by this kindness, but no sooner had she become conscious of the flush of gratitude through her veins than she remarked to herself irritably, in the old way, Nonsense, what is kindness
then? She just does as comes easiest, and then…

  She wrote a little note to Mr Jasper Cohen, in the humorous vein she knew she should not use, because it pleaded special privilege; for she needed a doctor’s certificate to stay at home any longer.

  Then she returned to resume that other journey of discovery which alternated with the discoveries of a young woman loose in town: she returned to her books. She was reading her way slowly and vaguely from book to book, on no better system than that one author might mention another, or that a name appeared in a publisher’s spring list. She was like a bird flitting from branch to darkening branch of an immense tree; but the tree rose as if it had no trunk, from a mist. She read as if this were a process discovered by herself; as if there had never been a guide to it. She read like a bird collecting twigs for a nest. She picked up each new book, using the author’s name as a sanction, as if the book were something separate and self-contained, a world in itself. And as she read she asked herself, What has this got to do with me? Mostly, she rejected; what she accepted she took instinctively, for it rang true with some tuning fork or guide within her; and the measure was that experience (she thought of it as one, though it was the fusion of many, varying in intensity) which was the gift of her solitary childhood on the veld: that knowledge of something painful and ecstatic, something central and fixed, but flowing. It was a sense of movement, of separate things interacting and finally becoming one, but greater—it was this which was her lodestone, even her conscience; and so, when she put down this book, that author, it was with the simplicity of perfect certainty, like the certainties of ignorance: It isn’t true. And so these authors, these philosophers who had fed and maintained (or so she understood) so many earlier generations, were discarded with the ease with which she had shed religion: they wouldn’t do, or not for her.

  In the meantime, she continued with the process of taking a fragment here and a sentence there, and built them into her mind, which was now the most extraordinary structure of disconnected bits of poetry, prose, fact and fancy; so that when she claimed casually that she had read Schopenhauer, or Nietzsche, what she meant was that she had deepened her conviction of creative fatality. She had in fact not read either of them, or any other author, if reading means to take from an author what he intends to convey.

  Those ‘few days’ were one of those periods which recurred in her life when she read like a famished person, cramming into the shortest possible time a truly remarkable quantity of vicarious experience. She emerged from it on Sunday evening, restless with energy, knowing she must go back to work the following day. It was almost February; already a month had gone from the new year. She must go back and work at the Polytechnic, she must fulfil all her good resolutions, so that by the end of the year she would be embarked properly on a career and know where she was going.

  The two authors she brought with her from that period of reading were Whitman and Thoreau—but then, she had been reading them for years, as some people read the Bible. She clung to these poets of sleep, and death and the heart—or so she saw them; and it did not occur to her to ask, not until long afterwards, how it was that she, not more than a few weeks in time from the farm, hardly separated from it in space (since this little town was so lightly scratched on the surface of the soil that one could see the veld by lifting one’s eyes and looking down to the end of the street, while the veld grasses sprung vigorously along the pavements)—why it was that she read these poets as if they were a confirmation of some kind of exile?

  When she returned to the office, she found that Mr Jasper Cohen had gone abruptly on holiday. His son had been killed in Spain—he had been shot, near Madrid, rather more than a year before; a friend of his had written, on returning safe to England, to tell his father so.

  The office was concerned not so much over the death of a hero as over the new regime; for Mr Max Cohen, now in charge, had dismissed three girls, one of whom was Maisie. Mr Max Cohen and young Mr Robinson allowed it to be seen how much they did not approve of Mr Jasper’s methods. Martha was interviewed and asked perfunctorily after her health (and she looked extremely well) and told that ‘we’ were so pleased that she was persevering at the Polytechnic, because the office could no longer afford unqualified girls.

  Maisie, placidly under sentence of dismissal, had already found herself another job, at an insurance office; she told Martha that she had taken four days off herself, for the Christmas season had nearly killed her—she had slept for three days without stopping. She manicured her nails, dreamily attended to the filing, and smiled with the pleasantest good nature at Mr Robinson and Mr Max, who were even more annoyed because she seemed not to regard being dismissed as a disgrace. The other two girls had left already, in a fit of outraged amour propre, and were employed elsewhere.

  ‘Wait till our Mr Cohen comes back,’ said Maisie calmly. ‘They’ll catch it. Nothing but slave drivers.’ But it was unlikely that Mr Jasper would be back for some months. It was not only the shock of his son’s death; his wife—or so said rumour—was going to divorce him, for she felt that it was all her husband’s fault that Abraham had been killed, and the office appeared to agree with her.

  Mrs Buss said with mournful satisfaction that if you were going to mix yourself up with the Reds, then you got what you asked for; she couldn’t understand Mr Cohen allowing Abraham to get mixed up with that bunch. Martha had her first political argument in the office; she pointed out hotly that it was not the republicans who were the rebels, but Franco. She was well armed with facts from the New Statesman. She was even better armed by the conviction of being in the right, but what is the use of being right if one is faced by the blank, unaltered stare of satisfied ignorance? Martha was so new to the game that she was surprised by Mrs Buss’s calm remark, ‘Oh, well, everyone’s entitled to their ideas.’ She said it was not a question of ideas, but one of fact. Mrs Buss said tartly that in any case everyone knew what Communists were. Martha said the Government in Spain was not Communist, but Liberal. Mrs Buss looked blank for a moment, and then said that was what she had said all the time, the Government was Liberal, so why did Abraham have to go and fight it? Martha was confused; then she understood, and said that Mrs Buss was making a mistake, Franco had never been elected, but…. Mrs Buss listened, frowning doubtfully, while her hands rested on her keys, her bright little face looking stubborn. She repeated, with a toss of her head, that she was entitled to her opinions, and added that politics bored her, anyway, and at once rattled on with her work, to stop Martha arguing. Martha was furious, chiefly because Mrs Buss not only was inconsistent but didn’t mind being inconsistent.

  After work, she walked down to the Polytechnic, still angry, and very grieved for Mr Cohen, that kind gentleman whose only son was dead, and his wife on the point of leaving him. She decided that she would borrow some money from somewhere and go to Cape Town: if only she could speak to Joss, he would know at once what it was she ought to do! Finally she steeled herself to take shorthand, and tried to concentrate while Mr Skye dictated a long piece about the prices of cotton waste. She gave up the attempt rather early, and left the Polytechnic, to find Donovan waiting for her in his little car. He said graciously that he would take her to the Sports Club, where there was a dance. Martha said that she did not feel like dancing, half hoping that he would take this as a snub. But no, he seemed relieved, and said that in that case they would go and watch the others dancing, he much preferred watching, for dancing was an overrated amusement. Martha understood that she was provisionally forgiven. She was, however, in no mood to feel penitent.

  On the way through the darkening streets, he asked in a falsely casual voice, ‘And so now you know all about the facts of life, you naughty girl, and I suppose you are pleased with yourself.’

  Martha felt that he wanted to talk about the details of the affair; she felt repelled, and said sulkily that Stella had behaved disgracefully, and that he, Donovan, was a hypocrite. He was almost angry, but decided against it: after a quick look,
he laughed, and said that she did not deserve a good friend like Stella. To this Martha maintained a strong dissenting silence, and looked out of the window. She felt she should not have agreed to go to the Sports Club. On the other hand, there would have been something childish in refusing.

  They reached the Club without having exchanged another word. The big room was cleared for the dance, but everyone was either down at McGrath’s, having dinner, or in the bar. Donovan said they might as well fill themselves on sundowner snacks, there would be sandwiches later on, if they got hungry. Martha indifferently agreed. They sat in moody silence on the veranda, drinking brandy.

  Soon a group of men came from the bar and joined them, greeting Martha with stereotyped emotion. She realized that she had fallen from grace, but not disgraced, no, from this circle one could hardly be cast out; it depended on her to redeem herself, for her mere presence here was as good as a sign of penitence. She listened to their talk, and was astonished to find them discussing war. Not the Spanish war, nor the Chinese war, nor Mussolini’s adventure in Abyssinia—these wars had had no existence, in this place. They were saying, devoutly, that things looked like trouble; they did not define this, for it meant what it would have meant to Mr Quest—they would shortly be expected to defend the honour of Britain in some way or another. It would have been difficult for them to define it in any case; they never read anything but the newspapers, and the newspapers were still placating Hitler, while the word ‘Russia’ was not so much the name of an enemy to be fought immediately (though of course it would be, one day) as it was a synonym for evil.