The Grass Is Singing Read online

  “It makes no odds,” said Charlie absently. He sat down on one of the rough wood chairs in the front room, and remained in thought, whistling softly though his front teeth. Marston stood by the window, looking for the arrival of the police car. From time to time Charlie looked round the room alertly, flicking his tongue over his lips. Then he lapsed back into his soft whistling. It got on the young man’s nerves.

  At last, cautiously, almost warningly, Charlie said: “What do you know of this?”

  Marston noted the emphasized you, and wondered what Slatter knew. He was well in control of himself, but as taut as wire. He said, “I don’t know. Nothing really. It is all so difficult...” He hesitated, looking appealingly at Charlie.

  That look of almost soft appeal irritated Charlie, coming from a man, but it pleased him too: he was pleased the youth deferred to him. He knew the type so well. So many of them came from England to learn farming. They were usually ex-public school, very English, but extremely adaptable. From Charlie’s point of view, the adaptability redeemed them. It was strange to see how quickly they accustomed themselves. At first they were diffident, though proud and withdrawn; cautiously learning the new ways, with a fine sensitiveness, an alert self-consciousness.

  When old settlers say “One had to understand the country,” what they mean is, “You have to get used to our ideas about the native.” They are saying, in effect, “Learn our ideas, or otherwise get out: we don’t want you.” Most of these young men were brought up with vague ideas about equality. They were shocked, for the first week or so, by the way natives were treated. They were revolted a hundred times a day by the casual way they were spoken of, as if they were so many cattle; or by a blow, or a look. They had been prepared to treat them as human beings. But they could not stand out against the society they were joining. It did not take them long to change. It was hard, of course, becoming as bad oneself. But it was not very long that they thought of it as “bad.” And anyway, what had one’s ideas amounted to? Abstract ideas about decency and goodwill, that was all: merely abstract ideas. When it came to the point, one never had contact with natives, except in the master-servant relationship. One never knew them in their own lives, as human beings. A few months, and these sensitive, decent young men had coarsened to suit the hard, arid, sun-drenched country they had come to; they had grown a new manner to match their thickened sunburned limbs and toughened bodies.

  If Tony Marston had been even a few more months in the country it would have been easy. That was Charlie’s feeling. That was why he looked at the young man with a speculative frowning look, not condemning him, only wary and on the alert.

  He said: “What do you mean, it is all so difficult?”

  Tony Marston appeared uncomfortable, as if he did not know his own mind. And for that matter he did not: the weeks in the Turners’ household with its atmosphere of tragedy had not helped him to get his mind clear. The two standards—the one he had brought with him and the one he was adopting— conflicted still. And there was a roughness, a warning note, in Charlie’s voice, that left him wondering. What was he being warned against? He was intelligent enough to know he was being warned. In this he was unlike Charlie, who was acting by instinct and did not know his voice was a threat. It was all so unusual. Where were the police? What right had Charlie, who was a neighbor, to be fetched before himself, who was practically a member of the household? Why was Charlie quietly taking command?

  His ideas of right were upset. He was confused, but he had his own ideas about the murder, which could not be stated straight out, like that, in black and white. When he came to think of it, the murder was logical enough; looking back over the last few days he could see that something like this was bound to happen, he could almost say he had been expecting it, some kind of violence or ugliness. Anger, violence, death, seemed natural to this vast, harsh country .. . he had done a lot of thinking since he had strolled casually into the house that morning, wondering why everyone was so late, to find Mary Turner lying murdered on the veranda, and the police boys outside, guarding the houseboy; and Dick Turner muttering and stumbling through the puddles, mad, but apparently harmless. Things he had not understood, he understood now, and he was ready to talk about them. But he was in the dark as to Charlie’s attitude. There was something here he could not get hold of.

  “It’s like this,” he said, “when I first arrived I didn’t know much about the country.”

  Charlie said, with a good-humored but brutal irony, “Thanks for the information.” And then, “Have you any idea why this nigger murdered Mrs. Turner?”

  “Well, I have a sort of idea, yes.”

  “We had better leave it to the Sergeant, when he comes then.”

  It was a snub; he had been shut up. Tony held his tongue, angry but bewildered.

  When the Sergeant came, he went over to look at the murderer, glanced at Dick through the window of Slatter’s car, and then came into the house.

  “I went to your place, Slatter,” he said, nodding at Tony, giving him a keen look. Then he went into the bedroom. And his reactions were as Charlie’s had been: vindictiveness towards the murderer, emotional pity for Dick, and for Mary, a bitter contemptuous anger: Sergeant Denham had been in the country for a number of years. This time Tony saw the expression on the face, and it gave him a shock. The faces of the two men as they stood over the body, gazing down at it, made him feel uneasy, even afraid. He himself felt a little disgust, but not much; it was mainly pity that agitated him, knowing what he knew. It was the disgust that he would feel for any social irregularity, no more than the distaste that comes from failure of the imagination. This profound instinctive horror and fear astonished him.

  The three of them went silently into the living room.

  Charlie Slatter and Sergeant Denham stood side by side like two judges, as if they had purposely taken up this attitude. Opposite them was Tony. He stood his ground, but he felt an absurd guiltiness taking hold of him, simply because of their pose, standing like that, looking at him with subtle reserved faces that he could not read.

  “Bad business,” said Sergeant Denham briefly.

  No one answered. He snapped open a notebook, adjusted elastic over a page, and poised a pencil.

  “A few questions, if you don’t mind,” he said. Tony nodded.

  “How long have you been here?”

  “About three weeks.”

  “Living in this house?”

  “No, in a hut down the path.”

  “You were going to run this place while they were away?”

  “Yes, for six months.”

  “And then?”

  “And then I intended to go on a tobacco farm.”

  “When did you know about this business?”

  “They didn’t call me. I woke and found Mrs. Turner.”

  Tony’s voice showed he was now on the defensive. He felt wounded, even insulted that he had not been called: above all, that these two men seemed to think it right and natural that he should be by-passed in this fashion, as if his newness to the country unfitted him for any kind of responsibility. And he resented the way he was being questioned. They had no right to do it. He was beginning to simmer with rage, although he knew quite well that they themselves were quite unconscious of the patronage implicit in their manner, and that it would be better for him to try and understand the real meaning of this scene, rather than to stand on his dignity.

  “You had your meals with the Turners?”

  “Yes.”

  “Apart from that, were you ever here—socially, so to speak?’

  “No, hardly at all. I have been busy learning the job.”

  “Get on well with Turner?”

  “Yes, I think so. I mean, he was not easy to know. He was absorbed in his work. And he was obviously very unhappy at leaving the place.”

  “Yes, poor devil, he had a hard time of it.” The voice was suddenly tender, almost maudlin, with pity, although the Sergeant snapped out the words, and then shut
his mouth tight, as if to present a brave face to the world. Tony was disconcerted: the unexpectedness of these men’s responses was taking him right out of his depth. He was feeling nothing that they were feeling: he was an outsider in this tragedy, although both the Sergeant and Charlie Slatter seemed to feel personally implicated, for they had unconsciously assumed poses of weary dignity, appearing bowed down with unutterable burdens, be-cause of poor Dick Turner and his sufferings.

  Yet it was Charlie who had literally turned Dick off his farm; and in previous interviews, at which Tony had been present, he had shown none of this sentimental pity.

  There was a long pause. The Sergeant shut his notebook. But he had not yet finished. He was regarding Tony cautiously, wondering how to frame the next question. Or that was how it appeared to Tony, who could see that here was the moment that was the crux of the whole affair. Charlie’s face: wary, a little cunning, a little afraid, proclaimed it.

  “See anything out of the ordinary while you were here?” asked the Sergeant, apparently casual.

  “Yes, I did,” blurted Tony, suddenly determined not to be bullied. For he knew he was being bullied, though he was cut off from them both by a gulf in experience and belief. They looked up at him, frowning; glanced at each other swiftly— then away, as if afraid to acknowledge conspiracy.

  “What did you see? I hope you realize the—unpleasantness—of this case?” The last question was a grudging appeal.

  “Any murder is surely unpleasant,” remarked Tony drily.

  “When you have been in the country long enough, you will understand that we don’t like niggers murdering white women.”

  The phrase “When you have been in the country,” stuck in Tony’s gullet. He had heard it too often, and it had come to jar on him. At the same time it made him feel angry. Also callow. He would have liked to blurt out the truth in one overwhelming, incontrovertible statement; but the truth was not like that. It never was. The fact he knew, or guessed, about Mary, the fact these two men were conspiring to ignore, could be stated easily enough. But the important thing, the thing that really mattered, so it seemed to him, was to understand the background, the circumstances, the characters of Dick and Mary, the pattern of their lives. And it was not so easy to do. He had arrived at the truth circuitously: circuitously it would have to be explained. And his chief emotion, which was an impersonal pity for Mary and Dick and the native, a pity that was also rage against circumstances, made it difficult for him to know where to begin.

  “Look,” he said, “I’ll tell you what I know from the beginning, only it will take some time, I am afraid ... “

  “You mean you know why Mrs. Turner was murdered?” The question was a quick, shrewd parry.

  “No, not just like that. Only I can form a theory.” The choice of words was most unfortunate.

  “We don’t want theories. We want facts. And in any case, you should remember Dick Turner. This is all most unpleasant for him. You should remember him, poor devil.”

  Here it was again: the utterly illogical appeal, which to these two men was clearly not illogical at all. The whole thing was preposterous! Tony began to lose his temper.

  “Do you or do you not want to hear what I have to say?” he asked, irritably.

  “Go ahead. Only remember, I don’t want to hear your fancies. I want to hear facts. Have you ever seen anything definite which would throw light on this murder. For instance, have you seen this boy attempting to get at her jewelry, or something like that. Anything that is definite. Not something in the air.”

  Tony laughed. The two men looked at him sharply.

  “You know as well as I do this case is not something that can be explained straight off like that. You know that. It’s not something that can be said in black and white, straight off.”

  It was pure deadlock; no one spoke. As if Sergeant Denham had not heard those last words, a heavy frown on his face, he said at last: “For instance, how did Mrs. Turner treat this boy? Did she treat her boys well?”

  The angry Tony, fumbling for a foothold in this welter of emotion and half-understood loyalties, clutched at this for a beginning.

  “Yes, she treated him badly, I thought. Though on the other hand ... “

  “Nagged at him, eh? Oh well, women are pretty bad that way, in this country, very often. Aren’t they, Slatter?” The voice was easy, intimate, informal. “My old woman drives me mad—it’s something about this country. They have no idea how to deal with niggers.”

  “Needs a man to deal with niggers,” said Charlie. “Niggers don’t understand women giving them orders. They keep their own women in their right place.” He laughed. The Sergeant laughed. They turned towards each other, even including Tony, in an unmistakable relief. The tension had broken; the danger was over: once again, he had been bypassed, and the interview, it seemed, was over. He could hardly believe it.

  “But look here,” he said. Then he stopped. Both men turned to look at him, a steady, grave, irritated look on their faces. And the warning was unmistakable! It was the warning that might have been given to a greenhorn who was going to let himself down by saying too much. This realization was too much for Tony. He gave in; he washed his hands of it. He watched the other two in utter astonishment: they were together in mood and emotion, standing there in perfect under-standing; the understanding was unrealized by themselves, the sympathy unacknowledged; their concerted handling of this affair had been instinctive: they were completely unaware of there being anything extraordinary, even anything illegal. And was there anything illegal, after all? This was a casual talk, on the face of it, nothing formal about it now that the notebook was shut—and it had been shut ever since they had reached the crisis of the scene.

  Charlie said, turning towards the sergeant, “Better get her out of here. It is too hot to wait.”

  “Yes,” said the policeman, moving to give orders accordingly.

  And that brutally matter-of-fact remark, Tony realized afterwards, was the only time poor Mary Turner was referred to directly. But why should she be?—except that this was really a friendly talk between the farmer who had been her next neighbor, the policeman who had been in her house on his rounds as a guest, and the assistant who had lived there for some weeks. It wasn’t a formal occasion, this: Tony clung to the thought. There was a court case to come yet, which would be properly conducted.

  “The case will be a matter of form, of course,” said the Sergeant, as if thinking aloud, with a look at Tony. He was standing by the police car, watching the native policemen lift the body of Mary Turner, which was wrapped in a blanket, into the back seat. She was stiff; a rigid outstretched arm knocked horribly against the narrow door; it was difficult to get her in. At last it was done and the door shut. And then there was another problem: they could not put Moses the murderer into the same car with her; one could not put a black man close to a white woman, even though she were dead, and murdered by him. And there was only Charlie’s car, and mad Dick Turner was in that, sitting staring in the back. There seemed to be a feeling that Moses, having committed a murder, deserved to be taken by car; but there was no help for it, he would have to walk, guarded by the policemen, wheeling their bicycles, to the camp.

  All these arrangements completed, there was a pause.

  They stood there beside the cars, in the moment of parting, looking at the red-brick house with its shimmering hot roof, and the thick encroaching bush, and the group of black men moving off under the trees on their long walk. Moses was quite impassive, allowing himself to be directed without any movement of his own. His face was blank. He seemed to be staring straight into the sun. Was he thinking he would not see it much longer? Impossible to say. Regret? Not a sign of it. Fear? It did not seem so. The three men looked at the murderer, thinking their own thoughts, speculative, frowning, but not as if he were important now. No, he was unimportant: he was the constant, the black man who will thieve, rape, murder, if given half a chance. Even for Tony he no longer mattered; and his knowle
dge of the native mind was too small to give him any basis for conjecture.

  “And what about him?” asked Charlie, jerking his thumb at Dick Turner. H e meant: where does he come in, as far as the court case is concerned?

  “He looks to me as if he won’t be good for much,” said the Sergeant, who after all had plenty of experience of death, crime and madness.

  No, for them the important thing was Mary Turner, who had let the side down; but even she, since she was dead, was no longer a problem. The one fact that remained still to be dealt with was the necessity for preserving appearances. Sergeant Denham understood that: it was part of his job, though it would not appear in regulations, was rather implicit in the spirit of the country, the spirit in which he was soaked. Charlie Slatter understood it, none better. Still side by side, as if one impulse, one regret, one fear, moved them both, they stood together in that last moment before they left the place, giving their final silent warning to Tony, looking at him gravely.

  And he was beginning to understand. He knew now, at least, that what had been fought out in the room they had just left was nothing to do with the murder as such. The murder, in itself, was nothing. The struggle that had been decided in a few brief words—or rather, in the silences between the words—had had nothing to do with the surface meaning of the scene. He would understand it all a good deal better in a few months, when he had “become used to the country.” And then he would do his best to forget the knowledge, for to live with the color bar in all its nuances and implications means closing one’s mind to many things, if one intends to remain an accepted member of society. But, in the interval, there would be a few brief moments when he would see the thing clearly, and understand that it was “white civilization” fighting to de-fend itself that had been implicit in the attitude of Charlie Slatter and the Sergeant, “white civilization” which will never, never admit that a white person, and most particularly, a white woman, can have a human relationship, whether for good or for evil, with a black person. For once it admits that, it crashes, and nothing can save it. So, above all, it cannot afford failures, such as the Turners’ failure.