A Ripple From the Storm

  ‘Missus wants to see you very bad, missus,’ said this young man, in the intimate easy way of a contented servant in a good feudal household.

  ‘Who is it, Mutisi?’

  ‘Mrs Maynard, missus.’

  ‘Please tell her that I shall come as soon as I can, but that I might be kept a few minutes.’

  Mrs Van entered her husband’s study after knocking and receiving permission to enter.

  Mr Van der Bylt was one of the town’s half-dozen barristers. A lean, grey-haired, dryly humorous gentleman of precise vocabulary, he was as well known in his way as his wife was in hers. He was associated with the type of case which in a small town is followed by the more humble citizens like a protracted sports contest, but with a delighted, tongue-in-cheek malice. He was expert in company law, mining law, land rights: expert, that is, in everything to do with the conflicts of property, but on the highest possible level. He had never, except very early in his career, taken on cases which concerned murder, robbery, violence, or debt. The conflicts of human passion bored him; the expression on his face when as a young lawyer he had unwillingly become involved in them suggested a faintly tolerant distaste. But when a couple of large mining companies disputed, or one newspaper group grappled with another, or a chain store competed for the soul of a town with its rival, then he was at his ease. On such occasions he would shut himself in his study for weeks at a time, studying the refinements of the law like a chess-player. The busy lawyers who briefed him for such cases did so with relief, for it was not necessary to do the usual spadework of preparation when he was Counsel for defence or prosecution. Nobody understood why a man who was by temperament a lawyer took silk except his wife, who knew it was because as a lawyer he would not have been able to avoid involving himself in those other, lower, sordid cases of emotion and crime. When Mrs Van had first understood this, very early in their marriage, her eyes had been used to rest on him not in irony, for this she would never have allowed herself, but with a certain quality of calm quizzical appraisal.

  Yet interestingly enough, for the white citizenry of the town Mr Van played the same role in his field as she did in hers. This nation of petty bourgeoisie were all able to defend and explain in its manifold branches and guises the theory which is expressed in popular language by the phrases: ‘If a man has anything in him he can make good,’ ‘A man must rely on himself,’ ‘A man must have initiative.’ They hated ‘big business’ more than the devil or even the blacks of the Colony. They hated cartels, trusts, combines, and syndicates, hated above all ‘the company’ which had once governed this territory, been officially dispossessed by the Legislative Assemblies, but which had, so to speak, gone underground, transmogrifying itself in a hundred different names and shapes. Therefore, when Mr Van’s name appeared in the pages of the News day after day for weeks, during the course of some battle between giants, those independence-loving citizens felt that his dry cold phrases in some way expressed their hatred of finance capital, their delight when ‘the dirty work at the top’ was exposed to them. Nothing would have surprised Mr Van more than this view of himself, for he would have scorned to take his stand on anything more than a point of the law.

  Recently, however, he had accepted a case quite out of his usual run. Two small Afrikaans farmers from ?—had been feuding for years over some boundary fence. A hundred yards of ground was in question. Their hatred for each other had reached a pitch which one had started a veld fire inside the other’s fence (he claimed it was his land and he had a right to burn it) and destroyed not only his rival’s but his own grazing for the season. Mr Van had plunged into this case with a salty relish quite foreign to him. He was a member of a younger branch of an old and respected Cape family, a family which drew its strength from the soil even now. During these weeks Mrs Van had been tending her husband with a new and even gay appreciation. Mr Van did not understand the reason for it; it disquieted him.

  He was a man who needed a great deal of attention from his wife. In his home he remained in his study, wearing an old dressing-gown and slippers, and continually summoned his wife to play cards with him, to read to him, or arrange his cushions and find his books. He was, it was understood, an invalid.

  On this evening the telephone had been ringing for over an hour from the News. He had repeated a dozen times that his wife’s business was not his, and he knew nothing that could be of any interest to the newspapers. Now, when Mrs Van had found his spectacles, he said to her: ‘Well, my dear, have you had a satisfactory afternoon?’ and the dry and courteous voice familiar to the city’s courts sounded like the creak of a closing door.

  She said: ‘I think quite satisfactory on the whole.’ She sat in a stiff chair, holding her back rigid. For some months she had been suffering from a pain in her back. She was overworking, she thought. Later ‘when things were not so busy’ she would rest. By this she meant, when the political crisis was over: in her own way, Mrs Van suffered from the prevalent mood of apocalyptism. Things were so bad, she thought, ‘the native problem’ so acute, there were so many unhappy people, that the situation could not possibly continue. Common sense must prevail, and then she could rest. Meanwhile she waited opposite her husband, conscious that Mrs Maynard, two rooms away, was fretting for her arrival. But it had been understood from the beginning of this marriage that Mrs Van’s duties were first to her children, then to her husband, and finally to her work. Mrs Maynard must wait.

  Mr Van der Bylt was this evening preparing a complicated transfer of shares from a gold mine to a copper mine. The controlling interest in both mines was owned by the same company which under another name was part of the complex of capital in a major group on the Rand. The transfer was being disputed, but almost humorously (or at least, that is how Mr Van saw it), for the party who objected to the transfer was, in another guise, the party who wanted it. In short, this was one of the shadowy and ambiguous negotiations in which Mr Van took so much pleasure, and he was looking forward to an evening of law-chopping. But the telephone had been ringing for an hour; he knew that there was going to be yet another newspaper fuss in which his name would be prominent. His wife sat before him talking about some meeting or other, her eyes resting on him, indeed, but warm with remembered political passion.

  The relations between this couple were, as the phrase goes, very well adjusted, and though Mr Van was in the habit of remarking: ‘Marriage is a question of compromise,’ while Mrs Van marked her agreement with him by a calm but emphatic nod, this state of affairs was due to decisions taken by her, and a very long time ago.

  There had been two great illuminations in this woman’s life. The first, when she was a girl of eighteen, already engaged to the promising young solicitor who was the son of a friend of her father’s, she had been taken to England and to Switzerland by her aunt in order to broaden her mind. Like her future husband she was a member of an old Cape family, solid comfort behind and around her, brought up in a small sleepy South African village which was the centre of a fruit-farming district. Her aunt was a decent capable woman who was fond of saying to her niece: ‘You must remember, my dear, that over in Europe they have no idea at all about our problems with the Kaffirs, so it is much better not to discuss that sort of thing.’ During the voyage over, the girl had read The Story of a South African Farm and this had begun an intellectual revolution in her. But not a sign of this appeared in her face or in her behaviour, for she allowed herself to be taken to dances, introduced to distant relatives and walked around the London parks, the very model of a well-chaperoned young girl. The year was 1913. At night she read behind locked doors, got hold of suffragist and socialist newspapers and by the time the year was over had come to a conclusion. It was that she had been brought up in a backward part of a country whose ideas were decades behind the times, and that although several hundred pounds had been spent on her education she knew nothing about the world. The second conclusion was that while she was in sympathy with the ideas of the suffragettes and that section of the s
ocialist movement with ideas which she characterized as ‘pacifist’, she could never hope to participate emotionally in all these exciting European currents. More, to allow herself to be stirred by them before she even understood them would be foolish. She formulated this quite clearly, and on a certain occasion. It was after having told her aunt she was going to church, she had slipped out for a couple of hours to attend an international socialist congress in Berne. She listened to the speakers without opening her mouth once or talking to any of the other people there, and returned to her hotel, where she sat in her room for several hours with her hands folded, her calm blue eyes fixed on the wall. She told herself, while she remembered the fervour of the socialist speakers: ‘In South Africa we haven’t reached that stage yet. And besides, I shall be marrying Jan quite soon, When I’m married and independent I shall educate myself and find out what I ought to do.’ She imagined herself discussing her new ideas with her husband. She imagined how they would act together.

  When she returned home, she considered her Jan seriously in the light of what she had learned in Europe and decided that her parents had chosen well for her. Her fiancé’s dryly humorous and judicious manner seemed to her a proof that she could count on him to share her ideas. She married him, and a month later had understood she had been mistaken, she was superior to her husband. But she did not do what nearly all women do when they understand they have made a bad bargain – create an image and fight a losing battle, sometimes for years, in the no-man’s-land between image and the truth. She told herself that her development must depend on her own efforts and that they must be secret efforts.

  This had become plain to her one night when her husband had come to bed after sitting up late to prepare a case and had found her reading Ingersoll. He had already taken her into his arms when he saw the title of the book lying beside her pillow. At this he had withdrawn his arms and turned away, remarking in his humorously dry voice: ‘I see you have better company than me, my dear. Steep well.’ That night she had lain awake, and again it was emotion that she decided she must ban from her life. Emotion was dangerous. It could destroy her.

  She was already pregnant, but her first child was her husband, and she thereby put herself beyond being hurt by him.

  She had seven children during the next fifteen years, and was a devoted mother and a good housewife. At night she read and studied; books and newspapers came from Britain and from America. In complete isolation, for there was no one in that small village with whom she could share her ideas, she became an atheist, a socialist, and a believer in racial equality – this last was the hardest, because of the way she had been brought up.

  When her husband moved the family northwards she had welcomed the change: she was going to a capital, though it was the capital of a country even more backward than her own. She settled the family in and then looked about her. She began by working for the women’s and welfare organizations, became a town councillor and a member of the embryo Social Democratic Party, at that stage consisting of a few white trade unionists who used the slogans of socialism in defence of their own position, which was to protect their living standards against the black workers. Soon she was secretary. It had taken her seven years of patient work to get this socialist party to accept the principle that when it got into power it would nationalize the means of production, distribution and exchange. On the day this was accepted by Congress, Mrs Van had celebrated her victory – not by herself, as for years she had celebrated her private achievements, with a present to herself of a new book or a library subscription, but with two dear friends, Jack Dobie and Johnny Lindsay. They opened a battle of wine in Johnny’s tiny house which was on the edge of the Coloured Quarter, and drank to the victory of world socialism and to the brotherhood of mankind.

  Since then the Social Democratic Party had become official opposition to the Government. Her children were grown-up. She had nine grandchildren. She was a happy woman, at the height of her powers, looking forward to a seat in Parliament and (she hoped secretly) in the Cabinet, for she knew herself to be more capable than all but one of the present Cabinet, the Prime Minister himself, and more efficient than any of the possible Government save for Mr McFarline, whose knowledge of finance she respected although she despised his principles.

  Mr Van had watched his wife’s determined advance towards her own goal, made his small dry comments, flicked little whips of sarcasm at her, supported her publicly, and privately thought her a cold and unpassionate woman. Even more privately he was relieved. And perhaps he was even relieved that she was immune from being hurt by him. Yet in his own way he redressed the balances. Throughout their early married life Mrs Van had been used to being woken, after a hard day with her young children, and after her session of study with her books (for never once had he broken into her hours of reading; it was as if they had come to an agreement that he should not) with a demand for attention of some kind. And never once had she failed him. With indomitable cheerfulness, even if she had perhaps slept an hour or a couple of hours a night for weeks, she would arouse herself, rub his back, make him tea, play chess with him, and discuss interminably whether his symptoms might be those of sciatica or lumbago. It was as if he were saying: If I’m one of your children then I demand the same attention.

  Now she sat, hands folded, in front of him, telling him about the meeting in which he was quite uninterested, listened to his variations on the theme that he might be losing the sight of one eye, agreed with him that the dust this year was particularly bad and the grandchildren might expect to suffer from stomach complaints because of it, and did not move until he said: ‘Well, my dear, I expect you have more interesting things than me to attend to.’ At which she rose, carefully, for her back hurt her, kissed his cheek, said that they would meet for dinner in half an hour, and went to her living-room. In the few seconds it took her to reach it she had considered all the reasons that might have brought Mrs Maynard to her, and decided it must be something to do about rehousing the Coloured community, a question they agreed on. They hardly ever agreed about anything.

  But as soon as she saw Mrs Maynard, who rose quickly at her entrance, a long rope of pearls sliding over her black-lace-shrouded bosom, her face flushed, her dark eyes sombre and agitated, she knew there was something else, something she had not made allowances for. She offered Mrs Maynard a drink, and Mrs Maynard said violently: ‘Yes, a stiff one, please.’ Mrs Van rang for the servant, ordered the drinks to be brought in, and the two women sat facing each other, inquiring about each other’s husbands until the servant made himself scarce so they could get down to business.

  These two women had been working together on the city’s committees for many years, respected each other’s capacities, and disapproved of each other utterly.

  But there was something more. During interminable committee meetings, at which they nearly always took opposite viewpoints, they would sometimes watch each other with a private and rather uneasy speculation.

  For here was Mrs Van, radical by conviction, known to everyone as ‘a Kaffir-lover’, a socialist and a libertarian. And yet surely she was deeply conservative by nature and by temperament? The pattern of her life showed it, with its ranks of solid, unradical children, its complement of well-brought-up grandchildren, its comfort and its order.

  And here was Mrs Maynard, conservative by conviction, unegalitarian, aristocratic. Yet surely there was something romantically anarchistic in her that was shown by her cabinet of wire-pulling ladies, and her passion for intrigue and even her handsome husband with his discreet but of course gossiped-about liaisons – particularly his longstanding affair with Mrs Talbot, who had been hovering in the wings of Mrs Maynard’s life for so long, beautiful, outrageous and victorious. Then there was the one son in contrast to Mrs Van’s well-founded family, the unsatisfactory Binkie. And no grandchildren at all. When Mrs Maynard came to the Van der Bylt house, there were grandchildren playing on the veranda or in the garden, but in her own home, only the bridge-play
ing women, the committees of self-appointed vigilantes of public order. No grandchildren, and no sign of any grandchildren.

  Mrs Maynard had made a hundred attempts to win Mrs Van over to become a member of her ‘cabinet’, partly because of her rival’s ability, partly out of her curiosity about the hidden anomaly which both matched and contradicted her own.

  But Mrs Van, the radical, would have nothing to do with the secret processes of private government. She rested herself on the processes of democratic government: committee work, agenda-balancing and election. She preferred to do solid boring detailed work in an organization for seven years in order to prove that she was worthy of election at the end of them. Mrs Van, the socialist, did everything by the book, according to the rules, and in the open.

  This then was the contradiction which made them watch each other and reflect about themselves. It was this contradiction which was going to show itself now. Both knew it and showed that they knew it by the way they waited for the servant to leave the room and close the door behind him.

  ‘Well, Mrs Maynard?’ said Mrs Van, nodding as if she were a chairman giving a signal to speak.

  ‘Look here, my dear,’ said Mrs Maynard, brusquely. ‘I’ve got to ask you something. And it’s something pretty tricky.’

  Mrs Van merely nodded.

  ‘You know that gal Maisie Gale? She’s one of the communists. At least, they’ve got hold of her. Something like that. ‘

  Mrs Van reviewed a dozen faces in her memory, and shook her head.

  ‘But you must know. She runs around with them. At any rate, this is the thing. She was engaged to my son Binkie. She got herself in the family way. Instead of coming to us about it like a sensible gal, the next thing we heard was she married one of the airmen, a sergeant I believe, or something like that.’