第2章 A MILD ATTACK OF LOCUSTS-2

If we can stop the main body settling on our farm, that's everything. If they get a chance to lay their eggs, we are going to have everything eaten flat with hoppers later on.” He picked a stray locust off his shirt and split it down with his thumbnail; it was clotted inside with eggs. “Imagine that multiplied by millions. You ever seen a hopper swarm on the march? No? Well, you're lucky.”

Margaret thought an adult swarm was bad enough. Outside, the light on the earth was now a pale, thin yellow darkened with moving shadow; the clouds of moving insects alternately thickened and lightened, like driving rain. Old Stephen said, “They've got the wind behind them. That's something.”

“Is it very bad?” asked Margaret fearfully, and the old man said emphatically, “We're finished. This swarm may pass over, but once they've started, they'll be coming down from the north one after another. And then there are the hoppers. It might go on for three or four years.” Margaret sat down helplessly and thought, Well, if it's the end, it's the end. What now? We'll all three have to go back to town. But at this she took a quick look at Stephen, the old man who had farmed forty years in this country and been bankrupt twice before, and she knew nothing would make him go and become a clerk in the city. Her heart ached for him; he looked so tired, the worry lines deep from nose to mouth. Poor old man. He lifted up a locust that had got itself somehow into his pocket, and held it in the air by one leg. “You've got the strength of a steel spring in those legs of yours,” he told the locust good-humoredly. Then, although for the last three hours he had been fighting locusts, squashing locusts, yelling at locusts, and sweeping them in great mounds into the fires to burn, he nevertheless took this one to the door and carefully threw it out to join its fellows, as if he would rather not harm a hair of its head. This comforted Margaret; all at once, she felt irrati onally cheered. She remembered it was not the first time in the past three years the men had announced their final and irremediable ruin.

“Get me a drink, lass,” Stephen then said, and she set a bottle of whiskey by him. In the meantime, thought Margaret, her husband was out in the pelting storm of insects, banging the gong, feeding the fires with leaves, while the insects clung all over him. She shuddered. “How can you bear to let them touch you?” she asked Stephen. He looked at her disapprovingly. She felt suitably humble, just as she had when Richard brought her to the farm after their marriage and Stephen first took a good look at her city self—hair waved and golden, nails red and pointed. Now she was a proper farmer's wife, in sensible shoes and a solid skirt. She might even get to letting locusts settle on her, in time.

Having tossed down a couple of whiskeys, old Stephen went back into the battle, wading now through glistening brown waves of locusts. Five o'clock. The sun would set in an hour. Then the swarm would settle. It was as thick as ever overhead. The trees were ragged mounds of glistening brown.

Margaret began to cry. It was all so hopeless. If it wasn't a bad season, it was locusts; if it wasn't locusts, it was army worms or veldt fires. Always something. The rustling of the locust armies was like a big forest in a storm. The ground was invisible in a sleek brown surging tide; it was like being drowned in locusts, submerged by the loathsome brown flood. It seemed as if the roof might sink in under the weight of them, as if the door might give in under their pressure and these rooms fill with them—and it was getting so dark. Through the window, she looked up at the sky. The air was thinner; gaps of blue showed in the dark moving clouds. The blue spaces were cold and thin; the sun must be setting. Through the fog of insects, she saw figures approaching. First old Stephen, marching bravely along, then her husband, drawn and haggard with weariness, and behind them the servants. All of them were crawling with insects. The sound of the gongs had stopped. Margaret could hear nothing but the ceaseless rustle of myriads of wings.

The two men slapped off the insects and came in. “Well,” said Richard, kissing her on the cheek, “the main swarm has gone over.” “For the Lord's sake!” said Margaret angrily, still half crying. “What's here is bad enough, isn't it?” For although the evening air was no longer black and thick but a clear blue, with a pattern of insects whizzing this way and that across it, everything else—trees, buildings, bushes, earth—was gone under the moving brown masses.

“If it doesn't rain in the night and keep them here,” Stephen said, “if it doesn't rain and weight them down with water, they'll be off in the morning at sunrise.” “We're bound to have some hoppers,” said Richard. “But not the main swarm. That's something.” Margaret roused herself, wiped her eyes, pretended she had not been crying, and fetched them some supper, for the servants were too exhausted to move. She sent them off to the compound to rest.

She served the supper and sat listening. There was not one maize plant left, she heard. Not one. They would get the planting machines out the moment the locusts had gone. They must start all over again. What was the use of that, Margaret wondered, if the whole farm was going to be crawling with hoppers? But she listened while they discussed the new government pamphlet that told how to defeat the hoppers. You must have men out all the time, patrolling the farm, to watch for movement in the grass. When you find a patch of hoppers—small, lively black things, like crickets—then you dig trenches around the patch or spray them with poison from pumps supplied by the government. The government wanted every farmer to cooperate in a world plan for eliminating this plague forever. You must attack locusts at the source—hoppers, in short. The men were talking as if they were planning a war, and Margaret listened, amazed.

In the night, it was quiet, with no sign of the armies that had settled outside, except that sometimes a branch snapped or a tree could be heard crashing down. Margaret slept badly, in the bed beside Richard, who was sleeping like the dead. In the morning, she woke to yellow sunshine lying across the bed—clear sunshine, with an occasional blotch of shadow moving over it. She went to the window. Old Stephen was ahead of her. There he stood, outside, gazing down over the bush. And she gazed, astounded—and entranced, much against her will. For it looked as if every tree, every bush, all the earth, were lit with pale flames. The locusts were fanning their wings to free them of the night dews. There was a shimmer of red-tinged gold light everywhere.

She went out to join the old man, stepping carefully among the insects. The two stood and watched. Overhead the sky was blue—blue and clear. “Pretty,” said old Stephen with satisfaction. Well, thought Margaret, we may be ruined, we may be bankrupt, but not everyone has seen a locust army fanning their wings at dawn. Over the slopes in the distance, a faint red smear showed in the sky. It thickened and spread. “There they go,” said old Stephen. “There goes the main army, off south.” And now, from the trees, from the earth all around them, the locusts were taking wing. They were like small aircraft maneuvering for the takeoff as they tried their wings to see if they were dry enough. Off they went. A reddish-brown steam was rising off the miles of bush, off the farmlands—the earth. Again the sunlight darkened. And as the clotted branches lifted, the weight on them lightening, there was nothing left but the black spines of branches and tree trunks. No green—nothing. All morning they watched, the three of them—Richard having finally got up—as the brown crust thinned and broke and dissolved, flying up to mass with the main army, now a brownish-red smear in the southern sky. The lands, which had been filmed with the green of the new, tender mealie plants, were stark and bare. A devastated landscape—no green, no green anywhere. By midday, the reddish cloud had gone. Only an occasional locust flopped down. On the ground lay the corpses and the wounded. The African laborers were sweeping them up with branches and collecting them in tins. “Ever eaten sun-dried locust, Margaret?” asked old Stephen. “That time twenty years ago when I went broke, I lived on mealie meal and dried locusts for three months. They aren't bad at all—rather like smoked fish, if you come to think of it.” But Margaret preferred not even to think of it. After the midday meal, the men went off to the lands. Everything was to be replanted. With a bit of luck, another swarm would not come travelling down just this way. But they hoped it would rain very soon, to spring some new grass, because the cattle would die otherwise; there was not a blade of grass left on the farm. As for Margaret, she was trying to get used to the idea of three or four years of locusts. Locusts were going to be like the weather from now on—always imminent. She felt like a survivor after a war; if this devastated and mangled countryside was not ruin—well, what then was ruin? But the men ate their supper with good appetites. “It could have been worse” was what they said. “It could be much worse.” ?