A Ripple From the Storm (27 page)
The men listening, not sure how to take her, saw her husband lolling back in his chair and watching her with appreciative derision, and slowly they began to smile, and then to laugh, but with her, not against her. Marie, standing on two firmly planted legs, one hand on her hip, admonished them collectively with a dignified forefinger, and launched into an abridged account of the suffragette movement, the history of which she told them they would do well to study because if they, the so-called intelligentsia of the Africans, continued to treat their women as they were doing now she, Marie du Preez, would personally make it her business to see that the African women of the town started a suffragette movement of their own.
At this point the Superintendent came back, scowling as bad-temperedly as when he had left. He stood, rather puzzled, at the door for a moment: Marie was declaiming at the top of her voice, calling the men in front of her a lot of conscienceless exploiters of human labour, arrogant slavedrivers, petty domestic dictators. Then, giving it up, he went to the platform and informed Mrs Van that the meeting had overrun its alloted span by half an hour and must close at once.
The lecture on women’s rights thus abruptly being brought to an end, Marie returned to her husband’s side, remarking: ‘There, you old ram, that’s a piece of my mind for you and for all of you – a communist you call yourself.’ To which he replied, pretending to cringe and writhe: ‘What’ve you got for my supper?’ And she, with great dignity: ‘Wait and see.’ But she was unable to maintain it. She suddenly flushed and smiled at him in reply to his broad smile, and said in a normal voice: ‘All the same, you’re a pain in the neck and that’s a fact.’
People were already rising to their feet, and as the three descended from the platform, groups of Africans surged around them in anxious insistence, as if this personal contact might bring their collective hunger nearer to appeasement. Some of them crowded around the literature table. In a few moments all the copies of Principles of Trade Unionism and How to Conduct a Meeting had gone, while the welfare pamphlets remained untouched. The Superintendent stood by the table watching, and making notes of the titles of the pamphlets.
As the white people left the Hall, a group of women who had been standing under the bunch of trees came forward, pushing in front of them some small children holding bouquets. After urging, the children presented a bouquet to each of the white people. There was a great deal of nodding, smiling, shy curtsies.
Martha and Jasmine sat in their car, the bouquets on their knees, both profoundly depressed. Jasmine was nearly in tears.
‘It doesn’t matter what one does in this bloody place,’ she burst out, ‘all we are is a bunch of do-gooders uplifting the poor. And do you know, Matty, what I was feeling all the time, I was hating those men for being so damned grateful, and I could feel myself becoming more and more condescending and pleased with myself inside …’ Here she burst into tears, and Martha put her arm around her. She had been feeling the same, and disliked herself for it.
Almost at once Jasmine stopped herself crying and said: ‘Sorry, Matty, I’d forgotten this was a special day for you. Well, I won’t offer to help move your things – I expect you’d rather be alone. And I’ll spend the evening with my parents for a change.’
‘Are they speaking to you yet?’
‘They’re trying to marry me off to a business friend of Dad’s.’
She tried to laugh, but failed. ‘You know, Matty, I’ve been thinking … I don’t know how to say it – but I go home, and there’s the house, nothing ever changes. Mum and Dad always the same, and when I’m in it it is hard to believe how the world is changing, and what it’s like in the group. And I think, suppose I married this man, well, he’s quite nice, in a couple of years I’d be just like them, and I’d be thinking like them … don’t you see, Matty – well, there are times when everything scares me.’
Here she hurriedly squeezed Martha’s shoulders with a convulsive pressure of her arm, and said with forlorn cheerfulness: ‘Well, never mind, we’ll all be dead in a hundred years!’
Martha found Anton, surrounded by packed suitcases and piles of books, seated on his bed in his hotel, waiting for her. It seemed that the lease for the new flat had not been signed and that he wanted her to go down to the lawyer’s office to sign it. She had expected him to have dealt with it, for she had searched for the flat, interviewed lawyers and landlord and made terms.
‘But I was at the meeting,’ she said, ‘I thought you’d fix it.’ She sounded peevish, and she hastened to alter the tone of her voice to a plaintive humour. ‘But, Anton, all you had to do was to sign the thing.’
He said quickly, with a note in his voice she had not heard before, something grumpy and accusing: ‘But, Matty, you’re good at these things and I’m not.’
Martha was silent from surprise. She had never considered herself good at practical things; while Anton was surely a practical man above anything else?
But she said she would rush down to the office before it closed, sign the lease, get the keys and meet Anton at the flat.
‘But Matty, all this luggage here, how can I move it?’ He gazed at her patiently, waiting for her to solve this problem.
‘Anton, for God’s sake! Call a taxi, or ring up Jasmine and borrow her car.’
There was a gleam of dislike in his eyes. She was amazed and frightened. Then she turned this corner of crisis by using the tone she despised, becoming gay and coaxing: ‘But, Anton darling, how can you be so
silly?’
She kissed him, he brightened, and said grumpily: ‘Well, Matty, of course you’re right.’
She left him, running, for it was late, and almost collided with a young man on the pavement, who said: ‘Mrs Knowell, just a moment.’ She stopped. ‘Were you at that meeting in the Location this afternoon? Would you care to make a statement about it?’
‘What for?’
‘I’m from the
News.’
Martha instantly sobered, and said: ‘You must see Mrs Van der Bylt.’
‘But she’s not in her office and I can’t get her at her house.’
‘Well, I’m sorry – and I’m very late for something.’ Martha ran off, thinking: Trouble, trouble, trouble! But she forgot about it, because there was the signing of the lease, and then getting the flat into some sort of shape so they could sleep in it, and she hadn’t bought any food yet. She had understood that from now on all the practical details of life would have to be dealt with by herself. This was such a reversal of her idea of Anton that she needed time to think about it.
When Mrs Van returned to her home from ‘the meeting in the Location’ (the reporters used this phrase first; and it stuck: thereafter, when anybody said, ‘the meeting in the Location’, it was in the way one might say: the year war broke out) she found herself faced with immediate demands on her temper and time of the kind she was very familiar with. As she entered the house her husband put his head around the door of his study and demanded to know where the servant had put his spectacles. Simultaneously, the house-boy – the servant in question – appeared to say that a missus was waiting in the living-room to see her.
‘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 socialist 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.