Free The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing

abasement, 'I had no right’
    Mary watched the wildly flickering flame of the dying lamp leap over walls and roof and the glittering window pane, and fell asleep holding his hand protectively, as she might have held a child's whom she had wounded.

Chapter Four
    When she woke she found she was alone in the bed, and there was the clanging of a gong somewhere at the back of the house. She could see a tender gold light on the trees through the window, and faint rosy patches of sun lay on the white walls, showing up the rough grain of the whitewash. As she watched they deepened and turned vivid yellow, barring the room with gold, which made it look smaller, lower, and more bare than it had at night, in the dim lamplight. In a few moments Dick came back in pajamas, and touched her cheek with his hand, so that she felt the chill of early morning on his skin.
    `Sleep well?' `Yes, thank you.' `Tea is coming now.'
    They were polite and awkward with each other, repudiating the contacts of the night. He sat on the edge of the bed eating biscuits. Presently an elderly native brought in the tray, and put it on the table.
    `This is the new missus,' said Dick to him. `This is Samson, Mary.'
    The old boy kept his eyes on the ground and said, 'Good morning, missus.' Then he added politely to Dick, as if this was expected of him, `Very nice, very nice, boss.'
    Dick laughed, saying, 'He'll look after you: he is not a bad old swine.'
    Mary was rather outraged at this casual stock market attitude; then she saw that it was only a matter of form, and calmed herself. She was left with a feeling of indignation, saying to herself, `And who does he think he is?' Dick, however, was unaware, and foolishly happy.
    He drank two cups of tea in a rush, and then went out to dress, coming back in khaki shorts and shirt to say good bye before going down to the lands. Mary got up, too, when he had gone, and looked around her. Samson was cleaning the room into which they had come first the night before, and all the furniture was pushed into the middle, so she stepped past him on to the small verandah which was merely an extension of the iron roof, held up by three brick pillars with a low wall about it. There were some petrol tins painted a dark green, the paint blistered and broken, holding geraniums and flowering shrubs. Beyond the verandah wall was a space of pale sand, and then the low scrubby bush, which sloped down in a vlei full of tall shining grass. Beyond that again stretched bush, undulating vleis and ridges, bounded at the horizon by kopjes. Looking round she saw that the house was built on a low rise that swelled up in a great hollow several miles across, and ringed by kopjes that coiled blue and hazy and beautiful, a long way off in front, but close to the house at the back. She thought, it will be hot here, closed in as it is. But she shaded her eyes and gazed across the vleis, finding it strange and lovely with the dull green foliage, the endless expanses of tawny grass shining gold in the sun, and the vivid arching blue sky. And there was a chorus of birds, a shrilling and cascading of sound such as she had not heard before.
    She walked round the house to the back. She saw it was a rectangle: the two rooms she had already seen in the front, and behind them the kitchen, the storeroom and the bathroom. At the end of a short path, screened off with a curving break of grass, was a narrow sentry-box building, which was the lavatory. On one side was a fowl house, with a great wire run full of scrawny white chickens, and across the hard bare ground scraped and gobbled a scattering of turkeys. She entered the house from the back through the kitchen, where there was a wood stove and a massive table of scrubbed bush timber, taking up half the floor space. Samson was in the bedroom, making the beds.
    She had never come into contact with natives before, as an employer on her own account. Her mother's servants, she had been forbidden to talk to; in the club