Martha Quest

The village held about fifty souls, and had sprung up untidily around the first store, owned by Socrates the Greek, who was known to the farmers as Sock. There was a garage, run by a Welshman; a farmers’ hall; the station beside the railway, a long tin-roofed shack on wooden piles; a ganger’s cottage; and a hotel, also owned by Socrates, in which there was a bar, which was the real social centre of the district. These buildings were scattered over a few acres of red dust; and along the railway line was a stretch of brownish water, where ducks swam until Mrs Socrates came out to catch one for the hotel dinner, and where the oxen from the farmers’ wagons were unyoked while the wagons were loaded, and stood knee-deep in green scum, raising their eyes tranquilly as the train thundered past over their heads. There were two trains a week, and twenty miles away was the end of the line, for beyond was the long ascent to the great escarpment at the verge of the Zambesi Valley. But there was a great deal of road traffic, and all day the cars stood in the dust outside the bar.

Years before, the Quests used to make the trip in to the station twice a week, for Mrs Quest was sociable; but Mr Quest disliked being disturbed so much that now they went once a month, and Mrs Quest must begin fighting with her husband at least a week before.

‘Alfred,’ she would say, with a sort of offhand defiance, ‘remember, we are going in to the station tomorrow.’

He did not hear. Or rather, he raised vaguely irritable eyes towards her, and dropped them again, hunching his shoulders against her voice.

‘Do listen, dear. I told you, we are out of flour, and the boys need new aprons, and the sugar’s practically finished.’

He kept his eyes lowered, and his face was stubborn.

‘Alfred!’ she shouted.

‘What is it?’ he demanded, and glared at her.

Startled by the glare, which nevertheless she had been provoking and facing with obdurate strength for years, she murmured, abashed but determined, ‘We must go to the station.’

‘We can send the wagon,’ he said hastily, getting up to escape.

‘No, Alfred, you know you always say you can’t spare the wagon, and it’s silly to send the wagon for two sacks of …’ He was at the door, on his way out; but she raised her voice after him: ‘Besides, I want to see if they’ve any nice materials: I’m really down to my last rag.’

And now he stopped, and gave her another glare, in which there was guilt and reproach, for she was using the weapon he dreaded most: she was saying, The very least you can do is to let me have a little trip once a month, when you’ve made me live on this awful farm, and we’re so poor, and my children have been dragged down to the level of the Van Rensbergs and …

‘Oh, all right, all right, have it your own way,’ he said, and sat down, reached for the newspaper, and covered himself with it.

‘Tomorrow,’ she said. ‘We will go in after lunch, and Martha can help me get ready.’

Her husband’s defiant eyes were hidden by the newspaper, which nevertheless gave a small protesting shake; but Martha’s eyes were lifted towards her, with the sullen enquiry. ‘Why do we have to get ready for half an hour’s trip?’

‘Oh well – you know – with everything …’ Mrs Quest lapsed into confusion.

‘Good Lord,’ said Martha irritably, ‘to hear us talk, you’d think we were off to England or something.’

This was a familiar joke, and allowed Mrs Quest to give her girlish and rather charming laugh; though no one else laughed. ‘Well, with this family I’ve got, and no one lifts a finger but me …’ This was not a grumble, but an appeal that please, please, for pity’s sake, they should laugh, this irritable, resisting couple, and make things easier. She sighed, as Martha’s face remained glum and the newspaper was held firmly upright against her.

Next morning at breakfast she said, ‘Don’t forget we’re going to the station.’

Now he was resigned, ‘Must we?’

‘Yes, we must. Besides, you know you’ll enjoy it once we get there.’

This was a mistake. ‘I do not enjoy it. I loathe it. Besides, we haven’t any petrol.’

‘There’s a spare tin in the storeroom,’ said Mrs Quest firmly. And now there was no help for it; Mr Quest groaned, and accepted his fate; and as he went off to the garage he even looked interested; the cloud of introspection was lifting, and his eyes intently followed what his hands did. It always worried Martha, made her uneasy, to see how those brooding eyes must concentrate, force themselves outwards, watching his hands as if they were clumsy creatures that were separate from himself.

The garage was a roof of tin over two walls of plastered logs, open at each end; and he reversed the car slowly out into the bush, so that it bounced and jerked over the rough ground, and then forwards into an empty space. Then he got out, and stood frowning at the car. It was a very old Ford; the paint had gone; there were no side curtains – they had been lost somewhere; one door was tied with rope; and a part of the canvas hood, which had decayed into holes, was thatched over. He had bought it for thirty pounds, ten years before.

‘The engine’s as good as ever,’ he murmured proudly. And he called Martha to say, ‘It isn’t the body of a car that matters. Only fools pay good money for paint and varnish. What matters is the engine.’ He liked to have Martha there when he attended to the car; he would even send the servant to fetch her. Now, Martha did not mind about how cars looked; but she was irritated because of this one’s extreme slowness; so her face was as absent and dreamy as his own while he fetched water in a watering can, and fed the radiator, and took off the rope from the useless handle and retied it. Slowly, because he got no response to his remarks, he began glaring at her. ‘It’s all very well,’ he would begin, ‘it’s all very well for you …’ More often than not, the sentence was never finished, for a humorous look would come over her face, and their eyes met.

‘Oh, Daddy,’ she protested, grumbling, ‘why is it all very well, I haven’t said a word!’ Here she might begin edging away, with longing glances at the house. It was so hot; the heat and light glittered into her eyes from the battered old car. ‘Where are you going?’ he demanded, sounding offended; and she returned to sit on the running board, opening the book she had held in her hand. Now he was mollified, and he sounded cheerful, as he stroked the warm thatch on the roof, and said, ‘I always did like thatching, there’s something about the look of a nice piece of thatch. I remember my cousin George – he was an expert thatcher, back home. Of course, he knew his job, not like these damned niggers, they slam it on any old how. When you go back to England, Matty, the first thing you must do is go to Colchester and see if George’s kids are half the man their father was – if so, you’ll see a piece of thatching you’ll find nowhere else in the world. Matty!’ he shouted at her bent and absorbed head.

‘What?’ she asked, exasperated, lifting her eyes from the book.

‘You’re not listening.’

‘I am listening.’

‘It’s all very well for you,’ came the grumbling voice.

When he had fiddled with the car for an hour or so, he came back to the house, followed by Martha, and demanded tea. He would not go down the farm that day. And then, about twelve o’clock, he began worrying that the lunch was late and they would never get off that afternoon.

‘But Alfred,’ said poor Mrs Quest, ‘first you won’t go at all, and then you start fussing hours before –’

‘It’s all very well, you haven’t got to nurse a twenty-year-old car over these roads.’

Martha gritted her teeth in anger. Standing on the hill, one could see the other farmers’ cars racing through the trees, like tiny black beetles, the red dust spurting up behind them. Other people made the journey to the station in a few minutes.

After lunch, the anxious Mr Quest went to the car and again tested the radiator. It was likely to be empty; and then he would call for half a dozen eggs, and break them one after another into the cavity. The eggs would form a sticky sediment over the leaky bottom of the radiator. Once someone had suggested mealie meal, which he had tried immediately, with all the cautious enthusiasm of the scientific experimenter. ‘There must be something in it,’ he murmured as he poured handfuls of the white floury stuff into the car. But halfway along the track, the cap shot off with an explosion, and lumps of porridge flew all over the windscreen, so that the car came to a blind and sliding stop against a large tree. ‘Well,’ said Mr Quest thoughtfully, ‘that’s interesting. Perhaps if one used a finer grain it might …’

On the whole, eggs were more predictable; though it was important not to drive too fast, and to stop frequently, so that the engine might cool, as otherwise the water might boil the clotted egg off the bottom of the radiator, and then …

After lunch Mr Quest called peremptorily, ‘May! Matty! Come on, the engine’s started, we must go.’ And Mrs Quest, half laughing, half grumbling, ran to the car, adjusting her hat, while Martha followed unhurriedly, with a look of exhausted resignation.

The car was poised at the edge of a flattish space, on the brow of the hill. Mr Quest sat urgently forward, clasping the brake with one hand, hugging the steering wheel with the other.

‘Now!’ he exclaimed, letting go the brake. Nothing happened. ‘Oh, damn it all,’ he groaned, as if this were the last straw. ‘Come on, then.’ And he and Mrs Quest began swinging back and forth in their seats, so the car was joggled inch by inch over the edge, and slid precariously down the rutted pebbly road to the foot of the hill, where there was a great ditch. Into this it slid, and stopped. ‘Oh, damn it all,’ Mr Quest said again, on a final note, and looked around at his women in an aggrieved way.

He tried the starter, without much hope. It worked at once, and the car flew up over the edge of the ditch in a screeching bounce, and down the track between the mealie fields. The maize stood now in its final colouring, a dead silvery gold, dry as paper, and its whispering against the wind was the sound of a myriad fluttering leaves. Below this Hundred Acres Field lay the track, the old railroad track, and now Mr Quest stopped the car, got out, took off the radiator cap, and peered in. There was a squelchy bubbling noise, and a faintly rotten smell. ‘It’s all right so far,’ he said, with satisfaction, and off they went.

Halfway, they stopped again. ‘At three and a half miles, the petrol ought to show …’ murmured Mr Quest, looking at the petrol gauge. For it was seven miles to the station. Or rather, it was five and three-quarters; but just as it was seven miles to the Dumfries Hills (in fact, six) and seven to Jacob’s Burg (at least nine), so the distance to the station must be seven miles, for to have a house in the dead centre of a magically determined circle offers satisfaction beyond all riches, and even power. But a poetical seven miles is one thing, and to check one’s petrol gauge by it another; and Mr Quest frowned and said, ‘I’d better take the thing to the garage. I cannot understand – if these people can make an engine to last a lifetime, why is everything else so shoddy?’

At the station, Mrs Quest descended at Socrates’ with her shopping lists, and Mr Quest drove off to the garage. Martha lagged on the veranda until her mother had forgotten her in her eager talk with the other women at the counter, and then walked quickly to the belt of trees which hid the kaffir store. It was a large square brick erection, with a simple pillared veranda. Martha went through the usual crowd of native women with their babies on their backs, pushed aside the coloured bead curtain at the door, and was inside the store. It had a counter down the centre, and on it were jars of bright sweets, and rolls of cotton goods. There were sacks of grain and sugar around the walls, bicycles, cans of paraffin, monkey nuts. Over the counter, cheap beads, strips of biltong, mouth organs and glass bangles dangled and swung together. The smell was of sweat and cheap dyes and dust, and Martha sniffed it with pleasure.

Old Mr Cohen nodded at her, with a distance in his manner, and, having asked politely after her parents, who owed him fifty pounds, waited for an order.

‘Is Solly in?’ she asked rather too politely.

The old man allowed his eyebrows to lift, before replying, ‘He’s in, for anyone who wants to see him.’

‘I would like to see him,’ she said, almost stammering.

‘You used to know the way,’ he said laconically, and nodded at the closed flap of the counter, under which she had ducked as a child. She had expected him to lift it for her now; clumsily, she tried to move it, while he watched her. Then, taking his time, he lifted it, and moved aside so that she might go through.

She found herself saying, ‘You’re mistaken, I didn’t mean …’

His eyes snapped around at her, and he said sarcastically, ‘Didn’t mean what?’ He at once turned away to serve a native child, who was so red with dust from the road that his black skin had a rusty look, some acid-green sweets from a jar.

Martha walked into the back room, and found the Cohen boys reading, one in each of the two big easy chairs, which she privately thought in unpleasant taste, as was the whole room, which was very small, and crowded with glossy furniture and bright china ornaments; there was an effect of expensive ostentation, like the display window of a furniture store. And in this ugly and tasteless room sat Solly and Joss, the intellectuals, reading (as she took care to see) Plato and Balzac, in expensive editions.

After a startled look at her, they looked at each other, and after a long pause Solly remarked, ‘Look who’s here!’ while Joss returned, ‘Well, well!’ and they both waited, with blandly sarcastic faces, for her to speak.

She said, ‘I’ve brought back a book of yours,’ and held it out.

Solly said, ‘My grateful thanks,’ extended a hand, and took it.

Joss was pretending to read, and this annoyed her; for, as Mrs Van Rensberg had suggested, he had once been her particular friend. But it was also a relief, and she said, rather flirtatiously, to Solly, ‘May I sit down?’ and sat forthwith.

‘She’s got to be quite a smart girl, h’m?’ said Solly to Joss, as the boys openly and rudely examined her.

As a result of her quarrels with Mrs Quest, she was now making her own clothes. Also, she had starved herself into a fashionable thinness which, since she was plump by nature, was not to everyone’s taste. Apparently not to the Cohen boys’, for they continued, as if she were not present:

‘Yellow suits her, doesn’t it, Solly?’

‘Yes, Joss and that cute little slit down the front of the dress, too.’

‘But too thin, too thin, Solly, it comes of giving up that rich and unhealthy Jewish food.’

‘But better thin and pure, Joss, than fat and gross and contaminated by –’

‘Oh, shut up,’ she said, in discomfort; and they raised their eyebrows and shook their heads and sighed. ‘I know you think …’ she began, and once again found it hard to continue.

‘Think what?’ they demanded, almost together, and with precisely the keen, sarcastic intonation their father had used.

‘It isn’t so,’ she stammered, sincerely, looking at them in appeal; and for a moment thought she was forgiven, for Joss’s tone was quite gentle as he began: ‘Poor Matty, did your mummy forbid you to come and see us, then?’

The shock of the words, after the deceptively gentle tone, which reached her nerves before the sense, caused her eyes to fill with tears. She said, ‘No, of course she didn’t.’

‘Mystery,’ said Joss, beginning the game again, nodding at Solly; who sighed exaggeratedly and said, ‘We’re not to know, dear, dear.’

Suddenly Martha said not at all as she had intended, but with a mixture of embarrassment and coyness, ‘Mrs Van Rensberg was gossiping.’ She glanced at Joss, whose dark face slowly coloured; and he looked at her with a dislike that cut her.

‘Mrs Van Rensberg was gossiping,’ said Solly to Joss; and before the exchange could continue, she cut in: ‘Yes, and I suppose it was silly, but I couldn’t – take it.’ The defiant conclusion ended on a shortened breath; this interview was not as she had imagined.

‘She couldn’t take it,’ sighed Joss to Solly.

‘She couldn’t take it,’ Solly sighed back; and with the same movement, they picked up their books, and began to read.

She remained where she was, her eyes pleading with their averted faces, trying to subdue the flood of colour she could feel tingling to the roots of her hair, and when, after a long silence, Solly remarked in a detached voice, ‘She couldn’t take us, but she’s still here,’ Martha got up, saying angrily, ‘I’ve apologized, you’re making a mistake. Why do you have to be so thin-skinned?’ She went to the door.

Behind her back, they began laughing, a loud and unpleasant laughter. ‘She’s cut us dead for two years, and she says we’re thin-skinned.’

‘I didn’t cut you – why must you talk about me as if I weren’t here?’ she said, and stumbled out, past Mr Cohen. She found the flap of the counter down, and had to wait, speechless, for him to lift it, for she was on the verge of crying.

He looked at her with what she thought was a tinge of kindliness; but he opened the flap, nodded quietly, and said, ‘Good afternoon, Miss Quest.’

‘Thank you,’ she said, with the effect of pleading, and walked back up the dusty path to the village, as the bead curtain swung and rattled into stillness behind her.

She walked over the railway tracks, which gleamed brightly in the hot sunlight, to the garage, where Mr Quest was in absorbed conversation with Mr Parry. He was repeating urgently, ‘Yes there’s going to be a war, it’s all very well for you people …’

Mr Parry was saying, ‘Yes, Captain Quest. No, Captain Quest.’ In the village, the war title was used, though Mr Quest refused it, saying it was not fair to the regular soldier. Martha used to argue with him reasonably, thus: ‘Are you suggesting that it is only the peace-time soldier who deserves his title? Do you mean that if civilians get conscripted and killed it’s on a different level from …’ and so on and so on – ah, how exasperating are the rational adolescents! For Mr Quest gave his irritable shrug of aversion and repeated, ‘I don’t like being Captain, it’s not fair when I haven’t been in the Army for so long.’ What Martha thought privately was, How odd that a man who thinks about nothing but war should dislike being Captain; and at this point, the real one, was of course never mentioned during those reasonable discussions.

Mr Parry was listening nervously to Mr Quest, while his eyes anxiously followed his native assistant, who was dragging an inner tube through the hot dust. At last he could not bear it, saying, ‘Excuse me, but …’ he darted forward and shouted at the native, ‘Look you, Gideon, how many times have I told you …’ He grabbed the tyre from the man’s hand, and took it over to a tub of water. Gideon shrugged, and went off to the cool interior of the garage, where he sat on a heap of outer tyres, and began making patterns on the dust with a twig. ‘Look you, Gideon …’ shouted Mr Parry; but Gideon wrinkled his brows and pretended not to hear. Mr Parry’s Welsh speech had lost nothing of its lilt and charm; but the phrases had worn slack; his ‘Look you’ sounded more like ‘Look ye’; and when he used the Welsh ‘whatever’, it came haphazard in his speech, with a surprised, uncertain note.

Mr Quest, disappointed of a listener, came to the car, climbed in, and said, ‘They don’t listen. I was telling him the Russians are going to join with the Germans and attack us. I know they are. Just after the war – my war – I met a man in a train who said he had seen with his own eyes the way the Russians were kidnapping German scientists and forcing them to work in their factories so they could learn how to make tanks to smash the British Empire. I said to Parry here …’

Martha heard these words somewhere underneath her attention, which was given to her own problems. Mr Quest looked over his shoulder at her, and said sarcastically, ‘But don’t let me bore you with the Great Unmentionable. Your time’ll come, and then I can say I told you so.’

Martha turned her face away; her lids stung with tears; she felt the most rejected and desolate creature in the world. It occurred to her that the Cohen boys might have felt like this when she (or so it had appeared) rejected them; but she dismissed the thought at once. The possessors of this particular form of arrogance may know its underside is timidity; but they seldom go on to reflect that the timidity is based on the danger of thinking oneself important to others, which necessitates a return of feeling. She was saying to herself that she could not imagine the clever and self-sufficient Cohen brothers caring about her one way or the other. But we were friends all our childhood, a voice said inside her; and that other voice answered coldly, Friends are whom you choose, not the people forced on you by circumstances. And yet she was nearly crying with misery and humiliation and friendlessness, in the hot back seat of the car, while grains of sunlight danced through the fractured roof, and stung her flesh like needles. For the first time, she said to herself that the Cohens were almost completely isolated in the district. The farmers nodded to them, offered remarks about the weather, but never friendship. The Greek family maintained a complicated system of friendship with the other Greeks from stores all along the railway line. The Cohens had relations in the city, no one nearer.

At last Mr Parry found a trail of bubbles sizzling up through the dirty water from the tube, and shouted to Gideon, ‘Come ye, now, you lazy black loafer, and do it quick whateffer you do, and listen well, now.’

Gideon indolently lifted himself and went to mend the puncture, while Mr Parry came back to the car in order to resume his conversation with Mr Quest.

‘Sorry, Captain, but if you want a good job, you do it yourself, whateffer else, it’s no good trusting the blacks, they’ve no pride in their work.’

‘As I was saying, you people have your heads buried in the sand. Anyone can see war is coming. If it’s not this year, it’ll be the next, as soon as they’re strong enough.’

‘You think the Jerries’ll have another shot at us?’ asked Mr Parry, polite but doubtful, and turned so that he might keep an eye on Gideon.

Another native came loping across the railway tracks and stopped by the car. ‘Baas Quest?’ he asked.

Mr Quest, once again interrupted, turned his darkly irritable eyes on him. But Martha recognized him: he was the Cohens’ cook; and she reached for the parcel he held.

‘For me,’ she said, and asked the man to wait. He went off to help Gideon with the tyre.

The parcel was a book from Joss, entitled The Social Aspect of the Jewish Question, and inside was a note: ‘Dear Matty Quest, This will be good for your soul, so do, do read it. Yours thin-skinnedly, Joss.’

She was filled with outrageous delight. It was forgiveness. She interrupted her father once again to borrow a pencil, and wrote: ‘Thanks for the book. As it happened, I borrowed it from you and of course agreed with it, three years ago. But I shall read it again and return it next time we come to the station.’ She was determined that would be very soon.

Next mail day she suggested that they should make the trip, but her father refused, with an air of being exploited.

‘Why do you want to go?’ asked Mrs Quest curiously; and Martha said, ‘I want to see the Cohen boys.’

‘You’re making friends with them?’ demurred Mrs Quest.

‘I thought we always were friends with them,’ said Martha scornfully; and since this put the argument on that hypocritical level where it was maintained that of course the Quests did not think Jews, or even shopkeepers, beneath them, and the only reason they did not continually meet was an inconvenience of some sort, Mrs Quest could not easily reply.