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    Grass Is Singing: A Novel
    Grass Is Singing: A Novel
    Grass Is Singing: A Novel
    Ebook306 pages5 hours

    Grass Is Singing: A Novel

    By Doris Lessing

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    "There is passion here, a piercing accuracy, a rare sensitivity and power. . . . One can only marvel." — New York Times

    Set in Southern Rhodesia under white rule, Doris Lessing's first novel is at once a riveting chronicle of human disintegration, a beautifully understated social critique, and a brilliant depiction of the quiet horror of one woman's struggle against a ruthless fate.

    Mary Turner is a self-confident, independent young woman who becomes the depressed, frustrated wife of an ineffectual, unsuccessful farmer. Little by little the ennui of years on the farm works its slow poison. Mary's despair progresses until the fateful arrival of Moses, an enigmatic black servant. Locked in anguish, Mary and Moses—master and slave—are trapped in a web of mounting attraction and repulsion, until their psychic tension explodes with devastating consequences.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateMay 7, 2013
    ISBN9780062294999
    Grass Is Singing: A Novel
    Author

    Doris Lessing

    Doris Lessing was one of the most important writers of the second half of the 20th-century and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007. Her novels include The Grass is Singing, The Golden Notebook and The Good Terrorist. In 2001, Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in British literature. In 2008, The Times ranked her fifth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". She died in 2013.

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    Reviews for Grass Is Singing

    4/5

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    • 5/5
      There is so much that is amazingly good about this book. The prose, "effortless" and non-intrusive, the setting, which can never be forgotten and which looms over the protagonists through the bulk of the book, the utterly believable characters, the poverty and gruelling work. The main point of view character, Mary, reveals beauty and ugliness, always within the framework of her fatally wounded personality. I feel compassion for her even as I am appalled by her attitude and her behaviour. Her torment and her struggles in her own mind ring true.The only disappointment is the lack of insight into the one important black character. We watch him from without, unlike the others, and although there is some subtlety in how he is drawn, Lessing relies too much on Mary's impressions and on literary stereotypes for the reader to feel that she knows him. [SPOILER: In the end, his motivation is not revealed. The author, who has just for the first time shown us his viewpoint, shrugs off responsibility for greater illumination by saying it is impossible to say what his thoughts were at the end. Even though it was not impossible to say what everyone else's thoughts were. Hmmm.]A well wrought, effective, affecting story of racism, sexism, and the destruction of human beings from within.
    • 4/5
      Doris Lessing's first novel is set in Rhodesia during white colonial rule. The focus is on Mary Turner, wife of Dick Turner, a poor white farmer, as isolation, poverty, and lack of purpose eat away at her and lead to her mental deterioration, and, ultimately, her murder. (Happens in the first pages). This is a searing criticism of colonialism and racism. There is very little plot, and the book moves slowly over 15 years of day-to-day sameness. The heat and the African veldt are vividly portrayed, making the setting a major element in the book. I recognize the importance of this book, and the beauty of the writing. However, I remember liking it much more the first time I read it 30+ years ago.3 1/2 stars
    • 5/5
      A fabulous first novel from Doris Lessing published in 1950. Her story tells of the struggles and downfall of a farmer and his wife in what is now Zimbabwe in the 1940s. The writing is outstanding, portraying the innermost feelings of the couple. Any feelings held by black natives are omitted, leaving them anonymous and unknown, as they were treated. The topic of racism is repugnant, yet the story, however repellant and bleak, is spellbinding. The book opens with the announcement of Mary's murder, and then goes to back to her beginnings, her life and details of the eventual breakdown.
    • 5/5
      A brilliant book. Technically it is close to perfect. But the depth of feeling is what makes it so powerful. It was a very simple story. Yet, as the characters drift towards the inevitable finale that is revealed to begin the story, it is difficult not feel the pain of the lead characters. The utter loneliness they experience is palpable. The representation of repressed feelings is utterly compelling. As is the destruction that such a situation leads to.The sadness of the tale is made even more important by the fact that the conclusion is made inevitable because of the societal pressures that each character faces. Mary faces pressure from her familial past, her husband, her friends and everyone else she meets. Her disintegration had a devastating effect on me because it felt so believable. This is not to say she is a likable character. Rather, she is so compelling because she is so real.The depiction of the dual subjugation of both women and blacks in Southern Africa during the mid-20th century is wrenching. I would like to think we have changed greatly since this time. However, I don't think I really believe it. One of the greatest strengths of this book was expressing the way that racism exists in the minds of whites. This perspective allows us to better understand how even though the institutional situation may have changed, this dangerous and damaging mindset can still be present. It can grow and fester in any situation.The number of big subjects tackled in such a small is quite amazing. It touches on the role of women in society, marriage, racism, classism, colonialism, mental illness and more. I think this book is essential reading for almost everyone. It is not at all an easy read. There is no lightness to make the emotional blows more tolerable. But I have a certain appreciation for authors who can write without sugar coating the situation. So READ THIS BOOK, but do so without expecting much reprieve.
    • 5/5
      The Grass is Singing opens with the murder of Mary Turner, a white Southern Rhodesian's farmer's wife, by one of the farm's black workers. Whilst to the local police this is an open and shut case of simple "native" brutality, as we walk back through the years in Mary's life we discover that a long and complex road of disappointment and racial prejudice has ultimately laid the path to her murder.I found this incredibly layered novel to be profoundly psychoanalytical and disturbing. In 200 short pages Lessing manages to convey the utter horror of a black/white segregated 1940s Southern Africa in a way that affected me much more than other books I've read with this setting. Mary's loathing of "the natives" runs much deeper than her husband's, manifesting itself in untempered disdain and a complete inability to consider the black workers on any human level. Her husband Dick tries to operate his farm workforce with a level of fairness, yet one doesn't have to peel back the layers of the onion too far to see that this "fairness" is based on the doctrine of keeping the coloured man down in his place under the total control of the the white man.He was obeying the dictate of the first law of white South Africa, that is "Thou shalt not let your fellow whites sink lower than a certain point; because if you do, the nigger will see that he is as good as you are".This is not only a novel about racial hatred, however. The Grass is Singing is an acutely observant look at the human psyche, of how life's twists and turns slowly but surely sour and disappoint a once vibrant and popular woman until she loses herself completely into that which she had always so defiantly tried to avoid becoming. I've found this a very difficult book to review as there are so many facets to it, but what I think stands out most is it's starkly honest portrayal of how the white southern Africans consider their fellow black men to be entirely sub-human and requiring management in the same way as the beasts of the land.4.5 stars - a darkly disturbing read in many ways, but a profound and important one that will leave me thinking about it for some time.
    • 5/5
      One of her best!
    • 4/5
      Doris Lessing's first novel from 1950 is her imagined background to a newspaper clipping about the murder of a white farm wife by her black house servant in Southern Rhodesia which is reproduced at the beginning of the book. Lessing has said (listen to her appearance on the 2003 BBC World Book Club podcast on iTunes for example) that there was an actual news story of this nature that she remembered from her time growing up in Southern Rhodesia and that what interested her was all the unspoken and hidden background to the surface life of white-rule in that country. These were things such as the upper class whites ensuring that the poorer whites did not "let the side down", that masters and servants could co-exist as long as they did not view each other as human beings etc. Her original manuscript was apparently 3 times as long and had actually centred on the character of the English farm manager Tony Marston which the neighbouring rich farmer Slatter hires to try to save the farm of Dick and Mary Turner who have let it run down. Lessing ended up cutting 2/3rds of the book and having it instead centre on the dissolution of the Turner farm and the mental deterioration of both Mary and Dick Turner and the gradual ascendance of the servant Moses whose role in holding up the household reaches a point where it alarms both Slatter and Marston. The novel has lost none of its power and although its ending is known from the beginning it still holds you with a compelling attraction as you watch the death dance unfold.A few points off for the typos in this Perennial Modern Classics edition that I read, which were surprising to see in a much reprinted early work by a Nobel Prize winner. These started as early as pg. 2 "families " and pg. 9 "premptorily" & "Charlies" for example, but were more sparse later on.
    • 5/5
      A beautiful book. The prose flows so well, drawing you right into the book with the protagonist, making you part of the world. You feel the same sense of growing despair as things begin to crumble but, like Mary can't leave, somehow you find you can't turn away from the book. Mary's degeneration into madness seems such a natural progression that when we are brought up against an outsiders view we are shocked to find what she has become. Deeply moving and consuming at all points, right to the end this book carried me with it and left me feeling empty and drained. A beautiful work of literature.
    • 4/5
      I believe this is Doris Lessing's first novel. She has a great sense of place and the characters are worth looking into. Has an unsettling undertone.
    • 4/5
      A brutal, unsparing tale of colonialism as acted out through interpersonal relationships: not only those between coloniser and colonised, but also the fractal way colonialism infects the relationships between the colonisers.
    • 3/5
      I've slowly come to the conclusion that Doris Lessing's first novel is actually some kind of mini masterpiece: what at first appear to be flaws, turn out, on reflection, to be subtle strokes of genius. Like the fact that the main characters, Mary and Dick Turner, are frustratingly one-dimensional, almost like cardboard cut-outs. You know what, they're meant to be; it's the only way this story could have been told. It begins with the death of Mary, the white wife of a white Rhodesian farmer in colonial South Africa. A newspaper reports how the houseboy, Moses, who confessed at the scene, has been arrested. Lessing begins: "The newspaper did not say much." And from there takes the reader back in time, revealing the community of which Dick and Mary were an isolated part, detailing how they met and married, and gradually, tantalisingly, unveiling the sweltering events that led to the tragedy. Easily read in a couple of hours, The Grass is Singing climaxes and twists like a short story, but there's a lot more going on in these two hundred pages than in many a novel of over a thousand. It's a book that left me with a lot of questions. By the end I was filled with mounting frustration because Moses was the one voice I really wanted to hear; I felt I needed to know what went on in his head in order to understand the story, yet his is the one voice Lessing denies. On the last page, she shifts from referring to him as Moses to calling him "the native" once more. I'm sure nothing here is accidental, but am still pondering her reasons for denying Moses a voice, and finally even an identity. Is it because she did not feel qualified, having lived as a white South African herself, to put words in the mouth, or even thoughts in the brain, of a black houseboy? Is it because, in this time and place, the black man really had no voice to call his own? What exactly happens in that stifling tin-roofed house is never fully revealed. I suspect in the end Mary willed her own murder, as preferable to the promised holiday with Dick, inevitably followed by a return to the grinding poverty and loneliness of their lives. On one level, this is a story of a woman who goes mad within marriage, but Lessing makes sure we have trouble feeling any real sympathy for Mary. A growing atmosphere of alienation, relentless heat, and the physical presence of the land permeate this book. All of which has left me with the feeling that, although it makes sharp social comment, this is actually a novel about the land, and the fact that the white South African can never hope to acclimatise, or to tame it. In the end we are left with the firm knowledge that Dick and Mary's lives meant nothing, that they are destined to disappear into oblivion, slowly swallowed up by the country they found so unforgiving, just as the Rhodesian bush will move in to reclaim the farm they once carved into it. 4/5
    • 5/5
      This is the story of a young white woman in postwar Rhodesia who grows up kind of always-already dispirited by her parents' broken marriage, finds a niche for herself and then loses it through a compulsion to repeat her trauma, marries a good but feckless farmer with an expansive but soft and easily wounded soul, and finds herself isolated and floundering as she tries to deal with their African labourers--very quickly, one labourer in particular, who's just trying (I think--if this book has a flaw it's that Moses remains a cipher till the very end, though I can't see that much good would have come of it if the white Rhodesian Lessing had tried to get inside his head really) to be a man and bear up under impossible circumstances. It's a story of inverted intersectionality, of what happens when someone oppressed for her gender is bound to someone oppressed for his poverty and then bound by him further to someone oppressed for his race (lest their be any doubt, by far the most acute form of oppression in their particular context) given the opportunity to depend on and resent and oppress one another--and the way it achieves the resonance of tragedy is that for each of them, oppression of one another is the irreducible byproduct of trying to follow their own entirely innocent hearts' joys and/or protect their tender spots. It's great historical forces coming to a head under a hot tin roof in a backwater settlement in a doomed colony, and it's absolutely riveting and powerful and true.
    • 5/5
      This short, intense and, I suspect, highly memorable book by Doris Lessing is a psychological portrait of a woman whose spirit is destroyed by her disastrous marriage and by her living conditions. It is also an exploration of exactly how white supremacy and colonialism in Africa was unjust, prejudicial and exploitative. These 200 pages pack a powerful punch and I can certainly understand how The Grass Is Singing earned it’s stature among twentieth-century literature. I found this story to be original and thought provoking. The characters were sharply drawn, and, although there wasn’t one that I felt much sympathy for, their actions and attitudes painted a very clear picture of white African society. Barely a step away from whip toting slave owners, they felt full justification in their control over the black population. The story was also a vivid portrait of how powerless women were in this environment as well. Having no escape, nothing to plan or work toward, her dreams unfulfilled, the woman in this story goes slowly insane. With this simple story, Doris Lessing exposes both the racial and gender inequality that British Colonialism supported and encouraged. The Grass is Singing is a disturbing story of doomed lives crumbling away under the hot African sun and is told with exceptional clarity and power.
    • 4/5
      How good can a first novel be? Set in southern Africa after WW2 - dated, but well written.Read Feb 2004
    • 5/5
      Apart from the Shikasta series of scifi books, I'd always avoided Lessing. I thought she wrote heavily feminist tracts disguised as novels about the middle class. I don't know where I got that idea from.

      This book is a stunning exposé of why Zimbabwe has Mugabe and why he, evil as he is, is certainly no worse than that great white hope, Sir Cecil Rhodes. The whites in this book, with one exception, are all devotees of Rhodes and his brand of racism - Rhodesia for the whites, the blacks are suitable for being farm animals as they are all thieves, liars and hate the white man. Same mindset as slavery really.

      The grass is singing cicada songs, songs of blood, songs of freedom - if the gentle rain from heaven droppeth upon this hellish place beneath.

      Leaving aside the political inferences which are not heavily obvious in the story anyway, the book is a good read. The characters are beautifully drawn, very strong and believable. It begins with what happens at the end and works, in a slightly unusual way, right to that end. Not light reading, but not at all dense, heavy literature.

      It would make a great film but would be very difficult to do in this day and age of pc language, reviling Mugabe and talking of how it wasn't good for the blacks before Mugabe but it wasn't bad, not like this.
    • 4/5
      Good exploration of the white characters and their motivations. Despite its obvious liberalism it was weak on the motivations of the Africans.
    • 4/5
      Coming from a decent family in Southern Rhodesia, Mary prides herself on her ability to balance a full time office job and many friends with her sense of independence. She isn't tied down to anyone except for herself, and for that she is respected. At least, she thinks so until she overhears a conversation between two of her "friends" making dubious remarks about her age and being a spinster. While her anger at the comments slowly boiled, she resolved to marry. Her choice of husbands is a poor white farmer named Richard Turner. They first meet at the movies, and after a very brief courtship, she agrees to marry him and move to his small farm in Ngesi.Unprepared for what little the farm offered, she tries at first to make the best of it. Making her own dresses from scraps of fabric, whitewashing the walls, taking over the management of the house. But the oppressive heat, the unproductive farm, the seclusion from their neighbors, and her contempt of the native servant who she feels enjoys too much freedom in the house, wears her down. Her constant firing of servants raises a few eyebrows with the locals, making it difficult for Richard to find someone willing to work. Unable to understand her gruffness, he chooses instead to ignore it by spending his time down at the fields, working on some new scheme in a sad attempt to create a profitable farm.Left on her own, her dislike of the natives comes to a head when she spots one of the farm workers -- Moses -- slacking off. She confronts him, and he tells that he wanted some water. Angry at his disobedience, she strikes him. To her surprise, Moses appears unscathed by her actions, and she stalks away. Weeks later, Richard is forced to hire Moses as the house servant when no one else will take the job because of Mary's reputation. Once Mary realizes who this new servant is, a battle of wills begins between the two."The Grass Is Signing" focuses on the racial tensions between Mary, a white South African, and the native Moses. Mary believes that she is better than the natives who work on their farm, though she is considered white trash by local standards. She demands respect from the natives, and when one stands up to her, her supposed strength is revealed to be cowardice and paranoia. She's a remarkable character because not once did I like her. She's a terrible person, but that's one of the draws of the novel, watching how wretched she is and how that serves as her own version of Hell when Moses comes to work in the house, in her constant presence. A remarkable novel and definitely worth a read.
    • 5/5
      Doris Lessing moved to London in 1949 and because of her involvement with radical politics was banned from her native Southern Rhodesia until black majority rule in 1980. Her first novel written while she lived in Rhodesia was published in 1950 and was a stunning debut; that brutally exposed the culture of her native country. This is the overriding theme but also the novel deals with psychological and mental breakdown and sexual repression.The novel opens with the murder of Mary Turner and mental breakdown of her husband Dick and the arrest of the black houseboy Moses. Within the first twenty pages of the first chapter Lessing has told the reader all he needs to know about the repressive racist culture that existed in Rhodesia in the 1940's. We are plunged into a society of masters and slaves, but where the masters are beginning to look over their shoulders. Charlie Slatter and a Police Sergeant arrive at the crime scene and their thoughts are only about clearing away the messy situation as quickly as possible. Tony Marston a trainee farm manager just fresh from England is shocked by the attitudes of the White Rhodesians and Lessing says:"when old settlers say 'One has to understand the Country' what they mean is 'You have to get used to our ideas about the native' They are saying in effect 'Learn our ideas or otherwise get out: we don't want you. Most of these young men were brought up with vague ideas about equality. They were shocked for the first week or so, by the way the natives were treated. They were revolted a hundred times a day by the casual way they were spoken of, as if they were so many cattle; or by a blow or a look. They were prepared to treat them as human beiings. But they could not stand out against the culture they were joining. It did not take them long to change. The novel is not about young Tony Marston but tells the back story of Mary and Dick Turner and how they come to such a terrible end. Mary is a city girl who finds that her fear of marriage and of intimacy has left her only with a casual circle of younger friends as she moves into her thirties. She no longer fits and so when Dick Turner a farmer from the veldt asks her to marry him she accepts. Dick is a struggling farmer who cannot seem to make anything work, he has ideas about cultivation that are progressive, but in spite of working hard on the land he cannot carry a project through. He takes a more lenient approach with some of the natives and his unwillingness to involve himself socially with his farming neighbours makes him also a person who "does not fit." The book is about the Turners struggle with their environment, their social and sexual relations and the culture which they buy into, but does not work for them. They are two people who are hopelessly ill equipped to cope with any of the challenges facing them and their ruin and disintegration is inevitable. Lessing ruthlessly exposes their lives concentrating on Mary, whose treatment of her native houseboys is as bad as the culture will allow; she seems to be taking out her frustrations on them and when Moses arrives at the end of a long line of houseboys Mary is seriously and mentally ill and a point is reached where a line is crossed from where there is no turning back: Remembering that thick black neck with the lather frothing whitely on it, the powerful black stooping over the bucket, was like a goad to her. And she was beyond reflecting her anger, her hysteria, was over nothing, nothing that she could explain. What had happened was that the formal pattern of black-and-white, mistress-and-servant, had been broken by a personal relation; and when a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which is his chief occupation to avoid, his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip.The Turner's inability to exploit the land and to exploit the natives as well as their neighbours leads to their financial ruin, but this is not the whole story and it is Lessing's brilliant dissection of the Turners characters and relationship that makes their total disintegration so believable. Their inability to fit even with each other and the hints of child molestation in Mary's past explains her frustration and fears of being intimate with Dick. This together with an unrelenting climate and an invidious culture leads inexorably to their tragedy. An excellent novel which I would rate as 4.5 stars.
    • 5/5
      I had not read Lessing before, and I was hesitant because I have seen mixed reviews for a lot of her stuff, but this novel is lovely. It pulls you in right from the start and will not let go of you. Set in colonial Africa in Rhodesia (what today would be referred to as Zimbabwe), it's the story of how small moments of what seems like clarity can be deceptive and in fact, lead to our demise. Mary Turner makes a lot of mistakes, and she will end up dead. Murdered. We know this from the very beginning of the book. But how did she get there? Her first mistake was in marrying Richard Turner, thinking that she needed to settle down just because that's what others around her valued. She gives up her independence and her financial certainty when she marries Richard and goes to live with him on his farm, which has only the most basic of amenities. Still, they could make it work if only Richard could stop investing in pipe dreams. If only Mary weren't carrying so much baggage from her youth that Richard knows nothing about. If only either one of them understood the other. And add to that the brutality of colonial Africa where Mary is surrounded by people that she thinks are beneath her. As she struggles with depression, she sinks into ugly and unforgivable behavior. This book is about racism. About how hatred eclipses our humanity. Lessing does a beautiful job of letting the tension slowly unfold, drawing us in so that even when we know what is going to happen, what surely must happen, we cannot look away. Very highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      I read this in one sitting--not so much because it's short--although it's a relatively short novel--but I found it nigh un-putdownable, which is a bit odd, because this novel has several aspects I'd ordinarily find off-putting. It's on an ugly subject--racism, with characters impossible to like but I found oddly compelling, and it's very interior--with pages, even chapters--where you'll find very little to no dialogue.This is set in what was Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) around World War II. We're told the ending from the first sentence: Mary Turner, wife of Richard Turner, a farmer at Ngesi, was found murdered on the front verandah of their homestead yesterday morning. A sentence that would head many a whodunnit. Except we're told paragraphs in their houseboy Moses seemingly did it, and this isn't a mystery novel really. I don't know I'd even call it a whydonnit--since that also is telegraphed early on. It's more about how did we get here. It's like those ancient Greek tragedies where we all know where things are headed with all the morbid fascination of a train wreck. I couldn't take my eyes off it. And it's an ugly scene. Especially in that first chapter the word "nigger" rains down on us. Both Mary and Dick Turner use the word unsparingly--as well as using "boy" even for elderly black Africans. Yet somehow there's nothing routine about this treatment of racism. Too many stories of racism fall between two stools. Even when written by whites, white racist characters are often dehumanized so the reader can comfortably think, well, that's not me. Or else the racism is there simply to set off the heroic Noble White Liberal (tm). Lessing doesn't take those easy ways out. Lessing grew up in Southern Rhodesia from the time she was five years old until thirty when she headed to England in 1949 with the manuscript of The Grass is Singing: her first novel. You just know she's known people like the Turners. She takes advantage of her omniscient perch to be scathing and acerbic about white colonial attitudes--and yet... Well, Lessing's pitiless in her depiction of Mary, but she makes you crawl inside of her skin. I can't say I ever liked Mary, and I'm not sure empathy is quite how I'd describe what I felt for her; even aside from her racism she's a chilly, neurotic character. Yet at times I did feel an identification with her, especially early on, and Lessing was masterful in showing her deterioration--and how it was fed by her attitudes towards the "natives." Dick has a decency despite his racism but is frustrating in his fecklessness. Moses is more a cipher. He only gets a point of view toward the very end, and is far less knowable, though never pitiable the way the Turners are--he's not a simple victim, a noble martyr--and I think the opacity of his character is deliberate.Besides the characterizations, I was also hit by the luminosity of Lessing's prose. She certainly conjures up the African landscape and climate, the isolation of the farm and its shabbiness and exudes an atmosphere that was suffocating and oppressive. Even that interiority of the narrative contributed to that, I think. I would definitely seek out Lessing again.
    • 3/5
      I wasn't as taken with this book as many others were and seem to have had a different experience of the story.  Most readers seem to focus on the race relations and that is indeed perhaps most of the story.  It is an excellent description of the horror and ambiguity of racial hatred and the enslavement of others.  Lessing is able to express these ideas, both the overt and the covert very well, no doubt due to her life experience.  My perspective was more focused on Mary, the lead character, as being raised in a neglectful, if not abusive home, by an emotionally absent mother and an alcoholic father.  I'm not sure Mary ever had a chance at any normal intimate relationship aside from the fact of her other circumstances.  I found the atmosphere to be rather flat actually, and depressed, but perhaps that was the point.  Three stars.
    • 3/5
      This book grows on you. While I was reading it, it disturbed me. It has a strong emotional impact. What disturbed me was that the story is told. There is an omniscient narrator who explains everything, what happens and why each character makes the choices they make. We are told how they feel and why they do particular things. How as a reader do you react if you think other reasons could be the cause of a particular choice? I wasn’t quite sure if I believed what I was being told, so rather than accepting the givens, I questioned everything, and ultimately I became annoyed.The book is about life on the veld in what is today Zimbabwe. It is about a couple, farmers, white colonials, without children, owners of a very small poorly run farm. The husband cannot seem to make a go of it and tries one fanciful idea after another, all to fail. The wife, she is a special case too. She carries lots of baggage on her back. Experiences of her own childhood weigh her down and she only marries at thirtyish because she reasons she simply has to. She didn’t want to, she had to……she was getting too old and realized all were whispering about her. She isn’t comfortable with men, not only is she instable, but she could be classified as being mentally ill. She cannot deal with sexual attraction; it throws her completely off kilter!This book is about how white colonials look at native Africans. At least that is what we are told. There is a murder. We are told at the start that the wife is killed by the native house slave. The question is why, how did this come about. This is the central theme. How well does this couple represent colonial whites in Africa? That is what concerned me! I never felt that this was an issue solely of utter disdain and hatred for the natives, but rather a couple that was emotionally unbalanced. How can these two be used as a mirror of how colonials viewed the African natives?! What I cannot deny is that I felt and breathed the atmosphere of the veld. The environment, the weather, the shabbiness, the heat, the storms weigh on you as you read this book and impose a sense of doom and hopelessness. This sense of the environment is impressive. I recognized it from other books I have read about Zimbabwe - Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight and Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller. I kept thinking I have been in places like this, albeit only in books. I definitely prefer the writing of Alexandra Fuller though. I would recommend that if you are interested in the southern African milieu to start with “Dogs” instead. There is humor in that. It is more rounded, and it offers a more realistic and balanced view of colonials; they cannot, should not, all be depicted as Doris Lessing does. The Grass is Singing is a novel, while the other two mentioned are autobiographical. I personally think Doris Lessing’s book concerns more the thoughts of a woman with emotional problems, but the atmosphere of the time and place is impressive.Completed May 23, 2013
    • 5/5
      This book far surpassed my expectations. I read one of Lessing's books in college, and found it almost impossible to navigate. This book, her first novel, perfectly captured the psychology of despair. The ending was not exactly what I had expected, but it made perfect sense. Overall, this is a great read if you are interested in colonialism, race relations, or psychological issues.
    • 4/5
      Set in apartheid Africa in the 1950s, this story is a study of desperation and deterioration. When the story opens, the main character, a young white woman, lives in a self-made world where she is contentedly self-sufficient but has no romantic inclinations. When she overhears a comment between two friends that implies she is a sexual oddity, she is shocked and embarrassed. She directs her efforts to finding a mate, which she discovers in a lonely farmer who lives well outside of town. Once married, her life descends into emotional desolation and depression until a young man, a native from the local village, is hired as her house servant. Like a spark to a powder keg, all the misery building within her erupts into desperate acts for love and connection.Written before the sexual revolution and civil rights movement, this story is a portrayal of the trappings of a rigid social structure and the penalties for those who don't fit in.
    • 4/5
      I found it impossible to put Doris Lessing's "The Grass is Singing" down. Her incredible writing instantly transported me to the farms of Africa where the heat is oppressive and the cicadas sing in the trees. Unfortunately, is colonial Africa, where the white men reign over black men, alternately treating them like servants, children or criminals.The novel is about the disintegrating marriage of Mary and Dick Turner, who are ill-suited for each other and married for all the wrong reasons. Just as the jungle inevitably consumes the house, small pockets of discontent begin to crack apart the marriage.The book opens with its ending -- Mary Turner has been murdered by her kitchen cook for reasons that nobody in "the community" really cares to explain. Going back through Mary's life, Lessing masterfully delves into her heroine's psyche and the reasons for her ugly treatment of the natives living around her. I really tore through this book-- it was fascinating and thought-provoking, painting the horrors of colonialism without feeling terribly preachy.
    • 5/5
      Very powerful. I really disliked Mary at first, but she grows on you with some sort of weird compassion. She is quite the bitch, sure, but you don't want her to end quite like she did.
    • 4/5
      Doris Lessing’s formidable debut novel – published in 1950 – had me completely engrossed from its first troubled pages until the bitter end.The book opens with the murder of Mary Turner and the arrest of the black man responsible for the deed.Lessing draws one into the arid blazing heat of the African landscape in Southern Rhodesia in the 50s. The story is about Mary and Dick Turner, who met, got married and went to live in a little ramshackle home on a farm. They don't really like one another; in fact, sometimes each one is totally revolted by the other. But as neither wants to hurt the other's feelings, they live together, mostly in silence. Inside, they are filled with resentment and a build-up of debilitating negative energy.Mary hates the searing heat, only marginally more than she loathes the black workers on the farm. There is no limit to her contempt for the natives, whom she deems savages. While Mary is at odds with nature, Dick is at peace with it.In this novel, Lessing boldly thrashes out the theme of racism (as well as human isolation and alienation). While she explores racism in this society broadly, she also zones in particularly on the relationship between one white woman and her black male servant.Though Mary and Dick Turner may well be the most unlikable characters I’ve come across, Lessing’s storytelling is superb. You may want to give up on the wretched Mary and Dick, but you cannot discard this book – not until you know exactly what has happened! Highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      Lessing's first novel, the story opens with the murder of a white woman, Mary Turner, in a remote farm somewhere in Rhodesia. In the next pages, we learn of her life and of the events that led to her tragic fate. She leads a relatively happy, carefree life in town but decides to move away to marry a Dick Turner, a farmer. Her situation changes dramatically and she fails to adapt to her new life on the farm. She shrinks from her world around. She realizes that Dick is not only poor, but is an incompetent farmer. Though both of them are committed to the marriage, it is a loveless arrangement, and neither see the other as a partner, on the farm or at home. The marriage disintegrates and Mary's state of mind descends, painfully mirrored in the further deterioration of their already squalid living conditions. Mary takes out her feelings of isolation and frustration on the black servants and workers. One day, Moses, an enigmatic, virile farm hand, comes to work in the house. This was the beginning of the erosion of the master-servant relationship that Mary took elaborate pains in the past to enforce.I didn't know whether to feel sorry for Mary or to feel that she had it coming. I kept wondering whether women at that time, and in that context, were really that helpless over their situation as Mary was portrayed? Somehow I felt more pity for Dick, who loved her despite not knowing how to show it. A powerful, psychological portrait, it is a chilling read about the bleakness of existence as opposed to living, tension (master vs. slave, white vs. black, female vs. male, that alternately repulsed and attracted), isolation, disillusionment, fear, prejudice, and madness. This is a book that will stay with me.
    • 5/5
      Mary Turner is forced, by social convention, to marry. She makes a poor choice in choosing Dick Turner, an unsuccessful farmer. Transported from her life in the city, Mary finds herself isolated and unable to cope with life on the farm.This novel is Mary's story as we watch her fall into an increasingly severe depression. It is the story of the powerlessness of women in a society that perscribes certain roles for them, and that (more so in the 1940s) places the real power of decision making with the husband.But this novel is more than that because it is set in Africa when whites had the power and control over the black population. As Mary's depression grows, her relationship with her black servant, Moses, becomes more complex and less appropriate. Neither Mary nor Moses are able to fully come to terms with the violations of white, patriarchial norms. This is a beautifully written book, largely focused on Mary's character rather than on a plot or narrative. I found it rich and deeply compelling in both its description and the message it conveyed through the fate of the characters.
    • 5/5
      I have great respect for Doris Lessing. She writes beautifully and truthfully and really doesn't give a damn what anyone else thinks. This book does not disappoint and in some ways it is hard to believe that a) it is her first novel and b) it was published in 1950. She takes on racist colonialist Africa straight on, no holds barred with her depiction of the relationship between blacks and whites, particularly focussing in on one white woman and her black male servant. But Lessing never lectures. It is her story telling that takes center stage, with her characters and all their warts and beauty.

    Book preview

    Grass Is Singing - Doris Lessing

    Prologue

    It is by the failures and misfits of a civilization that one can best judge its weaknesses.

    AUTHOR UNKNOWN

    1

    MURDER MYSTERY

    By Special Correspondent

    Mary Turner, wife of Richard Turner, a farmer at Ngesi, was found murdered on the front veranda of their home-stead yesterday morning. The houseboy, who has been arrested, has confessed to the crime. No motive has been discovered. It is thought he was in search of valuables.

    The newspaper did not say much. People all over the country must have glanced at the paragraph with its sensational heading and felt a little spurt of anger mingled with what was almost satisfaction, as if some belief had been confirmed, as if something had happened which could only have been expected. When natives steal, murder or rape, that is the feeling white people have.

    And then they turned the page to something else.

    But the people in the district who knew the Turners, either by sight, or from gossiping about them for so many years, did not turn the page so quickly. Many must have snipped out the paragraph, put it among old letters, or between the pages of a book, keeping it perhaps as an omen or a warning, glancing at the yellowing piece of paper with closed, secretive faces. For they did not discuss the murder; that was the most extraordinary thing about it. It was as if they had a sixth sense which told them everything there was to be known, although the three people in a position to explain the facts said nothing. The murder was simply not discussed. A bad business, someone would remark; and the faces of the people round about would put on that reserved and guarded look. A very bad business, came the reply—and that was the end of it. There was, it seemed, a tacit agreement that the Turner case should not be given undue publicity by gossip. Yet it was a farming district, where those isolated white families met only very occasionally, hungry for contact with their own kind, to talk and discuss and pull to pieces, all speaking at once, making the most of an hour or so’s companionship before returning to their farms where they saw only their own faces and the faces of their black servants for weeks on end. Normally that murder would have been discussed for months; people would have been positively grateful for something to talk about.

    To an outsider it would seem perhaps as if the energetic Charlie Slatter had traveled from farm to farm over the district telling people to keep quiet; but that was something that would never have occurred to him. The steps he took (and he made not one mistake) were taken apparently instinctively and without conscious planning. The most interesting thing about the whole affair was this silent, unconscious agreement. Everyone behaved like a flock of birds who communicate—or so it seems—by means of a kind of telepathy.

    Long before the murder marked them out, people spoke of the Turners in the hard, careless voices reserved for misfits, outlaws and the self-exiled. The Turners were disliked, though few of their neighbors had ever met them, or even seen them in the distance. Yet what was there to dislike? They simply kept themselves to themselves; that was all. They were never seen at district dances, or fetes, or gym-khanas. They must have had something to be ashamed of; that was the feeling. It was not right to seclude themselves like that; it was a slap in the face of everyone else; what had they got to be so stuck-up about? What, indeed! Living the way they did! That little box of a house—it was forgivable as a temporary dwelling, but not to live in permanently. Why, some natives (though not many, thank heavens) had houses as good; and it would give them a bad impression to see white people living in such a way.

    And then it was that someone used the phrase poor whites. It caused disquiet. There was no great money-cleavage in those days (that was before the era of the tobacco barons), but there was certainly a race division. The small community of Afrikaners had their own lives, and the Britishers ignored them. Poor whites were Afrikaners, never British. But the person who said the Turners were poor whites stuck to it defiantly. What was the difference? What was a poor white? It was the way one lived, a question of standards. All the Turners needed were a drove of children to make them poor whites.

    Though the arguments were unanswerable, people would still not think of them as poor whites. To do that would be letting the side down. The Turners were British, after all.

    Thus the district handled the Turners—in accordance with that esprit de corps which is the first rule of South African society, but which the Turners themselves ignored. They apparently did not recognize the need for esprit de corps; that, really, was why they were hated.

    The more one thinks about it, the more extraordinary the case becomes. Not the murder itself; but the way people felt about it, the way they pitied Dick Turner with a fine fierce indignation against Mary, as if she were something unpleasant and unclean, and it served her right to get murdered. But they did not ask questions.

    For instance, they must have wondered who that Special Correspondent was. Someone in the district sent in the news, for the paragraph was not in newspaper language. But who? Marston, the assistant, left the district immediately after the murder. Denham, the policeman, might have written to the paper in a personal capacity, but it was not likely. There remained Charlie Slatter, who knew more about the Turners than anyone else, and was there on the day of the murder. One could say that he practically controlled the handling of the case, even taking precedence over the Sergeant himself. And people felt that to be quite right and proper. Whom should it concern, if not the white farmers, that a silly woman got herself murdered by a native for reasons people might think about, but never, never mentioned? It was their livelihood, their wives and families, their way of living, at stake.

    But to the outsider it is strange that Slatter should have been allowed to take charge of the affair, to arrange that every-thing should pass over without more than a ripple of comment.

    For there could have been no planning: there simply wasn’t time. Why, for instance, when Dick Turner’s farm boys came to him with the news, did he sit down to write a note to the Sergeant at the police camp? He did not use the telephone.

    Everyone who has lived in the country knows what a branch telephone is like. You lift the receiver after you have turned the handle the required number of times, and then, click, click, click, you can hear the receivers coming off all over the district, and soft noises like breathing, a whisper, a subdued cough.

    Slatter lived five miles from the Turners. The farm boys came to him first, when they discovered the body. And though it was an urgent matter, he ignored the telephone, but sent a personal letter by a native bearer on a bicycle to Denham at the police camp, twelve miles away. The Sergeant sent out half a dozen native policemen at once, to the Turners’ farm, to see what they could find. He drove first to see Slatter, because the way that letter was worded roused his curiosity. That was why he arrived late on the scene of the murder. The native policemen did not have to search far for the murderer. After walking through the house, looking briefly at the body, and dispersing down the front of the little hill the house stood on, they saw Moses himself rise out of a tangled ant heap in front of them. He walked up to them and said (or words to this effect): Here I am. They snapped the handcuffs on him, and went back to the house to wait for the police cars to come. There they saw Dick Turner come out of the bush by the house with two whining dogs at his heel. He was off his head, talking crazily to himself, wandering in and out of the bush with his hands full of leaves and earth. They let him be, while keeping an eye on him, for he was a white man, though mad, and black men, even when policemen, do not lay hands on white flesh.

    People did ask, cursorily, why the murderer had given himself up. There was not much chance of escape, but he did have a sporting chance. He could have run to the hills and hidden for a while. Or he could have slipped over the border to Portuguese territory. Then the District Native Commissioner, at a sundowner party, said that it was perfectly understandable. If one knew anything about the history of the country, or had read any of the memoirs or letters of the old missionaries and explorers, one would have come across ac-counts of the society Lobengula ruled. The laws were strict: everyone knew what they could or could not do. If someone did an unforgiveable thing, like touching one of the King’s women, he would submit fatalistically to punishment, which was likely to be impalement over an ant heap on a stake, or something equally unpleasant. I have done wrong, and I know it, he might say, therefore let me be punished. Well, it was the tradition to face punishment, and really there was something rather fine about it. Remarks like these are forgiven from native commissioners, who have to study languages, customs, and so on; although it is not done to say things natives do are fine. (Yet the fashion is changing: it is permissible to glorify the old ways sometimes, providing one says how depraved the natives have become since.)

    So that aspect of the affair was dropped, yet it is not the least interesting, for Moses might not have been a Matabele at all. He was in Mashonaland; though of course natives do wander all over Africa. He might have come from anywhere: Portuguese territory, Nyasaland, the Union of South Africa. And it is a long time since the days of the great king Lobengula. But then native commissioners tend to think in terms of the past.

    Well, having sent the letter to the police camp, Charlie Slatter went to the Turners’ place, driving at a great speed over the bad farm roads in his fat American car.

    Who was Charlie Slatter? It was he who, from the beginning of the tragedy to its end, personified Society for the Turners. He touches the story at half a dozen points; without him things would not have happened quite as they did, though sooner or later, in one way or another, the Turners were bound to come to grief.

    Slatter had been a grocer’s assistant in London. He was fond of telling his children that if it had not been for his energy and enterprise they would be running round the slums in rags. He was still a proper cockney, even after twenty years in Africa. He came with one idea: to make money. He made it. He made plenty. He was a crude, brutal, ruthless, yet kindhearted man, in his own way, and according to his own impulses, who could not help making money. He farmed as if he were turning the handle of a machine which would produce pound notes at the other end. He was hard with his wife, making her bear unnecessary hardships at the beginning; he was hard with his children, until he made money, when they got everything they wanted; and above all he was hard with his farm laborers. They, the geese that laid the golden eggs, were still in that state where they did not know there were other ways of living be-sides producing gold for other people.

    They know better now, or are beginning to. But Slatter believed in farming with the sjambok. It hung over his front door, like a motto on a wall: You shall not mind killing if it is necessary. He had once killed a native in a fit of temper. He was fined thirty pounds. Since then he had kept his temper. But sjamboks are all very well for the Slatters; not so good for people less sure of themselves. It was he who had told Dick Turner, long ago, when Dick first started farming, that one should buy a sjambok before a plow or a harrow, and that sjambok did not do the Turners any good, as we shall see.

    Slatter was a shortish, broad, powerful man, with heavy shoulders and thick arms. His face was broad and bristled; shrewd, watchful, and a little cunning. He had a crop of fair hair that made him look like a convict; but he did not care for appearances. His small blue eyes were hardly visible, because of the way he screwed them up, after years and years of South African sunshine.

    Bent over the steering wheel, almost hugging it in his de-termination to get to the Turners quickly, his eyes were little blue chinks in a set face. He was wondering why Marston, the assistant, who was after all his employee, had not come to him about the murder, or at least sent a note. Where was he? The hut he lived in was only a couple of hundred yards from the house itself. Perhaps he had got cold feet and run away. Any-thing was possible, thought Charlie, from this particular type of young Englishman. He had a rooted contempt for soft-faced, soft-voiced Englishmen, combined with a fascination for their manner and breeding. His own sons, now grown up, were gentlemen. He had spent plenty of money to make them so; but he despised them for it. At the same time he was proud of them. This conflict showed itself in his attitude towards Marston: half hard and indifferent, half subtly deferential. At the moment he felt nothing but irritation.

    Half-way he felt the car rock, and swearing, pulled it up. It was a puncture: no, two punctures. The red mud of the road held fragments of broken glass. His irritation expressed itself in the half-conscious thought, Just like Turner to have glass on his roads! But Turner was now necessarily an object of passionate, protective pity, and the irritation was focused on Marston, the assistant who, Slatter felt, should somehow have prevented this murder. What was he being paid for? What had he been engaged for? But Slatter was a fair man in his own way, and where his own race was concerned. He restrained himself, and got down to mending one puncture and changing a tire, working in the heavy red slush of the roads. This took him three-quarters of an hour, and by the time he was finished, and had picked the pieces of green glass from the mud and thrown them into the bush, the sweat was soaking his face and hair.

    When he reached the house at last, he saw, as he approached through the bush, six glittering bicycles leaning against the walls. And in front of the house, under the trees, stood six native policemen, and among them the native Moses, his hands linked in front of him. The sun glinted on the hand-cuffs, on the bicycles, on the masses of heavy wet leaves. It was a wet, sultry morning. The sky was a tumult of discolored clouds: it looked full of billowing dirty washing. Puddles on the pale soil held a sheen of sky.

    Charles walked up to the policemen, who saluted him. They were in fezzes, and their rather fancy-dress uniform. This last thought did not occur to Charlie, who liked his natives either one way or the other: properly dressed according to their station, or in loincloths. He could not bear the half-civilized native. The policemen, picked for their physique, were a fine body of men, but they were put in the shade by Moses, who was a great powerful man, black as polished linoleum, and dressed in a singlet and shorts, which were damp and muddy. Charlie stood directly in front of the murderer and looked into his face. The man stared back, expressionless, indifferent. His own face was curious: it showed a kind of triumph, a guarded vindictiveness, and fear. Why fear? Of Moses, who was as good as hanged already? But he was uneasy, troubled. Then he seemed to shake himself into self-command, and turned and saw Dick Turner, standing a few paces away, covered with mud.

    Turner! he said, peremptorily. He stopped, looking into the man’s face. Dick appeared not to know him. Charlies took him by the arm and drew him towards his own car. He did not know he was incurably mad then; otherwise he might have been even more angry than he was. Having put Dick into the back seat of his car, he went into the house. In the front room stood Marston, his hands in his pockets, in a pose that seemed negligently calm. But his face was pale and strained.

    Where were you? asked Charlie at once, accusingly.

    Normally Mr. Turner wakes me, said the youth calmly. This morning I slept late. When I came into the house I found Mrs. Turner on the veranda. Then the policemen came. I was expecting you. But he was afraid: it was the fear of death that sounded in his voice, not the fear that was controlling Charlie’s actions: he had not been long enough in the country to under-stand Charlie’s special fear.

    Charlie grunted: he never spoke unless necessary. He looked long and curiously at Marston, as if trying to make out why it was the farm natives had not called a man who lay asleep a few yards off, but had instinctively sent for himself. But it was not with dislike or contempt he looked at Marston now; it was more the look a man gives a prospective partner who has yet to prove himself.

    He turned and went into the bedroom. Mary Turner was a stiff shape under a soiled white sheet. At one end of the sheet protruded a mass of pale strawish hair, and at the other a crinkled yellow foot. Now a curious thing happened. The hate and contempt that one would have expected to show on his face when he looked at the murderer, twisted his features now, as he stared at Mary. His brows knotted, and for a few seconds his lips curled back over his teeth in a vicious grimace. He had his back to Marston, who would have been astonished to see him. Then, with a hard, angry movement, Charlie turned and left the room, driving the young man before him.

    Marston said: She was lying on the veranda. I lifted her on the bed. He shuddered at the memory of the touch of the cold body. I thought she shouldn’t be left lying there. He hesitated and added, the muscles of his face contracting whitely: The dogs were licking at her.

    Charlie nodded, with a keen glance at him. He seemed indifferent as to where she might be lying. At the same time he approved the self-control of the assistant who had performed the unpleasant task.

    There was blood everywhere. I cleaned it up . . . I drought afterwards I should have left it for the police.

    It makes no odds, said Charlie absently. He sat down on one of the rough wood chairs in the front room, and remained in thought, whistling softly though his front teeth. Marston stood by the window, looking for the arrival of the police car. From time to time Charlie looked round the room alertly, flicking his tongue over his lips. Then he lapsed back into his soft whistling. It got on the young man’s nerves.

    At last, cautiously, almost warningly, Charlie said: "What do you know of this?"

    Marston noted the emphasized you, and wondered what Slatter knew. He was well in control of himself, but as taut as wire. He said, I don’t know. Nothing really. It is all so difficult... He hesitated, looking appealingly at Charlie.

    That look of almost soft appeal irritated Charlie, coming from a man, but it pleased him too: he was pleased the youth deferred to him. He knew the type so well. So many of them came from England to learn farming. They were usually ex-public school, very English, but extremely adaptable. From Charlie’s point of view, the adaptability redeemed them. It was strange to see how quickly they accustomed themselves. At first they were diffident, though proud and withdrawn; cautiously learning the new ways, with a fine sensitiveness, an alert self-consciousness.

    When old settlers say One had to understand the country, what they mean is, You have to get used to our ideas about the native. They are saying, in effect, Learn our ideas, or otherwise get out: we don’t want you. Most of these young men were brought up with vague ideas about equality. They were shocked, for the first week or so, by the way natives were treated. They were revolted a hundred times a day by the casual way they were spoken of, as if they were so many cattle; or by a blow, or a look. They had been prepared to treat them as human beings. But they could not stand out against the society they were joining. It did not take them long to change. It was hard, of course, becoming as bad oneself. But it was not very long that they thought of it as bad. And anyway, what had one’s ideas amounted to? Abstract ideas about decency and goodwill, that was all: merely abstract ideas. When it came to the point, one never had contact with natives, except in the master-servant relationship. One never knew them in their own lives, as human beings. A few months, and these sensitive, decent young men had coarsened to suit the hard, arid, sun-drenched country they had come to; they had grown a new manner to match their thickened sunburned limbs and toughened bodies.

    If Tony Marston had been even a few more months in the country it would have been easy. That was Charlie’s feeling. That was why he looked at the young man with a speculative frowning look, not condemning him, only wary and on the alert.

    He said: What do you mean, it is all so difficult?

    Tony Marston appeared uncomfortable, as if he did not know his own mind. And for that matter he did not: the weeks in the Turners’ household with its atmosphere of tragedy had not helped him to get his mind clear. The two standards—the one he had brought with him and the one he was adopting— conflicted still. And there was a roughness, a warning note, in Charlie’s voice, that left him wondering. What was he being warned against? He was intelligent enough to know he was being warned. In this he was unlike Charlie, who was acting by instinct and did not know his voice was a threat. It was all so unusual. Where were the police? What right had Charlie, who was a neighbor, to be fetched before himself, who was practically a member of the household? Why was Charlie quietly taking command?

    His ideas of right were upset. He was confused, but he had his own ideas about the murder, which could not be stated straight out, like that, in black and white. When he came to think of it, the murder was logical enough; looking back over the last few days he could see that something like this was bound to happen, he could almost say he had been expecting it, some kind of violence or ugliness. Anger, violence, death, seemed natural to this vast, harsh country .. . he had done a lot of thinking since he had strolled casually into the house that morning, wondering why everyone was so late, to find Mary Turner lying murdered on the veranda, and the police boys outside, guarding the houseboy; and Dick Turner muttering and stumbling through the puddles, mad, but apparently harmless. Things he had not understood, he understood now, and he was ready to talk about them. But he was in the dark as to Charlie’s attitude. There was something here he could not get hold of.

    It’s like this, he said, when I first arrived I didn’t know much about the country.

    Charlie said, with a good-humored but brutal irony, Thanks for the information. And then, Have you any idea why this nigger murdered Mrs. Turner?

    Well, I have a sort of idea, yes.

    We had better leave it to the Sergeant, when he comes then.

    It was a snub; he had been shut up. Tony held his tongue, angry but bewildered.

    When the Sergeant came, he went over to look at the murderer, glanced at Dick through the window of Slatter’s car, and then came into the house.

    I went to your place, Slatter, he said, nodding at Tony, giving him a keen look. Then he went into the bedroom. And his reactions were as Charlie’s had been: vindictiveness towards the murderer, emotional pity for Dick, and for Mary, a bitter contemptuous anger: Sergeant Denham had been in the country for a number of years. This time Tony saw the expression on the face, and it gave him a shock. The faces of the two men as they stood over the body, gazing down at it, made him feel uneasy, even afraid. He himself felt a little disgust, but not much; it was mainly pity that agitated him, knowing what he knew. It was the disgust that he would feel

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