Martha Quest. Doris Lessing

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      Martha telephoned the McDougalls to ask if they were going to the station. They were not. She asked the Van Rensbergs; Marnie said awkwardly that Pop didn’t often go to the station these days. Finally she telephoned Mr McFarline, the old miner from the small working in the Dumfries Hills; and he said yes, he was going to town tomorrow. She told her mother she would get a lift back (for ‘town’ in this case meant the city, not the station, as it sometimes did), and added, with the apparently deliberate exaggeration which was so infuriating, ‘If I don’t get a lift, I’ll walk.’ Which of course was absurd, infringed one of the taboos – ‘a young white girl walking alone’, etc. – and was calculated to provoke an argument. The argument immediately followed; and both women appealed to Mr Quest

      ‘Why shouldn’t she walk?’ demanded Mr Quest vaguely. ‘When I was a young man in England, I used to walk thirty miles an afternoon and think nothing of it.’

      ‘This isn’t England,’ said Mrs Quest tremulously, filled with horrid visions of what might happen to Martha if she encountered an evil native.

      Martha came back with, ‘I walk miles and miles all over the farm, but that doesn’t matter for some reason. How can you be so illogical?’

      ‘Well, I don’t like it, and you promised not to go more than half a mile from the house.’

      Martha laughed angrily, and chose this moment to say what until now she had been careful to keep dark: ‘Why, I often walk over to the Dumfries Hills, or even to Jacob’s Burg, I’ve been doing it for years.’

      ‘Oh, my dear,’ said Mrs Quest helplessly. She had known quite well that Martha was doing this, but to be told so now was another thing. ‘What would happen if a native attacked you?’

      ‘I should scream for help,’ said Martha flippantly.

      ‘Oh, my dear …’

      ‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous,’ said Martha angrily. ‘If a native raped me, then he’d be hung and I’d be a national heroine, so he wouldn’t do it, even if he wanted to, and why should he?’

      ‘My dear, read the newspapers, white girls are always being ra – attacked.’

      Now, Martha could not remember any case of this happening; it was one of the things people said. She remarked, ‘Last week a white man raped a black girl, and was fined five pounds.’

      Mrs Quest said hastily, ‘That’s not the point; the point is girls get raped.’

      ‘Then I expect they want to be,’ said Martha sullenly; and caught her breath, not because she did not believe the truth of what she said, but because of her parents’ faces: she could not help being frightened. For they were united for once, in genuine emotion, and began lecturing her on the consequences of her attitude. It ended with ‘and so they’ll drive us into the sea, and then the country will be ruined, what would these ignorant blacks do without us.’ And the usual inconsequent conclusion: ‘They have no sense of gratitude at all for what we do for them.’ It had all been said so often that it rang stale and false for both sides; and Martha remained silent in a way which they could take as an agreement, for comfort’s sake.

      Next morning she was waiting down on the track, by the signpost in the long grass, for Mr McFarline; and they made the journey to the station in just over ten minutes.

      Mr McFarline was a charming and wicked old Scotsman, who lived alone on his mine, which he worked in a way which cost him the very minimum in money, but a good deal in human life. There were always accidents on his mine. Also, his native compound was full of half-caste children, his own. He was extremely wealthy, and very popular. He gave generously to charity, and was about to stand for Parliament for one of the town constituencies. Because of the work in connection with getting himself elected, he often went into town.

      As the car raced dangerously through the trees, he squeezed Martha’s knee in an experimental way and tried to put his hand up her skirt. She held the skirt down, and moved coolly away to the other side of the car, as if she had not noticed the action. So he took his hand away, and concentrated on showing her how nearly it was possible to escape death, with perfect sangfroid, at every bend of the road. He took the paint off his back mud-guard at the last raking turn; and they stopped before Sock’s store in a billowing cloud of dust. Martha’s heart was beating wildly for several reasons. No one had ever tried to put his hand up her skirt before, and she was petrified at the wild driving. She looked confused and alarmed; and the old Scotsman decided to see her as the little girl he had known for years. He took a ten-shilling note from his stuffed wallet, and gave it to her.

      ‘For when you go back to school,’ he said bluffly.

      Martha almost handed it back; but was unable to partly because ten shillings was such a large sum for her, and partly because of a feeling which she described to herself as: If I refuse it, he will think it’s because of the way he tried to touch me. She thanked him politely for the lift, and he roared away over the railway track on the road to the city, singing, ‘You’re a bonny lassie …’

      She had the book on the Jewish question (which she had not re-read, thinking it unnecessary to gild the already sound coinage of her opinions) under her arm. She went over to the kaffir store. Mr Cohen greeted her, and lifted the counter for her. He was a short, squat man; his hair was a close-growing, crinkling cap of black; his skin was pallid and unhealthy. He had, she thought secretly, the look of a toad, or something confined and light-shunning; and in fact he was hardly ever away from his counter; but the commercial look of the small shopkeeper was tempered in him by purpose and dignity, which was not only because of his ancient culture, but because this penniless immigrant from Central Europe had chosen such a barren place, such exile, for the sake of his brilliant sons. His eyes were black and wise and shrewd, and it was impossible not to like him. And yet Martha found him repulsive, and was guilty; it was strange that she could find the oily fatness of the Greek Socrates repulsive without any sense of guilt at all, but this question of anti-Semitism, this shrinking nerve, put her on guard against herself, so that her manner with Mr Cohen was always strained.

      In the back room Martha found Solly, alone; and was pleased that the brotherly solid act could not be repeated. СКАЧАТЬ