bed was brought in for Jessie.
The ugliness of the place would have meant nothing to the girl if she had found there the way to play, to begin a life for herself in the grown-up games of the young people seeking amusement. If she were to dance there, to be teased by young men, to learn to use the fashionable slang of the girls, to rush about in the happiness of laughing too wildly and staying up too late, then she would remember it as a marvellous place, the mere scaffolding of joy. She put on one of the sundresses she had made herself, but though she looked like any one of the group of young people who already, the first afternoon, had clustered together, she did not know how to talkto a boy, or how to form one of those alliances with a girl that boys seem to find an irresistible challengeâher only piece of equipment was the dress.
Some members of the group actually came from the mining town to which the Helgasdrift mining community belonged, and Jessie knew one or two of them by name. She had even been in the same class, before her mother took her out of school to have her taught at home, with one of the girls, Rose Price. Rose Price was there in a foursome that obviously included her particular boy friend; she waved a friendly recognition from where she sat swinging her legs on the verandah wall, but the greeting did not come from the distance, a few yards of cement, that separated the party of young people from the Fuechts passing on their way to lunch; it came from the distance of the girlâs independence and confidence.
There were weevils in the porridge next morning and Fuecht pushed his plate away and lit a cigar, not taking his attention from the newspaper; his indifference to discomfort was not stoic or good-natured but due to the fact that he did not expect anything better of arrangements made by his wife. She was well aware of the hurtful nature of his lack of complaint. Jessie had the cheerfulness and automatic sense of anticipation that were simply there for her when she woke up every day, and she walked out between the unfinished pillars with her mother into the haze of a bare, brilliant morning. The shores of the irrigation lake were flat. Stony veld with the bald red earth showing through over-grazed grass spread to the horizon. Some black children clambered on the wheel-less hulk of an old motor car that had come to rest there; it was picked clean of everything but rust, like the horny shell of a beetle that has been eaten out by ants. A single bird of prey hung in the vacancy of a drought sky. As the mother and daughter stood there, the young people set out in a hired boat, oars waving and yells rising as they exhorted each other to sit down.Slowly distance smoothed out their erratic course and they became a fleck no bigger than the bird.
Jessie and her mother had brought simple evening dresses to wear on Christmas Eve, and, studying the wine list with a look of due consideration for its limitations, Fuecht ordered a bottle at dinner. It turned out to be a bottle that the sort of people who patronised the hotel wouldnât know about, and, probably acquired by mistake in the first place, it had lain forgotten since the place opened. A bottle of wine like that was one of the pleasures that remained to the grown-ups untouched by the tarnish that, for them, lay on other pleasures. Their murmured exchanges on its quality made an unaccustomed intimacy between them; unlike the girl, they were not open to the stir of the dance bandâthree men with slicked hair and red cummerbunds who began to blow and thump, each looking for the beat like a man searching for a lost bunch of keys.
When the music started Jessie felt a nervous, happy embarrassment, although she knew that there was no one for her to dance with. The young crowd began to slide round the chalk-sprinkled floor in the stylish, skating steps that were fashionable at the time. Married men grasped their wives clumsily by the back of the
The ugliness of the place would have meant nothing to the girl if she had found there the way to play, to begin a life for herself in the grown-up games of the young people seeking amusement. If she were to dance there, to be teased by young men, to learn to use the fashionable slang of the girls, to rush about in the happiness of laughing too wildly and staying up too late, then she would remember it as a marvellous place, the mere scaffolding of joy. She put on one of the sundresses she had made herself, but though she looked like any one of the group of young people who already, the first afternoon, had clustered together, she did not know how to talkto a boy, or how to form one of those alliances with a girl that boys seem to find an irresistible challengeâher only piece of equipment was the dress.
Some members of the group actually came from the mining town to which the Helgasdrift mining community belonged, and Jessie knew one or two of them by name. She had even been in the same class, before her mother took her out of school to have her taught at home, with one of the girls, Rose Price. Rose Price was there in a foursome that obviously included her particular boy friend; she waved a friendly recognition from where she sat swinging her legs on the verandah wall, but the greeting did not come from the distance, a few yards of cement, that separated the party of young people from the Fuechts passing on their way to lunch; it came from the distance of the girlâs independence and confidence.
There were weevils in the porridge next morning and Fuecht pushed his plate away and lit a cigar, not taking his attention from the newspaper; his indifference to discomfort was not stoic or good-natured but due to the fact that he did not expect anything better of arrangements made by his wife. She was well aware of the hurtful nature of his lack of complaint. Jessie had the cheerfulness and automatic sense of anticipation that were simply there for her when she woke up every day, and she walked out between the unfinished pillars with her mother into the haze of a bare, brilliant morning. The shores of the irrigation lake were flat. Stony veld with the bald red earth showing through over-grazed grass spread to the horizon. Some black children clambered on the wheel-less hulk of an old motor car that had come to rest there; it was picked clean of everything but rust, like the horny shell of a beetle that has been eaten out by ants. A single bird of prey hung in the vacancy of a drought sky. As the mother and daughter stood there, the young people set out in a hired boat, oars waving and yells rising as they exhorted each other to sit down.Slowly distance smoothed out their erratic course and they became a fleck no bigger than the bird.
Jessie and her mother had brought simple evening dresses to wear on Christmas Eve, and, studying the wine list with a look of due consideration for its limitations, Fuecht ordered a bottle at dinner. It turned out to be a bottle that the sort of people who patronised the hotel wouldnât know about, and, probably acquired by mistake in the first place, it had lain forgotten since the place opened. A bottle of wine like that was one of the pleasures that remained to the grown-ups untouched by the tarnish that, for them, lay on other pleasures. Their murmured exchanges on its quality made an unaccustomed intimacy between them; unlike the girl, they were not open to the stir of the dance bandâthree men with slicked hair and red cummerbunds who began to blow and thump, each looking for the beat like a man searching for a lost bunch of keys.
When the music started Jessie felt a nervous, happy embarrassment, although she knew that there was no one for her to dance with. The young crowd began to slide round the chalk-sprinkled floor in the stylish, skating steps that were fashionable at the time. Married men grasped their wives clumsily by the back of the
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