It pushed up against her throat and she had to say it; it seized her and poured out of her with something of the uncontrolled violence of the emotional babble that comes out of a person under gas. “What do you think people think of you? The girls you went to school with, you won’t look at. Of course not. They’re content with their jobs and the decent people they’ve known since they were children. And I have to have Mrs. Tatchett saying to me, What’s wrong with Basil? — Yes, I’m telling you, she came to me the other day and asked me straight out, and I admire her for it. What’s wrong with my Basil, she said, that Helen stayed at home rather than go to the Halloween dance with him and she never came to the cocktail party we had for his graduation? After all, he goes to the University the same as she does, why doesn’t she consider him good enough?”
“Good enough,” I flashed out. “That’s all they ever think of, the petty snobs. The only reason why one should be friendly with anyone is because they’re good enough.”
My mother turned on me. “No, you like to roll in the mud. Anything so long as it’s not what any other reasonable person likes. You’d rather be seen running about with the son of a Jew from the native stores, that’s much nicer, someone brought up among all the dirt and the kaffirs. He must be a finer person, of course, than anyone decently brought up by people of our own standing.”
A kind of thrill of getting to grips with real issues went through me. “Ah, I thought that would come. You’ve had that on your chest a long time. And you’ve always pretended to be so polite to Joel. And all the time you’re as bigoted as the rest. Worried because all the old crows of the Mine saw your daughter out with a Jew. Well, you can tell them to mind their own damn business, I’ll be friendly with whom I choose. And I’m not interested in their standards or who they think would be suitable for me. You can tell them.”
“We’ve got nothing against the boy,” said my father. “No one’s saying anything against the boy. But why him, rather than anyone else?”
“Why?”—I was almost laughing with excitement. “Because he’s alive, that’s why. Because he’s a real, live, thinking human being who’s making his own life instead of taking it ready-made like all your precious little darlings of sons on the Mine.”
“Have him,” said my mother shrilly. The venom between us seemed like a race that we were shouting on. “Why don’t you marry him? That would be nice. You can sit on a soapbox outside the store and shout at the natives. That’ll be nice for your father, after he’s worked himself up to a decent position to give you a background.”
I looked at her. “It would kill you, wouldn’t it? It would kill you to have the Manager ask after your daughter, who married the Jew from the Concession store. Well, don’t worry. He wouldn’t have me. He can find something better than the half-baked daughter of a petty official on a gold mine. He’ll want a richer life than a person with my background can give him.” I did not knaw where this came from in me, but all at once it was there, and it seemed to become true in the saying.
“After all, Helen, be reasonable,” my father was insisting, on the perimeter of this. “How can you have a native staying in the house? I’ve got to think of my position too, you know. It’s our bread and butter. What does it look like? I can’t do things like that. I’ve got a responsibility, my girl. Next thing is it will be going round the Group that I’m a Communist.”
“You disgust me. You both disgust me,” I said fiercely, half-weeping, half-laughing in shame at the shrill crescendo of pettiness of the scene that, inescapably, caught us all up for what we were. Like a certain shape of nose or tone of skin it showed in all of us. I had it, too. I burned for the dignity and control my blood betrayed. “Do you hear? You disgust me.”
“That’s all right,” said my mother. Her anger seemed to tremble meltingly through her, like a fire lambently consuming a bush. “That’s all right.” It was as if I had handed my words to her like a knife. The danger of them seized us both, but it was done. She would not give it back to me; I could not take it from her.
At that moment Anna walked in with the sweet, and her detached and servile presence, a kind of innocence of ignorance, showed up by contrast the peculiar horror that was in the room. She came in on her sloppy, shuffling slippers, and went out again, looking at no one. In the sudden, mid-air silencing of her presence, the intensity of the room was like that of a room enclosed by a hurricane. And all the stolid evidence of ordinary things, the familiar furniture, the food on our plates, the crocheted cover with the shells over the water jug, took on the awful quality of unknowing objects in a room where violence has been done.
When she had gone the silence remained.
My mother began to ladle stewed fruit into the three bowls. Suddenly she burst into weeping and ran from the room.
She cried like a man; it had always been hard for her to cry.
Chapter 18
I went to Joel. I had not seen much of him lately, but I went to him with an instinctive selection of the one person I needed to counter the situation at home. I telephoned him in the morning and we arranged to meet for lunch at Atherton’s one tearoom. Over breakfast and the business of dressing our household went about in silence, a kind of shame which made everything secretive and perfunctory, like the trembling hand and dizzy air that harks back from a hang-over to the excess that reeled behind it. My mother did not speak to me. But as I made ready to leave the house I heard her complaining to Anna behind the closed kitchen door, the familiar plaint of the mother who has “done all she can” for a callously wrong-headed child. The door was closed to exclude me, but her voice was as heedless of my being able to hear it as if I had been a child too small to understand anything except the tone. I could also hear the murmur of agreement from Anna like the hum of responses from a chapel congregation.
The tearoom was not a good place to meet because it was always full of Atherton women and women from the Mine, dropping in for tea between shopping. At eleven o’clock, too, the lawyers came over for the recess from the courthouse near by, and sat at two large tables to themselves, their heads together, very conscious of their serious purpose as compared with that of the women. Now it was school holidays in addition, and many women whom I knew gave me the smile of patronizing frankness used by married women toward young girls, as they trailed children in like strings of sausages, holding hands and straggling behind. I sat and waited for Joel in the atmosphere that smelled of warm scones and lavender water. The waitress said: “How’s your mother?” and dusted crumbs importantly off the table before me. Other women came up and spoke to me. Say hello to Helen, dear. — Won’t you? Oh, the cat’s got away with her tongue. That’s it, you know. Helen, the cat’s got away with her tongue. Laughter from the woman and myself. Well, remember me to your mother, dear? Daddy all right?
In between I sat in a kind of listless daze, as if I were not there at all. I kept thinking: I want to go away. But there was no indignation, no strength in the idea any more. I did not want to be at home, but there was nowhere else I wanted to be, either. Often since then I have known the same grogginess of the spirit, that comes from emotional excess and, like any other bankruptcy, has no choice but to be passive. Sitting in the Atherton tearoom that hot day in November, I knew for the first time the distaste of no-feeling, the incredible conviction one hasn’t the strength to discover with anything more than a listless horror like nausea that not to care about the love that agonized you is more agonizing than the agony itself; to have lost the motive of anger is worse than living anger was.