I felt this in the form of a kind of uneasy bewilderment that now and then rose up like a barrier of language between myself and the young man. I could not fit him into the inherited categories of my child’s experience, and this made me obscurely anxious. … Two days before his leave was up I was alone with him for perhaps only the second or third time since I had arrived. We walked into the village together on a dull afternoon to get our hair cut and he said to me suddenly on the way back: “I suppose you’re going to go back and live there? — That life on the Mine is the narrowest, most mechanical, unrewarding existence you could think of in any nightmare.”
I was so surprised, shocked, that I stammered as if I had been caught out in some reprehensible act. “Well, Ludi, of course. I mean I live there—!”
He shook his head, walking on.
I felt indignant and unhappy at the same time. “I’ve always lived on the Mine. — I know you don’t like towns, you hated working underground, you like to be at the sea, who wouldn’t—” But even as I said it I was aware that no one I knew would dream of wanting to live buried away on the South Coast, not working. Why? It was an existence at once desirable because of its strangeness, yet in some way shameful.
He made a noise of disgust. “Grubbing under the earth in the dark to produce something entirely useless, and coming up after eight hours to take your place in the damned cast-iron sacred hierarchy of the Mine, grinning and bowing all the way up to the godly Manager on top, and being grinned and bowed at by everyone below you — not that there ever was anyone below me, except the blacks and it’s no privilege to sit on them since anyone can.”
“Oh, Ludi I laughed. He laughed, too, his wry smile with the corners of his mouth turning down.
“You drink in the pubs together and you play tennis on Saturdays together and you go to dances organized by the ladies. You live by courtesy of the Mine, for the Mine, in the Mine. And to hell with Jack so long as I’m all right, so long as my promotion’s coming. And I’ll grin at the Underground Manager and I’ll slap the shift boss on the back—”
“But what are you going to do?” He had admitted me to a plane of adulthood that released the boldness to ask something I had wondered in silence.
For once he turned to look at me, and it was with the patient smile that expects no comprehension, knows that a familiar barrier has been reached. “Look,” he said, “I don’t want to ‘get on.’ I’m happy where I am. All I want is the war to end so that I can get back here.”
“Shall you start up the chicken farm again?”
“It doesn’t much matter. Any sort of job would do so long as it brings in fifteen or twenty pounds a month. Just so’s mother and I can manage. She’s got a small income of her own.”
I was embarrassed by my own reaction. I knew that in my face and my silence I showed a deep sense of shock and a kind of disbelief that timidly tried to temper it. A struggle was set up in me; dimly I felt that the man acted according to some other law I did not know, and yet at the same time the law of my mother, the law of the people among whom I lived and by which I myself was beginning to live, made him outcast, a waster, a loafer, ambitionless; to be sighed over more than blamed, perhaps, like Pat Moodie, the son of one of the officials who had “wasted all his opportunities” and taken to drink. The phrases of failure came to my mind in response to the situation, because I had no others to fit it.
“No, thank you”—his voice was firm and serene—“I don’t want it. I don’t want the nice little job or the nice little family or the dreary little town or the petty little people. It doesn’t interest me”—he was looking at me rather shortsightedly through his glasses; he obviously did not expect or care for an answer or opinion from me—“and I have no desire whatever to get on with anything at all except living down here. — You should see the Pondoland Coast, you know, Helen. You people’ve no idea. … I go down there for a week or so to fish — some tinned stuff and my tackle, and sleep on the beaches. There are coral reefs there, under the deep water … you’ve never seen anything like it. Like some buried city of pink marble. And the fish!”
I looked at him curiously as he pushed a way for me through the wet bracken. Rain brushed off along the bleached hair on his red-brown arms, his bare legs had a curiously impersonal muscular beauty that would have astonished him if anyone had spoken of it: somehow his personal physical attributes existed in spite of him rather than as a conscious part of him, as a plant, being in its function of turning oxygen to sap, does not participate in the beauty of the flower which results and is blooming somewhere on it.
I tried to think of him in one of my father’s gray suits, in a shirt with arm bands to hold up the sleeves, like the men wore at the office. It did not seem possible. Suddenly the absurdity of it pleased me very much; I was laughing at the thought of the clerks at the office.
He was scrambling ahead of me up a bank and he half-turned at the sound. His hand went to the bright shaven hair at the nape of his neck. “It’s a bit of a mess, I suppose …?” he said, smiling. I shook my head, I was too out of breath to speak. “Mine too,” I gasped, catching up with him. The wet, the slither of the grass beneath our feet, and the sudden darkening of the air as the day ended unseen behind a muffling of cloud, filled us both with a kind of intoxication of energy. We tore home, ignoring the paths. I plunged with the child’s conscious craziness into every difficulty I could find, madly excited at myself. Sometimes I could not speak at all, but just stood, pointing at him and laughing.
The ten years between us were forgotten.
Ludi left on Saturday morning. In the day and a half between, I had felt rather than thought that he might say he would write to me. I kept out of the way of the mother and son almost unconsciously, leaving them to draw together before the fresh parting or, perhaps as unconsciously, they excluded me; but I felt all the time that the natural moment would arise when the only possible thing to say would be: I shall drop you a line when I get a chance, just to let you know what it’s like. Or: But of course you’ll tell me that when you write.
And it did seem to me that the moment came again and again, but Ludi smiled into the pause and did not even know that it was his. I watched this with the quiet, gradual disappointment of a child who has presumed too far upon the apparent understanding of a grownup for an imaginative game: suddenly, the ageless understanding being becomes simply an adult indulgently regarding rather than participating, and nothing, no dissimulation or protest, can deflect the child’s cold steady intuition of the fact. For the first time since I had left home, I felt lonely, but it was not for my mother and father or anything that I had left, but rather for something that I had not yet had, but that I believed was to come: a time of special intimate gaiety and friendship with some vague companion composed purely of an imaginative ideal of youth — an ideal that I would never formulate now, and that only later, when it had gone, would recognize as having existed all the time unnoticed in myself, because it was nothing concrete, but just the dreams, the uncertainty, the aspiration itself.