The Grass Is Singing

by Doris Lessing

And again, some days later, as if he had been thinking in the interval, he asked: “Did Jesus think it right that people should kill each other?” This time she was angry at the implied criticism, and she answered coldly that Jesus was on the side of the good people.

“Mission boy,” he replied. “The only decent one I’ve ever had.” Like most South Africans, Dick did not like mission boys, they “knew too much.” And in any case they should not be taught to read and write: they should be taught the dignity of labor and general usefulness to the white man.

But she felt as if she were in a dark tunnel, nearing something final, something she could not visualize, but which waited for her inexorably, inescapably.

They were like two antagonists, silently sparring. Only he was powerful and sure of himself, and she was undermined with fear, by her terrible dream-filled nights, her obsession.

People who live to themselves, whether from necessity or choice, and who do not trouble themselves about their neighbors’ affairs, are always disquieted and uneasy if by some chance they come to know that other people discuss them. It is as though a sleeping man should awake and find round his bed a circle of strangers staring at him.

He was not particularly impressed with the youth one way or the other; he was the usual type; the self-contained, educated Englishman who spoke in a la-di-da way as if he had a mouthful of pearls.

He had brought with him a suitcase full of books, which he stacked round the circular wall of his hut: books on the color question, on Rhodes and Kruger, on farming, on the history of gold. But, a week later, he picked up one of them and found the back eaten out by white ants. So he put them back in the suitcase and never looked at them again. A man cannot work twelve hours a day and then feel fresh enough for study.

“Complete nervous breakdown,” diagnosed Tony, who was just off to bed. He had the kind of mind that is relieved by putting things into the words: the phrase was an apology for Mary; it absolved her from criticism.

“There was once an Empress of Russia who thought so little of her slaves, as human beings, that she used to undress naked in front of them.”

He held it as illiterate natives always handle printed paper: as if it is something that might explode in their faces.