Write when you feel like it. When I think of you, in this place, you don’t seem quite true, you know. Figment of the imagination! End of my candle, so I’d better turn in.
Ludi.
P.S. Lost the piece of paper with the house address on it, so am sending this to your dad’s office. My regards to him and to your mother. L.
I had not read it so much as flown through the lines, alighting on the word “you.” “Well, Miss? And what about you?”—What looked like an island, a beckoning palm top, was as uncertain as a piece of floating vegetation, rootless in the tide. I hovered, went on. And in the last paragraph, there it was. A small island, soon explored, but the place where my heart came down and beaked its feathers. I read it over, and again. “When I think.” He thinks about me. But “When” … that means it isn’t often. Yet it might be. “You don’t seem quite true.” Oh, the happiness of it! Now I am the woman and the princess and the dream. Now it is like a sign on my forehead. “You don’t seem quite true.” A dream. Something that’s over, then; can’t believe it happened. Just forgotten, an incident, like that?
I read the whole letter over again, searching through every word, through the commonplaces, the information of the way he was living, the time, the weather — pushing it all aside like so much rubble. Now I would pick up a word or a phrase, as one fingers a pebble. But no. The repetition of “as I told you” seemed an intimacy, perhaps? Yes. Yes, that I could keep. The bit about his mother. This puzzled me. Of course, it could mean a special kind of confidence in me; of course.
Some sentences I read over to myself a dozen times. Aloud, they sounded different; with another intonation, the meaning changed. Every word of the letter seemed ambiguous; happiness came and went like the color in the bird’s wing, showing and going out as it falls through the sun.
I sat on my bed with the three thin sheets and the envelope spread evidence about me. Well, I had a letter, anyway. I rested in that.
But strangely, the mood of exaltation, of closeness to Ludi, was gone. It was only when I was in bed that night, late and awake, thinking about him as I remembered him on the farm, as I had done when I lay dreaming before my father had called me, that it came back.
Chapter 10
It is amazing on how little reality one can live when one … is very young. It is only when one is beginning to approach maturity that achievement and possession have to be concrete in the hand to create each day; when you are young a whole livable present, elastic in its very tenuousness, impervious in its very independence of fact, springs up enveloping from a hint, a memory, an idea from a book. On this slender connection, like a tube of oxygen which feeds a man while he moves in an atmosphere not his own, it is possible to move and breathe as if your feet were on the ground. Through the autumn and into winter, this was the way I lived now. The quiet, steeped autumn days passed, as if the sun turned the earth lovingly as a glass of fine wine, bringing out the depth of glow, the fine gleam; the banks of wild cosmos opened like a wake, with the cream and pink and gilt of an early Florentine painting, on either side of the railway cutting from Atherton to Johannesburg and spattered, intoxicating bees with plenty in the bareness of flat veld and mine dumps, out of ditches and rubbish heaps; the last rains brought the scent of rot like a confession from leaves that had fallen and lain lightly as feathers; the cold wind of the highveld, edged with the cut of snow it had passed on the Drakensberg, blew round the house, blowing bare round the bare Mine, blowing the yellow cyanide sand into curling miasmas and mistrals over the road; the Mine boys walked with only their eyes showing over blankets. I did an afternoon’s duty at the soldier’s canteen in Atherton twice a week; I worked for three weeks in my father’s office again as a relief for someone away on leave. There it was chilly in the mornings; I noticed winter. Dressed in warm clothes, the distance of the summer came to me. I went nowhere, yet I took great care of my appearance, spending hours before my mirror in the poor light that always showed me shadowy. Sometimes while my parents were out at tennis (they were proud that they still made the second league) I would spend the whole Saturday afternoon arranging and rearranging my hair. In the evening I would not go out, but sat reading beneath an elaboration of shining whorls and curls, formal as a Gothic cornice. My dresses were chosen each day with hesitation and care, my hands were manicured. All these rites were performed alone in my bedroom, in silence, in a depth of dream that held me, deep, far away, as deafness holds someone still and serene in a room full of talk. Any faint temptation to enjoy the distractions of the Mine — a fete, a party, a concert — was paid for and nullified by the immediate feeling of estranging myself from Ludi, and what Ludi thought. The fact that he was in Italy, that the South Coast was months away, made no difference. Like God, to deny his tenets was to lose him.
The letters I wrote to Ludi became more important to me than those I received from him. In them, I assumed our world in common. His, full of descriptions of places I could not imagine, always written from the moment of the present, seemed to have less and less to do with the Ludi of the South Coast, the bright hair, the shortsighted look, the warm strange breast. In time, the infrequent letters were not the painful thrill, the charged token they had been. I could almost have done without them entirely. … For while believing that I was living Ludi’s way of life by keeping aloof from that of my home and the Mine, I had all the time been creating a third way of my own, as unconsciously as a spider salivates his thin silver lifeline of survival. The frailty of dreams, imagination and memory was changed and churned by some unsuspected emotional digestion into a vanity and cultivation of myself. Like most finished products, nothing could have resembled less the raw material of emotion from which it was processed. And also, like most survival changes, it was accomplished by personality, unrecognized and unrealized by the conscious mind.
I spent a great deal of time reading, and these were not books about which I would write to Ludi. I began to read poetry, Auden and T.S. Eliot, reading it always for the sound and feel of the words rather than for the meaning, which sometimes I sensed, but seldom knew with my intellect. Then I took Pepys’s diary out of the library, and Tobias Smollett. — There is a theory that, given the free choice to hand of various foods, babies who see them only as blurs of color and shape will instinctively choose those necessary for balanced sustenance; perhaps the same is true of a hungry mind. One book led me to another; a quotation from one author by another, a mention that a character was reading so-and-so, sent me to the source itself, so that I had Hemingway to thank for John Donne, and D. H. Lawrence to thank for Chekhov. But in nothing that I read could I find anything that approximated to my own life; to our life on a gold mine in South Africa. Our life was not regulated by the seasons and the elements of weather and emotion, like the life of peasants; nor was it expressed through movements in art, through music heard, through the exchange of ideas, like the life of Europeans shaped by great and ancient cities, so that they were Parisians or Londoners as identifiably as they were Pierre or James. Nor was it even anything like the life of Africa, the continent, as described in books about Africa; perhaps further from this than from any. What did the great rivers, the savage tribes, the jungles and the hunt for huge palm-eared elephants have to do with the sixty miles of Witwatersrand veld that was our Africa? The yellow ridged hills of sand, thrown up and patted down with the unlovely precision that marked them manufactured unmistakably as a sand castle; the dams of chemical-tinted water, more waste matter brought above ground by man, that stood below them, bringing a false promise of a river — greenness, cool, peace of dipping fronds and birds — to your nose as you sat in the train. The wreckage of old motorcar parts, rusting tin and burst shoes that littered the bald veld in between. The advertisement hoardings and the growing real-estate schemes, dusty, treeless, putting out barbed-wire fences on which the little brown mossies swung and pieces of torn cloth clung, like some forlorn file that recorded the passing of life in a crude fashion. The patches of towns, with their flat streets, tin-roofed houses, main street and red-faced town hall, “Palace” or “Tivoli” showing year-old films from America. We had no lions and we had no art galleries, we heard no Bach and the oracle voice of the ancient Africa did not come to us, was drowned, perhaps, by the records singing of Tennessee in the Greek cafés and the thump of the Mine stamp batteries which sounded in our ears as unnoticed as our blood.