Martha Quest

  And it was the future they spoke of; for she found he was as dissatisfied as herself with the present. He wanted to go to England, he said; he had plans, too, to live in the South of France and become a wine farmer. That would be the life; one could live cheaply and be free, and his father had been a farmer: he wanted to get back to the soil.

  She urged him to describe these plans in more detail, but since they were still hazy, she made them for him. He must borrow a little money, enough to get over there—fifty pounds would be enough, living was so cheap in France, everyone said, all one had to do was to get there, and then life would begin.

  It was midnight when he said he must leave; which he did reluctantly. A serious, responsible young man, he seemed to Martha, with his warm and approving blue eyes, and that touch of hesitation in his speech, which made everything he said so deliberate, so considered.

  Martha told herself fiercely that he was a man, at least, and not a silly little boy. And so intelligent too! She slept that night deeply and dreamlessly, for the first time in weeks; she did not start up, half a dozen times, with the feeling that there was something she ought to be doing, if she only knew what it was; she woke on a delicious wave of anticipation, the day beckoning to her like a promise. But she did not say she was in love. For of course she was going to have a career. Besides, when she said, ‘He’s a man, at least,’ that ‘at least’ was by no means rhetorical. She was still capable of being critical. For several days they were together all their leisure time, and she looked surreptitiously at him, with a feeling of disloyalty, and the round, rather low forehead struck her unpleasantly—there was something mean about it, something commonplace; the shallow dry lines across it affected her; as for his hands, they were large and clumsy, rather red, heavily freckled, and covered with hair. Soon she averted her eyes from his hands, she did not see them; she did not see his forehead, with those unaccountably unpleasant lines, like the lines of worry on an elderly face. She saw his eyes, the approving and warm blue eyes. She had never known this easy warm friendliness with anyone before; she could say what she liked; she felt altogether approved, and she expanded in it delightedly, and her manner lost its half-timid aggressiveness.

  Also, he was so sensible! When she told him, making a funny story of it, how she had nearly gone to England as a nursemaid, he listened, seriously, and said she should not go to England without being sure of something to go to; and that it was ‘ill-advised’ to become a chauffeur, because the job had no prospects, while at her remark that she thought of becoming a freelance writer, he produced all kinds of practical objections, the least of which was the question of talent, for it seemed he had once had the same notion himself, had ‘gone into the question from every angle,’ in fact. He found a folder packed with sketches she had made of the wardrobe, the flowers in the garden, and evolved a most sensible plan. She should take a course in commercial art at the Polytechnic, and then she would be equipped to move from country to country as she liked. And Martha caught at this with enthusiasm, the idea gripped her completely for a couple of evenings. Then she began to condemn herself bitterly, as usual, for indecision; a creeping reluctance came over her at the mere idea of two or three years’ serious study. But what she was thinking involuntarily was, What’s the use of it?—meaning the war. ‘Two years?’ she murmured, looking at him evasively. That knowledge of urgency was in her, stronger than ever. Unconsciously, the coming war was there, before her, like a dark chasm in her spirit. And when he said, ‘Well, two years isn’t long,’ she laughed suddenly, and the maternal note was back in her voice, so that they both felt uncomfortable. It was a discord in their relationship. And they continued to talk, like two children at college, about growing grapes in France, or going to America, delightedly planning half a dozen different careers at once.

  And this continued for what seemed to be a long time, though it was not much more than a week. And then one evening they had returned from the pictures, and were walking slowly towards his room under the long canopies of heavy leafage, and she was telling him, for some reason, about Perry, and how he had flung out of her room ‘in a rage’, as she explained laughing. Douglas exclaimed, ‘You really are rather-rather a fine…’ and kissed her. This was no romantic kiss, but more a friendly and companionable one; they clung together, and what she was most conscious of was the warmth of his arm against her back. And then she was flung into dismay because he broke away with a sigh, and muttered, frowning, ‘I shouldn’t…’ He walked on a few steps, and the boyish face was troubled, his eyes clouded.

  ‘Why ever not?’ she demanded, laughing, running up to overtake him, for now she felt that of course, since he had kissed her, he had in some way claimed her, and they would make love.

  He looked embarrassed, so that she gave an uncomfortable laugh. She was offended.

  ‘I—well—I…’ He looked away, his face clenched in indecision; then he again turned to her, and kissed her, muttering, ‘Oh, to hell with it, let them all go to hell.’ She hardly heard this; she was now possessed by a fierce determination not to be deprived of what was her right. He had kissed her, that was enough.

  They reached his room locked together, their steps lagging, and he did not switch on the light. He took her to the bed, and they lay on it. He began to kiss her, caressing her arms and her breasts with a hard and trembling hand. She was ready to abandon herself, but he continued to kiss her, murmuring how beautiful she was. Then he smoothed her skirt up to her knee, and stroked her legs, saying over and over again, in a voice troubled by something that sounded like grief, that her legs were so lovely, she was so lovely. Her drowning brain steadied, for she was being forced back to consciousness. She saw herself lying there half exposed on the bed; and half resentfully, half wearily partook, as he was demanding of her, in the feast of her own beauty. Yes, her legs were beautiful; yes, she felt with delight (as if her own hands were moulding them), her arms were beautiful. Yes, but this is not what I want, she thought confusedly; she was resenting, most passionately, without knowing that she resented it, his self-absorbed adoration of her, and the way he insisted, Look at yourself, aren’t you beautiful? Then he raised himself and pulled back the curtains. Immediately, the trees in the street outside lifted themselves in the moonlight, moonlight and yellow street light fell over the bed in an unreal flood of glamour, and in this weird light her bronze legs, her tumbled skirt, her loosely lying brown arms, lay like a statue’s. He pulled aside her dress, and fell in an ecstasy of humble adoration on her breasts, cupping them in his hands and explaining how they were so sweet. During this rite, she remained passive, offering herself to his adoration; she was quite excluded; she was conscious of every line and curve of her own body, as if she were scrutinizing it with his eyes. And for hours, or so it seemed, he kissed and adored, pressing his body humbly against her and withdrawing it, and she waited for him to sate his visual passion and allow her to forget the weight of her limbs, her body, felt as something heavy and white and cold, separate from herself. At last, her spirit cold and hostile, she said she must go home, and sat up brusquely, jumping off the bed. He came to her and helped her button up her dress, still self-absorbed in his fervent rite of adoration.

  ‘How sad-sad to shut them away,’ he said, closing the material over her breasts, and she felt as if they were burying a corpse. She thought angrily, Them—just as if they had nothing to do with me! Yet as she crossed in front of a mirror, she glanced in, from habit, and straightened herself, so that the lines of her body might approximate to those laid down by the idea of what is desirable. She settled her shoulders, so that her breasts, they, should stand out; and, with a rather impatient movement, she walked away from Douglas, who followed her meekly. But when they reached the gate and were ready to walk down the road, some kind of guilt, like a tenderness, made her slide obediently into the curve of his arm.

  The moon stood high and cold, above a flood of stars, the trees glittered off a greenish light, the street shone like white sand. Suddenly
she heard him say, in a different, half-sniggering voice, which struck her apprehensive with shock, ‘I-I can’t-can’t walk.’ He gave her a guilty, aggressive glance, and laughed. ‘Never-never mind,’ he said, still laughing suggestively. ‘But that-that was rather-rather a strain.’

  She did not understand him. She looked at him, bewildered. Also, she was disgusted and impatient. Her own body was aching, even her shoulders ached, and her breasts felt arrogant and chilled. But she was bound to love him, that claim had been laid on her. Yet she resented him so terribly, at that moment, she could not look at him. She was remembering Perry. She was wishing that men were not like this. She did not know, clearly, what she wished; all she knew was that she ached, body and spirit, and hated him. She walked silently down the moonlit street, looking ahead of her.

  He said unexpectedly, without stammering, ‘I ought to tell you that I’m engaged to a girl in England.’

  Martha stared at him. She thought scornfully, How conventional. She despised him even more. She shrugged, as if to say, ‘What of it?’ The girl in England seemed remote, quite irrelevant. At the same time, she felt all at once deprived and lost and unhappy, a flood of unhappiness came into her, so that, watching it from outside, as it were, she said irritably of herself, What’s the sense of that?

  To him she said sarcastically, ‘I suppose now you think everything’s all right, you can say to her quite truthfully that you’ve been faithful.’

  He laughed uncomfortably, pressed her arm to his side with a quick, nervous squeeze, and said, ‘No—no, I didn’t think, I was waiting all the time for you…’

  ‘Waiting?’ she asked, again at sea. Then she shrugged again. She said to herself, Oh, to hell with him. What she meant was, To hell with men.

  When they reached her home, she nervously said good night, and turned to go in. But her coldness troubled him; he stopped her, holding her irresolutely for a moment. Then he said inarticulately again, ‘Oh, to hell with it,’ and came in with her.

  She thought, amazed, Surely he’s not going to make love to me now? For it seemed quite outrageous, even insulting, that he should. The moment had passed. But he did. She acknowledged to herself that this was quite different, not at all the same thing as with Adolph. Then she suppressed the disloyal thought. Afterwards he remarked, with a proud, shy laugh, ‘You’re the first girl I’ve made love to.’

  ‘What?’ she exclaimed indignantly. She felt furious. She suppressed that too.

  ‘Well, there was a prostitute in Cape Town, but I was drunk and…’

  The prostitute seemed neither here nor there. ‘How old are you?’ she asked bluntly.

  ‘Thirty.’

  She digested this information silently. She was shocked. But it was not so easy to be shocked, for that claim on her was so strong. She stroked his head, acknowledging the claim, and thought uneasily that he had been messing about with the Sports Club girls for years. It was so unpleasant, she immediately forgot the fact. Then, like a ribald and mocking spirit housed somewhere disconcertingly within her, the thought arose: Gallantly preserving himself for the right girl! How touching! How disgusting! She tried to shut a lid on this disconcerting spirit, and succeeded, but not before it had said derisively, in a pious voice, Keeping himself clean for his wife. She turned towards him, and began caressing his head and hair in a passion of tenderness.

  After a while she told him about Adolph. Now, this was no confession, but a statement of fact. And whatever Douglas might naturally have been inclined to do, such as forgive her, for instance, was put on one side, for if one has a relationship with a girl based on an assumption that one is in all things free and unprejudiced, and she remarks, taking it for granted that it has nothing to do with you, that she is not chaste, and it is to her a matter of no importance one way or the other, then a man can hardly do otherwise than conform. Douglas accepted the statement, in the spirit in which it was offered. Soon he was comforting her; Martha was sitting up in bed, her voice wrung with anguish, saying, ‘I can’t understand how I behaved so terribly, I can’t bear to think of it.’ He understood she did not mean sleeping with Adolph, she was ashamed because of something else. He comforted her, though it was not clear to him what it was all about. Finally he said, ‘Well, I know old Stella, she’s a good sort, she’s a good kid, she meant well.’ Martha did not reply, she withdrew from him into that glacial region where it seemed he was hardly worth criticizing. Soon he kissed her, and went home.

  In the morning Mrs Gunn was acidly correct, but Martha no longer cared about Mrs Gunn. She was extremely depressed.

  After work that day, Douglas waited for her, and took her to his room at once, saying that it was necessary for them to discuss a certain matter. She had not seen the room by daylight. It was quite large, an ordinary furnished room, with cretonne-covered chairs, a cretonne-covered daybed, coconut matting on the red cement floor. There was a writing table against one wall, however, and this was piled with ledgers and files from the office. She admired this, her respect for him was instantly restored. She was seeing him again as a sober, responsible man to whom she could defer.

  He remarked nervously that he was in a hell of a fix. He moved around the room, stopping for a moment at the window, staring out of it, returning to the desk to finger a ledger or pick up a ruler. Martha watched him move, and what she felt was, This won’t last long. She meant that her will was set hard on his saying he would give up the girl in England. It was remarkable that it had never entered her head to feel guilty about the girl in England; no, Martha was in the right, the other girl was the interloper. If someone had asked her, just then, if she wanted to marry Douglas, she would have exclaimed in horror that she would rather die. But she sat there quietly, her face troubled and her eyes thoughtful, and at the same time every line of her body expressed quiet, set determination.

  As for Douglas, he looked altogether like a rather worried boy. He wore an old pair of flannel trousers, a white shirt rolled up at the sleeves and open at the neck. There was a fresh cleanliness about him. Martha was already feeling maternal. She sat and waited.

  He began to talk, in an absorbed troubled way. He was talking to himself, trying to present the problem to himself, as it were, with Martha as passive audience. He said he had met the girl in Cape Town. She had been on holiday there with her aunt. ‘Come out to get herself a husband in the colonies,’ Martha thought scornfully. He had taken her out several times. Then his leave was finished, and she returned to England, and he to his home town. Then, afterwards, he had written to England, asking her to marry him.

  ‘You mean you wrote—you got engaged by post?’ asked Martha in a scandalized voice.

  ‘Yes. Yes. She was ever such a find. She was such a sweet.’ He half stammered looking as bewildered as she. ‘I told her,’ he added, suddenly quite firm, and speaking without a suggestion of hesitation, ‘that we could not marry yet, I can’t afford it, we must wait two or three years.’

  She was silent. Again she was wondering why he was so poor. She asked hesitantly, not wanting to ‘interfere’, ‘Why are you—I mean, why couldn’t you marry?’

  ‘Well, the Sports Club racket is a helluva expense. You can’t save money if you’re in the Club much.’

  ‘Do you owe money?’

  ‘No, I don’t owe-owe money. But I thought, if I was going to marry, I ought to offer her a proper home.’ This last was said as if quoted.

  She shrugged, dismissing the question of money. She felt there was some kind of discrepancy, but could not be bothered to think it over. What does money matter? she thought dimly.

  He came to her helplessly, saying appealingly, ‘I don’t-don’t know, Matty.’

  She comforted him. Soon they made love. Physically it was a fiasco, which only made her more tender. By the end of the evening, it was decided they would marry. When she went home, she walked with calm angry contempt into the back veranda, informed a silent and critical Mrs Gunn that she was going to get married, and turned on her heel a
nd went out before there could be any reply. She then sat down and wrote to her parents that she was marrying ‘a man in the civil service’, that they would be married in ten days, and she would bring him out to the farm ‘for inspection’ the following weekend. ‘It went without saying’ that they would marry at a register office.

  On the following morning she woke in a panic. She told herself she was mad, or rather, had been, for now she was quite sane. She did not want to marry Douglas, she did not want to marry at all. With a cold, disparaging eye, she looked at the image of Douglas and shuddered. She told herself that she would ring him from the office and tell him they had both made a terrible mistake. Calm descended on her, and she went to the office, spiritually free once again. In this mood she walked into the office, and was greeted by congratulations.

  ‘But how do you know?’ she asked, annoyed; although warmth was already rising in her, in answer to the spontaneous pleasure on every face.

  It appeared Maisie had telephoned Mrs Buss from the office where she now worked.

  ‘But how did Maisie know?’ inquired a completely bewildered Martha.

  ‘She said your—your fiancé was up at the Club last night, he was giving it a real bang, he’s off the tack again.’

  Martha nodded, and began taking the cover off her typewriter, to give herself time. Douglas had taken her home at midnight. He had then gone up to the Club? She could imagine the scene only too vividly; and disgust and anger, heightened by a sickly, unwelcome excitement, began plucking at her nerves.

  The telephone rang for Martha. It was Maisie, being calmly, amusedly informative. Having congratulated Martha on ‘hooking Douggie—no one ever thought Douggie’d get hooked,’ she went on to say that the wolves had practically wrecked the town, they’d torn up the whole place. There was a chamber-pot on the statue of Cecil Rhodes that morning, and all the lamp-posts were slashed with red paint. Perry, Binkie and Douglas had spent the hours between four and seven not in a prison cell, which was hardly fitting for people of their standing, but drinking brandy with the policeman on duty at the charge office. They had been fined ten shillings each and presumably were now back administering the affairs of the nation.