Doris Lessing - Martha Quest

There had been a challenge that she had refused. But the wave of nostalgia made her angry. She knew it to be a falsity; for it was a longing for something that had never existed, an ‘ecstasy’, in short. There had been no ecstasy, only difficult knowledge. It was as if a beetle had sung. There should be a new word for illumination.

She saw that she was standing off the road in the grass, staring at the two little bucks, who indifferently flicked their tails and grazed their way off into the bush. Martha thought that she had often shot these little creatures, and that she would never do so again, since they had shared the experience with her. And even as she made the decision, she was as helplessly irritable as if she had caught herself out in a lie which was pointless. She felt, above all, irritable; not sad, merely flat and stale; the more because not five minutes after ‘the moment’ it had arranged itself in her mind as a blissful joy; it was necessary, apparently, to remember the thing as an extremity of happiness.

She walked slowly homewards, taking a short cut along the fence through the mealies. The ground was hard and packed, cracked across with drought under her feet, which ached, for her sandals were meant for show and not for use. She climbed the hill draggingly, and went to her room, so as to compose herself before meeting her parents, or rather, her mother, for to meet her father was rather like trying to attract the attention of an irritable spectre.

Alas for visions and decisions. In her bedroom she felt nothing but angry resentment: against the people in the district, against Mr McFarline, against Marnie, who would now ‘drop over’ and borrow patterns.

Her mother entered with the oil lamp, for it was dusk, and exclaimed, ‘My dear, I was worrying, and you don’t even tell me you’re home.’

‘Well, there’s no harm done, safe and sound and still a virgin.’

‘My dear –’ Mrs Quest checked herself, and hung the lamp on the wall. The flame vibrated bluely, then sent a pleasant yellow glow over the uneven plaster, and up to the thatch, where a strand of tarnished silver glistened among shadow. ‘How did you get back?’ asked Mrs Quest cautiously.

‘Walked,’ Martha said aggressively; and even felt disappointed because Mrs Quest did not protest.

‘Well, come on, we’re going to have supper now.’

Martha followed her mother obediently, and suddenly found herself saying, in a bright flippant voice, ‘That dirty old man, Mr McFarline, he tried to make love to me.’ She looked at her father but he was slowly crumbling his bread in time with his thoughts.

Mrs Quest said hastily, ‘Nonsense, you’re imagining it, he couldn’t have done.’

The suggestion that she was too young for such attentions made Martha say, ‘And then he had an attack of conscience, and offered me ten shillings.’ She giggled uncomfortably, with another glance at her abstracted father; and Mrs Quest said, ‘He knows better, he’s too nice.’

‘Nice,’ said Martha acidly, ‘with a compound full of his children.’

Mrs Quest said hastily, with a glance at the servant who was handing vegetables, ‘You shouldn’t listen to gossip.’

‘Everybody knows it, and besides, I heard you saying so to Mrs McDougall.’

‘Well, but that doesn’t mean – I don’t think …’

‘Damned hypocrisy,’ said Martha, ‘all this colour-bar nonsense, and Mr McFarline can sleep with whoever he likes and –’

‘My dear,’ said Mrs Quest, with a desperate look towards the impassive servant, ‘do think of what you’re saying.’

‘Yes, that’s all you think of, provided all the lies and ugliness are covered up.’

Mrs Quest raised her voice in anger, and the battle was on; mother and daughter said the things both had said so often before; not even waiting for the other to finish a sentence, until the noise caused Mr Quest to snap out, ‘Shut up, both of you.’

They looked at him immediately, and with relief; one might have supposed this was the result they intended. But Mr Quest said no more; after a baffled and exasperated glare, he dropped his eyes and continued to eat.

‘You hear what your father says?’ demanded Mrs Quest unfairly.

Martha was filled with frightened pain, at this alliance against her; and she exclaimed loudly, ‘Anything for peace, you and your Christianity, and then what you do in practice …’ But almost at once she became ashamed, because of the childishness of what she was saying. But the things we say are usually on a far lower level than what we think; it seemed to Martha that perhaps her chief grievance against her parents was this: that in her exchanges with them she was held down at a level she had long since outgrown, even on this subject, which, to her parents, was the terrifying extreme outpost of her development.

But her remark at least had had the power to pierce her father’s defences, for he raised his head and said angrily, ‘Well, if we’re so rotten, and you haven’t time for us, you can leave. Go on,’ he shouted, carried away by the emotions his words generated, ‘go on, then, get out and leave us in peace.’

Martha caught her breath in horror; on the surface of her mind she was pointing out to herself that her own father was throwing her out of her home – she, a girl of seventeen. Deeper down, however, she recognized this for what it was, an emotional release, which she should ignore. ‘Very well,’ she said angrily, ‘I will leave.’ She and her father looked at each other across the breadth of the table – her mother sat in her usual place at the head; and those two pairs of dark and angry eyes stared each other out.

It was Mr Quest who dropped his head and muttered, half-guiltily, ‘I simply cannot stand this damned fight, fight, fight!’ And he pettishly threw down his napkin. Immediately the servant bent and picked it up, and handed it to his master. ‘Thanks,’ said Mr Quest automatically, arranging it again across his lap.

‘My dear ,’ said Mrs Quest, in a small appealing voice to her husband.

He replied grumblingly, ‘Well, fight if you like, but not when I’m around, for God’s sake.’

Now they all remained silent; and immediately after the meal Martha went to her bedroom, saying to herself that she would leave home at once, imagining various delightful rescues. The parcel of books lay unopened on her bed. She cut the string and looked at the titles, and her feeling of being let down deepened. They were all on economics. She had wished for books which might explain this confusion of violent feeling she found herself in.

Next day she rose early, and went out with the gun and killed a duiker on the edge of the Big Tobacco Land (where her father had grown tobacco during his season’s phase of believing in it). She called a passing native to carry the carcase home to the kitchen which, as it happened, was already full of meat.

But put this way it implies too much purpose. Martha woke early, and could not sleep; she decided to go for a walk because the sunrise was spread so exquisitely across the sky; she took the gun because it was her habit to carry it, though she hardly ever used it; she shot at the buck almost half-heartedly, because it happened to present itself; she was surprised when it fell dead; and when it was dead, it was a pity to waste the meat. The incident was quite different from actually planning the thing, or so she felt; and she thought half-guiltily, Oh, well what does it matter, anyway?

After breakfast she again looked at Joss’s books, skimming through them rapidly. They were written by clearly well-meaning people who disliked poverty. Her feeling was, I know this already; which did not only mean that she agreed with any conclusion which proved hopelessly unfair a system which condemned her, Martha Quest, to live on the farm, instead of in London with people she could talk to. She made this joke against herself rather irritably, for she knew it to be half true. What she felt was, Yes, of course poverty is stupid so why say it again? How do you propose to alter all this? And ‘all this’ meant the farm, the hordes of deprived natives who worked it, the people in the district, who assumed they had every right to live as they did and use the natives as they pleased. The reasonable persuasiveness of the books seemed merely absurd when one thought of violent passions ranged against them. She imagined the author of books like these as a clean, plump, suave gentleman, shut in a firelit study behind drawn curtains, with no sound in his ears but the movement of his own thoughts.