Back on the farm, he took himself to task. This would end in marriage if he were not careful, and he simply could not afford it. That was the end of it, then; he would forget her, put the whole thing out of his mind. Besides, what did he know about her? Nothing at all! Except that she was obviously, as he put it, ‘thoroughly spoiled’. She was not the kind to share a struggling farmer’s life. So he argued with himself, working harder than he had ever done before, and thinking sometimes, ‘After all, if I have a good season this year I might go back and see her.’ He took to walking ten miles over the veld with his gun after his day’s work to exhaust himself. He wore himself out, grew thin and haunted-looking. He fought with himself for two months, until at last one day he found himself preparing to take the car into town, exactly as if he had decided it long ago, and as if all his exhortations and self-discipline had been nothing but a shield to hide from himself his real intention. As he dressed he whistled jauntily, but with a crestfallen undertone; and his face wore a curious little defeated smile.
As for Mary, those two months were a long nightmare. He had come all the way in from his farm after meeting her once for five minutes, and then, having spent an evening with her, had not thought it worth his while to come back. Her friends were right, she lacked something. There was something wrong with her. But she clung to the thought of him, in spite of the fact that she said to herself she was useless, a failure, a ridiculous creature whom no one wanted. She gave up going out in the evenings, and remained in her room waiting for him to call for her. She sat for hours and hours by herself, her mind numb with misery; and at night she dreamed long grey dreams in which she struggled through sand, or climbed staircases which collapsed as she reached the top, letting her slide back to the bottom again. She woke in the mornings tired and depressed, unable to face the day. Her employer, used to her inevitable efficiency, told her to take a holiday and not to come back till she felt better. She left the office, feeling as if she had been thrown out (though he could not have been nicer about her breakdown) and stayed all day in the club. If she went away for a holiday she might miss Dick. Yet what was Dick to her, really? Nothing. She hardly knew him. He was a spare, sunburnt, slow-voiced, deep-eyed young man who had come into her life like an accident, and that was all she could say about him. And yet, she would have said it was for his sake she was making herself ill. All her restlessness, her vague feelings of inadequacy, centred on him, and when she asked herself, in chilly dismay, why it should be he, rather than any of the other men she knew, there was no satisfactory reply.
Weeks after she had given up hope, and had gone to the doctor for a prescription because ‘she was feeling tired’ and had been told she must take a holiday at once, if she wanted to avoid complete breakdown; when she had reached a stage of misery that made it impossible for her to meet any of her old friends, because of her obsession that their friendship was a cloak for malicious gossip and real dislike of her, she was called to the door again one evening. She was not thinking about Dick. When she saw him it took all her self-control to greet him calmly; if she had shown her emotion he might after all have given her up. By now he had persuaded himself into believing she was a practical, adaptable, serene person, who would need only a few weeks on the farm to become what he wanted her to be. Tears of hysteria would have shocked him, ruined his vision of her.
It was to an apparently calm, maternal Mary that he proposed. He was adoring, self-abasing, and grateful when she accepted him. They were married by special licence two weeks later. Her desire to get married as quickly as possible surprised him; he saw her as a busy and popular woman with a secure place in the social life of the town, and thought it would take her some time to arrange her affairs: this idea of her was part of her attraction for him. But a quick marriage fell in with his plans, really. He hated the idea of waiting about the town while a woman fussed with clothes and bridesmaids. There was no honeymoon. He explained he was too poor really to afford one, though if she insisted he would do what he could. She did not insist. She was very relieved to escape a honeymoon.
It was a long way from the town to the farm – well over a hundred miles; and by the time he told her they had crossed the boundary, it was late at night. Mary, who was half asleep, roused herself to look at his farm, and saw the dim shapes of low trees, like great soft birds, flying past; and beyond it a hazy sky that was cracked and seamed with stars. Her tiredness relaxed her limbs, quietened her nerves. Reaction from the strained state of the last few months was a dulled acquiescence, a numbness, that was almost indifference. She thought it would be pleasant to live peacefully for a change; she had not realized how exhausted she was, after those years of living geared to a perpetual demand for the next thing. She said to herself, with determination to face it, that she would ‘get close to nature’. It was a phrase that took away the edge of her distaste for the veld. ‘Getting close to nature’, which was sanctioned, after all, by the pleasant sentimentality of the sort of books she read, was a reassuring abstraction. At the weekends, when she worked in town, she had often gone out for picnics with crowds of young people, to sit all day on hot rocks in the shade, listening to a portable gramophone playing dance music from America, and had thought of that, too, as ‘getting close to nature’. ‘It is nice to get out of the town,’ she would say. But like most people, the things she said bore no relation at all to the things she felt: she was always profoundly relieved to get back to hot and cold water in taps and the streets and the office.
Still, she would be her own mistress: that was marriage, what her friends had married for – to have homes of their own and no one to tell them what to do. She felt vaguely that she had been right to marry – everyone had been right. For, looking back, it seemed to her that all the people she had met were secretly, silently but relentlessly, persuading her to marry. She was going to be happy. She had no idea of the life she had to lead. Poverty, which Dick had warned her of with a scrupulous humility, was another abstraction, nothing to do with her pinched childhood. She saw it as a rather exhilarating fight against odds.
The car stopped at last and she roused herself. The moon had gone behind a great luminous white cloud, and it was suddenly very dark – miles of darkness under a dimly starlit sky. All around were trees, the squat, flattened trees of the highveld, which seem as if pressure of sun has distorted them, looking now like vague dark presences standing about the small clearing where the car had stopped. There was a small square building whose corrugated roof began to gleam whitely as the moon slowly slid out from behind the cloud and drenched the clearing with brilliance. Mary got out of the car and watched it drive away round the house to the back. She looked round her, shivering a little, for a cold breath blew out of the trees and down in the vlei beyond them hung a cold white vapour. Listening in the complete silence, innumerable little noises rose from the bush, as if colonies of strange creatures had become still and watchful at their coming and were now going about their own business. She glanced round at the house; it looked shut and dark and stuffy, under that wide streaming moonlight. A border of stones glinted whitely in front of her, and she walked along them, away from the house and towards the trees, seeing them grow large and soft as she approached. Then a strange bird called, a wild nocturnal sound, and she turned and ran back, suddenly terrified, as if a hostile breath had blown upon her, from another world, from the trees. And as she stumbled in her high heels over the uneven ground and regained balance, there was a stir and a cackle of fowls that had been wakened by the lights of the car, and the homely sound comforted her. She stopped before the house, and put out her hand to touch the leaves of a plant standing in a tin on the wall of the verandah. Her fingers were fragrant with the dry scent of geraniums. Then a square of light appeared in the blank wall of the house, and she saw Dick’s tall shape stooping inside, hazed by the candle he held in front of him. She went up the steps to the door, and stood waiting. Dick had vanished again,