Martha Quest (14 page)

She stopped suddenly, in a dramatic silence, glared at him, shouted ‘
No!
’ and at once rattled on.

Charlie gave an immense, good-natured shrug, and went out. Immediately, Mrs Buss rested her hands, looked around the office, and demanded breathlessly, ‘What do you think of that for cheek?’ The girls laughed sympathetically and, it seemed, did not need to be told why it was cheek.

Martha, who was at sea, looked closely at Charlie when he came back to collect the empty cups. He was a tall and handsome young man, with a dark bronze skin, a small toothbrush moustache, and careless eyes. He was whistling a dance tune under his breath.

Mrs Buss watched him over her jigging hands, and then protested sharply, ‘Charlie!’

‘Yes, madam?’ he answered at once, turning to her.

‘We know you’re a dancing champion, you don’t have to whistle like that,’ she said, without expecting an answer, for she tore a sheet of paper out of her machine and inserted another without looking at him.

Charlie stopped his muted whistle; and then, with his black and gallant eyes fixed on her, sidled past her towards Mr Cohen’s door.

‘It’s all right, I’ll get his cup,’ she said firmly, flushed with anger. She glared at him; he looked back with, it seemed, appreciation of the duel, for his eyes were snapping with amusement.

‘Charlie,’ she said furiously, ‘you’re not going to ask Mr Cohen for that money!’

‘No, madam,’ he agreed, and gave a large and fatalistic shrug. With a humorous look at her, he went out and began a shrill whistle just outside the door.

‘Did you ever see anything like it?’ asked Mrs Buss, faint with indignation. ‘He’d go past
me
, into Mr Cohen’s office, and ask for an advance!’

Suddenly Martha asked, ‘What does he earn?’ and knew at once she should not have asked, or at least not in that tone of voice.

Mrs Buss said aggressively, ‘He earns five pounds a month. It’s more than he’s worth, by about four pounds. Have you ever heard of an office-boy earning that much? Why, even the head cook at McGrath’s earns only seven! Mr Cohen’s so softhearted…’ She was overcome by inarticulate indignation, and continued to type like a demon.

Martha reflected uneasily that she herself was to earn twelve pounds ten shillings, and an altogether unreasonable protest was aroused in her; for if she supported the complete equality of all races, then she must applaud this small advance towards it. On the other hand, because of her upbringing, she was shocked. She asked the blonde young woman next to her what Charlie did in the office, and was told that he delivered letters by hand, sent others to the post, made the tea and ran errands for the girls in the office.

‘He’s a real character, Charlie is,’ the girl added good-humouredly.

‘Mr Cohen makes a joke. He says, “The two best-dressed men in town are my brother”—that’s Max, you know—“and my office-boy.” ’ She looked at Martha to make sure she would laugh, and when Martha did she continued, ‘I like Charlie. He’s much better than most of the niggers, and that’s saying something, isn’t it?’

Martha agreed absent-mindedly that it was, while she argued with the voices of her upbringing. She had never heard of a native being paid more than twenty shillings a month. Her father’s boss-boy
earned twenty, after ten years’ service. With half her emotions she commended Mr Cohen for his generosity, both to herself and to Charlie, and with the other she fought down an entirely new fear—new to her, that is: she could not help feeling afraid that the gap between her and Charlie was seven pounds and ten shillings, in hard cash.

At half past four something happened which cannot be described as an incident, since she understood it occurred every day. The girls were covering their typewriters when the door swung open and in came a tall, fair woman, who simply nodded at Mrs Buss and stood waiting. Mrs Buss lifted her telephone receiver.

‘Here’s our beauty,’ muttered the blonde girl to Martha. ‘I wouldn’t mind her clothes, would you? These Jews always give their wives everything they want.’

Well, of course; what could Mr Cohen’s wife be called, if not ‘beauty’? But Martha was troubled by something else—that she was not the only female creature prepared to overlook Mr Cohen’s appearance. It had never entered her head that there could be a Mrs Cohen; but almost immediately the balance was redressed by a fresh conviction of injustice. Mrs Cohen was not, Martha decided, in the least beautiful; whereas Mr Cohen was—in any sense that mattered. Conventionally, she might be called tall, slim and elegant; Martha preferred to describe her as bony, brassy-haired and over-dressed. She wore a clinging white crepe afternoon suit, a white cap with dangling black plumes, and a great deal of jewellery. The jewellery was sound, but colourful. When Mr Cohen came out in answer to Mrs Buss’s call, Martha was still able to feel sorry for him; but she was at once forced to examine this emotion when she understood that all the women around her were feeling the same thing.

‘Poor man,’ said Mrs Buss calmly, as she came pushing her own narrow hips this way and that around the sharp desks, and pulling on black suede gloves. ‘Poor man. Oh, well, it’s not my affair.’ And she went out, at a discreet distance from her employer and his wife, watching them jealously.

When Martha arrived in the room she was prepared to call her home
, her mother and father were there, and she was angry. She had not expected them for at least a week; it seemed to be monstrously unfair that she had been tormented for years by those terrible preparations for the excursions over a seventy-mile stretch of road, and now, it seemed, there was no more necessity for preparations. Mr and Mrs Quest, like anybody else, had ‘come in for the afternoon’. Mr Quest was talking about the Great War with Mrs Gunn, the landlady, when Mrs Quest gave him an opportunity, for she was concerned to get Mrs Gunn to agree that girls were headstrong and unsatisfactory. Martha could hear this talk going on in the back veranda, through the fanlight of her room, which opened on to it. She sulkily refused to join them, but sat on her bed, waiting for what she expected would be a battle.

The room was large, and plainly furnished. The iron bed was low and spread with white, and reminded her of her own. There was simple brown coconut matting on the red cement floor, and a French door opened into a small garden filled with flowers. Beyond the garden lay a main road, and the noise was difficult for a country person who had learned
not
to hear only the din of thunder, the song of the
frogs, the chirping crickets. As she sat waiting on her bed, Martha was conscious of strain. She understood that her eardrums, like separate beings, were making difficult and painful movements to armour themselves against the sound of traffic. There was a quivering sensitiveness inside her ears. A big lorry roaring down the tarmac ripped across tender flesh, or so it felt; the
ching-ching
of a bicycle bell came sharply, almost as if it were in the room. She sat listening and painfully attentive, and at the same time marked the progress of the conversation next door. Her father was winning Mrs Gunn’s attention; it was becoming a monologue.

‘Yes, that was two weeks before Passchendaele,’ she heard. ‘And I had foreknowledge of it, believe it or not. I wrote to my people, saying I expected to be killed. I felt as if there was a black cloud pressing down on me, as if I was inside a kind of black velvet hood. I was out inspecting the wire—and then the next thing I knew, I was on the hospital ship.’

That these words should be following her still made Martha feel not only resentful but afraid. In spite of herself, even as she isolated each traffic sound in a difficult attempt to assimilate it, even while she looked at the rough and hairy surface of the coconut matting, she was seeing, too, the landscape of devastation, shattered trees, churned and muddy earth, a tangle of barbed wire, with a piece of cloth fluttering from it that had once been part of a man’s uniform. She understood that the roar of a starting car outside had become the sound of an approaching shell, and tried to shake herself free of the compulsion. She was weighted with a terrible, tired, dragging feeling, like a doom. It was all so familiar, so horribly familiar, even to the exact words her father would use next, the exact tone of his voice, which was querulous, but nevertheless held a frightening excitement.

When the door opened and her parents came in, Martha rose to meet them with the energy of one prepared to face the extremities of moral and physical persuasion; but all she heard was a grumbling note in Mrs Quest’s voice as she said, ‘It wasn’t polite of you not to come and have tea when you were asked.’ It was exactly as she might com
plain of Martha’s rude behaviour to visitors on the farm; and Martha was surprised into silence. ‘Well, dear,’ continued Mrs Quest, briskly moving around the room as if it were her own, ‘I’ve unpacked your things and arranged them, I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, and I moved the bed, it was in a draught, and you must be careful to sleep a lot.’ Noticing the look on Martha’s face, she hurried on: ‘And now Daddy and I must go back to the farm, we really hadn’t time to leave it, but you’re such a helpless creature, you look tired, do go to bed early.’

Martha, as usual, pushed away the invading feeling of tiredness and pointed out to herself that her sudden guilt was irrational, since she had not asked them to leave the farm and come in after her. She decided to leave this room at once for another which would be free of her mother’s atmosphere and influence.

Mr Quest was standing at the french door, his back to the women. ‘Mr Gunn must have been an interesting chap,’ he said thougtfully. ‘He was in the Somme country. Must have missed him by two weeks. Get Mrs Gunn to tell you about him some time, Matty, old chap. Died of gas from the war, she says. Pity those War Office blokes never understood that people could be ill because of the war, and it only showed afterwards. He got no compensation, she says. Damned unfair.’ He turned himself around, and his face had put on its absorbed, devoted look. He reached for a bottle in the skirts of his bush shirt—he always refused to change from his farm clothes when he came into town—and stood holding it, helplessly looking around. ‘A glass?’ he asked. Mrs Quest took it from him, measured his dose at the washstand, and he drank it down. ‘Well?’ he asked irritably, ‘it’s quite a way back, you know, with our old car.’

‘Coming,’ said Mrs Quest, guiltily, ‘coming.’ She moved Martha’s things on the dressing table to her own liking, and changed the position of a chair. Then she went across to Martha, who stood stiffly, in nervous hostility, and began patting her shoulders, her hair, her arms, in a series of fussy little pushes, as a bad sculptor might ineffectually push and pat a botched piece of work. ‘You look tired,’ she mur
mured, her voice sinking. ‘You look tired, you must sleep, you must go to bed early.’

‘
May!
’ exclaimed Mr Quest irritatedly, and Mrs Quest flew to join him. Martha watched them drive away, the thatched, rattling, string-bound machine jogging through the modern traffic. People turned and smiled indulgently at this reminder that it was a farming country—even, still, a pioneer country. Martha could not manage a smile. She stood tensely in the middle of the room and decided to leave at once.

Mrs Gunn knocked. The knock, a courtesy to which she was not accustomed, soothed Martha, and she said politely, ‘Come in.’

Mrs Gunn was a tall, large-framed woman with abundant loose flesh. She had faded reddish hair, pale, pretty blue eyes, and an air of tired good nature. ‘It was nice to speak to your mother,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t help wondering, a young thing like you by yourself.’

Martha was trying to frame words, which would convey, politely, that she was leaving, and that it was no fault of Mrs Gunn that she must. But Mrs Gunn talked on, and she found herself without the courage to say it.

‘…your mother says you don’t eat, and I must make you. I said you were providing for yourself, but I’d do what I could.’

‘There’s no need, Mrs. Van Rens—’ Martha stopped, confused. ‘I mean, Mrs Gunn. I eat like a horse.’

Mrs Gunn nodded comfortably. ‘You look as if you had a head on your shoulders. I told her, girls have sense these days. My Rosie was out and about two years before she married, and I never had to raise my voice to her. The thing is you must keep men in their place, so they know from the start they’re not getting something for nothing.’

Martha was ready to be sarcastic at this remark; but Mrs Gunn came over and kissed her, and she was warmed by gratitude into good humour.

‘If you want anything, just come to me. I know young things don’t want to be nagged at, but think of me like a mother.’

‘Thank you, Mrs. Van R—Mrs Gunn,’ said Martha gratefully, and Mrs Gunn went out.

Martha gazed around the room with as much dislike as if it had been contaminated. She looked into her drawers, and every crease and fold of her clothing spoke of her mother’s will. But she had paid the rent till the end of the month, and she could not afford to move. She flung all the clothes out onto the floor, and then rearranged them to her own taste, though no outsider would have seen any difference; she pushed the bed back to what she imagined had been its old position, but she was unobservant and did not accurately know what the position had been. Having finished, she was very tired; and although it was early, she undressed, and stood by the door and watched the cars go racing past, while their lights spun over her in blotches and streaks of gold, and over the flowers in the garden, touching them into sudden colour. Beyond the garden and the street, there were black shapes of trees against a dim night sky. It was the park. And beyond, the city; but she imagined its delights in terms of what she had read of London and New York. She dreamed of the moment when she would be invited to join these pleasures, while her eyes remained on the trees and she unconsciously compared their shapes with those of the skyline on the farm; and soon it was as if the farm had stretched itself out, like a long and shadowy arm across the night, and at its end, as in the hollow of a large, enfolding palm, Martha stood like a pigmy and safely surveyed her new life. And when she awoke in the morning and saw the sunlight warm and yellow over the coconut matting, she wondered sleepily if the water-cart brakes had given, for it was making such a noise; and she sat up, while the new room rearranged itself about her; and now her ears had been informed by her brain that this was not the water-cart but a delivery van, they began to ache in protest.

At the office that day, she was left to ‘keep her eyes open’ until after the lunch hour. Then Mr Max Cohen brought her a document to copy. She was so nervous, she had to start afresh three times; and when he came to fetch it, all that had been achieved were the words
‘Memorandum of an Agreement of Sale’ typed raggedly across the top of the sheet. She shrank under his impatient assurance that it did not matter in the least, and she must take her time. Her fingers were heavy and trembling, and her head was thick. To type two pages of his small neat writing into something clean and pleasant to look at seemed to her, just then, an impossibly difficult task. He went home without coming to her desk again; and she flung a dozen sheets of paper into the wastepaper basket, and decided she would come early next morning and do it before anyone else arrived.

Mrs Buss, on her way out, asked, ‘Have you got any certificates?’ Martha said no, she had learned to type at home. Mrs Buss said nothing consoling, but merely nodded absent-mindedly, for her eyes were on the elegant Mrs Jasper Cohen.

Martha left the office so humiliated she could hardly see where she was going. She was filled with a violent revulsion against the law and everything connected with it. What she said to herself was, I won’t spend the rest of my life typing this stupid jargon.

She stood at the corner of the street, with Mr Jasper Cohen’s money—or rather what was left of it—in her handbag, and watched a crowd of carefree young people going into McGrath’s Hotel, and felt sick with envy. Then she crossed the street and went into the offices of the
Zambesia News
. She was going to see Mr Spur, an old journalist, whom she had known ‘as a child’—that is to say, she had spent a month’s holiday with him and his wife about four years before. She was in the building about half an hour, and when she came out her face was hot with embarrassment. It had been so painful she could not bear to remember what had happened. What she must remember was that she had no qualifications whatsoever.

She understood, finally, the extent of the favour Mr Cohen was doing her; and next morning she was at her desk in a very chastened frame of mind. Her eyes were certainly opened, but she had no time to use them, for long before that first document was finished, several more arrived on her desk, and it was lunchtime before she knew it. She was very incompetent. She tried to persuade herself that the papers she
sent in, neatly clipped and tied with green tape in the form of the exquisite, faultless documents Mrs Buss turned out with such ease, were satisfactory. Mr Max Cohen received them with a noncommittal glance and a nod; and later Martha saw Mrs Buss doing them again. She was given no more. For a whole day she sat idle at her desk, feeling sick and useless, wishing that she could run away, wondering what would happen.

The fair, plump girl, Miss Maisie Gale, who sat next to her said consolingly, ‘Don’t lose any sleep over it. Just do what you can get away with, that’s my motto.’

Martha was offended, and replied with a stiff smile. Later, she was told to go to Mr Jasper Cohen’s office, and she went, while her heart beat painfully.

The ugly man was waiting quietly in his chair. It seemed to Martha that the pale face was paler than ever, and the flat, brownish-mauve lips moved several times before any sound came out. Then he pulled himself together. He settled the ungainly body firmly back in his chair, lifted a pencil with that fat protuberant hand, and said gently, ‘Miss Quest, I think we were mistaken in putting you on to skilled work so soon. I thought you said you had learned to type.’

‘I though I had,’ said Martha ruefully; and she was conscious that in using that tone she was again trading on the personal relation.

‘Well, well, it doesn’t matter; it couldn’t have been easy, learning by yourself, and I propose you take the following course. Will you go down to Polytechnic and take lessons in shorthand and typing for a few months, and in the meantime you can work with Miss Gale. You must learn to file too, and it won’t be wasted, in the long run.’

Martha eagerly assented, and at the same time registered the fact that working with Miss Gale was beneath her. She was surprised and flattered, for all the women in the office seemed so immeasurably above her, in their self-assurance and skill, that she saw them through a glowing illusion. She understood, too, that Mr Cohen was now about to give her a lesson, very kindly and tactfully, and she must listen carefully.

‘You see, Miss Quest, you are very young—you won’t mind me saying that, I hope? It is obvious you are intelligent, and—well, if I may put it like this, you’re not considering getting married next week, are you?’ He was smiling, in the hopeful but uncertain way of a person who finds it hard to make amusing remarks; and Martha quickly laughed, and he gratefully joined in. ‘No. Of course not. At eighteen there’s plenty of time. You shouldn’t marry too quickly. In this country I think there’s a tendency—however, that’s not my affair. Well, most girls work in an office simply to pass the time until they get married—nothing wrong with that,’ he hastened to assure her. ‘But my policy—our policy—is, I think, rather unusual: that we do not believe married women make bad workers. Some firms dismiss women as soon as they marry, but you will have noticed that all our senior girls are married.’