The Compound Manager said, drawing in his cheeks at the dryness of his last swallow of his whisky: “Helen … So … it’s a long time since you’ve deserted us. You like the city, eh? I don’t think you’ve been to see us since your parents went overseas—?”
“D’you know,” I said, smiling, “the last time I remember being in your house? The morning of the strike. A Sunday morning, when the Compound boys had a strike over their food, and I came with Daddy to see. They were standing about all over the garden, and we came inside — into this room — and Mrs. Ockert was giving everybody tea.”
“Oh, no!” he laughed, astonished. “—D’you hear that, Mab — Helen says the last time she was here was that time when we had the strike.”
“But that’s twelve — no, thirteen years ago,” objected Mr. Bellingan.
“You were with us,” I said. “I remember you were with us.”
“Heavens, Helen, you must have been here a number of times after that!” All the gentlemen laughed round me.
“Well, that’s the last time I remember!”
They all began to recollect the strike; like a performance of theatricals, taken earnestly at the time, that becomes amusing in the retelling. One had done this; the other had thought that. The Compound Manager put down his empty glass and, hands in his pockets, rocked on his heels, knowing, smiling, at a situation he had dealt with.
“Ah, but things were still done decently in those days,” said the Reduction Officer. Old men, confronted with two world wars, jet aircraft and atom bombs, sometimes spoke like this of the Boer War, in which they had fought: the last gentlemanly war. “This kind of thing coming up on Monday — we didn’t have that then. But of course the mine boys have always been the good old type of kraal native, not these cheeky devils from the town, don’t know what they want themselves, half the time, except trouble.”
And that was the one reference anyone there made to the May Day strike of African and colored workers which was only the duration of Sunday away from us.
When I went back to Johannesburg that Sunday evening I caught a fast train that did not stop at the Atherton Mine siding and so my father had to drive me in to Atherton to the station. We went slowly down the main street, arrested at every block by the traffic lights. The town had changed a great deal since I was a child, slowly, of course, and I had seen it changing, so that while it was happening I had not seen the alteration of the whole structural face, but merely the pulling down of this old building, the filling up of that vacant square where the khaki weed used to grow and the dogs clustered round a poor little vagrant bitch in season. But this evening I had the shock of discovering that in my mind the idea of Atherton carried with it a complete picture of the town the way it must have been when I was nine or ten years old: it rose up in connotation like a perfectly constructed model, accurate in every detail. And I saw that now it really was nothing more than a model, because that town had gone. The vacant lots blocked in in concrete, the old one-story shops demolished; with them the town had gone. A department store was all glass and striped awnings where two tattered flags, a pale Union Jack and a pale Union flag, had waved above the old police barracks. A new bank with gray Ionic columns and a bright steel grille stood on the corner where my mother’s grocer had been; the grocer was now a limited company with a five-story building, delicatessen, crockery and hardware departments, further down the street. As I say, all this had happened gradually, but I saw it suddenly now; it did not match the Atherton alive in the eye of my mind. In the shadow of two buildings a tiny wood-and-iron cottage lived on; a faint clue. Here at least, the one Atherton fitted over the other, and in relation to this little house I could fade away the tall irregular buildings, and place the vanished landmarks where I had looked or lingered.
Sitting beside my father while he changed gears and drew away as if the car were a live creature to be treated considerately, I felt queerly that it was as impossible for me ever to walk in and out the shops of this real Atherton as it was for me to walk again in the small village that had gone.
On my lap I held the paper bag my mother had given me before I left. “Half the fruitcake,” she had said, and I knew that inside it would be wrapped in a neat sheet of grease-proof paper, the kind that had wrapped my school lunches. “No good my keeping it all, there’s no one to eat it. And if I give you the whole, it’s the same thing, isn’t it—” And she had stopped in cold embarrassment at her own voice, that had implied that I was alone, and so doing, had reminded both of us that I wasn’t, that someone would be there to help me eat my mother’s fruitcake. She had stiffened and answered with offended monosyllables the commonplaces, suitably removed from the subject, about which I went on talking to her. I suppose it was funny, really, and perhaps I should have been secretly amused. But I had only wanted to say to her — I don’t know why—: Mother, I haven’t changed. Look, this is me; you know me: just as I have always been, before I could walk and before I could speak and before I had loved a man and taken him into my body. And I thought, She will never recognize me, she will never know me again. Even if I could speak it would not alter it.
I said good-by to Daddy on the platform. There was a tranquillity in him, as if he were seeing his daughter off to school after a week end at home; there is the certainty that there will be many other week ends when she will be coming home. As I kissed his cool shaven cheek, the cheek of an aging man with little tendrils of broken vein under the thin skin, I had again the queer feeling I had had in the main street of Atherton. I would keep coming; but the way I came would never be coming back.
The train rocked into speed, clacked through the Mine siding without stopping. The tin shelter marked EUROPEANS ONLY, the fading shout of Mine natives jumping back exaggeratedly as we passed, the dark, ragged gum plantation that hid the Mine, the Recreation Hall, the rows of houses and my parents’ house itself. A single dusty light burned already above the siding, although it was not yet dark.
There were a great many natives on all the stations, but that was nothing unusual for a Sunday night. Neither was the air of excitement, which one like myself, deaf to the meaning of the words, found in their voices. Sunday clothes, beer, and the still greater intoxication of leisure commonly accounted for that. At one of the larger stations I noticed several men wearing rosettes. The train jolted them away; the outcrop of the gold reef which ran along under the ground began to pass my window again: shaft heads, old untidy mine dumps with the cyanide weirdly hardened and fissured by years of rain, new dumps geometrically exact as the pyramids, towns like Atherton, brickfields, smoking locations, mines, clumps of native stores on the veld — the windows wired over for Sunday — another dump, another mine, another Atherton. Everywhere, gradually sparsened by the increase of human rubble, the cosmos which sprang up every autumn. Even when first I had started traveling to University, they had been a thick wake in the path of the train, in many places. Now they showed pink and white among the khaki weed which was stifling them out; when the train stopped at a small station I could smell it, rank on the cooling air and the smell of water. Below the station was one of the dams that chemical infiltration from the Mine colored mother-of-pearl, making, by incidental artifice and a strange reversal of the usual results of man’s interference with nature, something beautiful that was not.
At this little station a newsbill stood against the wire fence, though apparently the paper boy had sold out his stock of papers and left. It was rucked up under the wire frame that held it to a board: STRIKE SITUATION: POLICE PREPARED FOR TOMORROW. Of course not — those were not rosettes: no wonder the men weren’t dressed like a football team. Freedom Day badges. Yet I could not feel anything about the strike that was coming tomorrow, the. strike that, the whole of the previous week in Johannesburg, we had talked of. Neither fear nor apprehension nor curiosity at the nearness of this threat — to ourselves? to the Africans themselves? — that would soon be here; soon now. Tomorrow something might get up on its feet that was being fed for such a moment every day. Nobody knew what it would be like, what it could do; this thing to the Africans a splendid creature of their own power, to the white men a monster of terror. Even people like Paul, Laurie, Isa, myself, had to say to ourselves: Maybe this will be the day when the patient hands will come down in blows, when our mouths will be stopped for the things we have not said.