It was a very sharp attack, and because he was not used to illness, he was querulous and difficult. Mary sent a letter over to Mrs Slatter – though she hated having to ask favours of her – and later that day Charlie brought the doctor in his car; he had driven thirty miles to fetch him. The doctor made the usual pronouncements, and when he had finished with Dick, told Mary the house was dangerous as it was, and should be wired for mosquitoes. Also, he said, the bush should be cut back for another hundred yards about the house. Ceilings should be put in at once, otherwise there was danger of their both getting sunstroke. He looked shrewdly at Mary, informed her she was anemic, run down and in a bad nervous condition and she should go for at least three months to the coast at once.

He then left, while Mary stood on the verandah and watched the car drive off, with a grim little smile on her face. She was thinking, with hate, that it was all very well for rich professionals to talk. She hated that doctor, with his calm way of shrugging off their difficulties; when she had said they could not afford a holiday, he had said sharply, 'Nonsense! Can you afford to be really ill?' And he had asked how long it had been since she had been to the coast? She had never seen the sea! But the doctor had understood their position better than she imagined, for the bill she awaited with dread, did not come. After a while she wrote to know how much they owed, and the answer came back: 'Pay me when you can afford it.' She was miserable with frustrated pride; but let it go – they literally did not have the money.

Mrs Slatter sent over a sack of citrus from her orchard for Dick, and many offers of assistance. Mary was grateful for her presence there, only five miles away, but decided not to call her save in an emergency: She wrote one of those dry little notes of hers in thanks for the citrus, and said that Dick was better. But Dick was not at all better. There he lay, in all the helpless terror of a person suffering his first bad illness, with his face turned to the wall and a blanket over his head. `dust like a nigger!' said Mary in sharp scorn over his cowardice; she had seen sick natives lie just like that, in a kind of stoical apathy. But from time to time Dick roused himself to ask about the farm. Every conscious moment he worried about the things that would be going wrong without his supervision. Mary nursed him like a baby for a week, conscientiously, but with impatience because of his fear for himself. Then the fever left him, and he was weak and depressed, hardly able to sit up. He now tossed and kicked and fretted, talking all the time about his farm work.

She saw that he wanted her to go down and see to things, but did not like to suggest it. For a while she did not respond to the appeal she saw in his weakened and querulous face; then, realizing he would get out of bed before he was fit to walk, she said she would go.

She had to crush down violent repugnance to the idea of facing the farm natives herself: Even when she had called the dogs to her and stood on the verandah with the car keys in her hand, she turned back again to the kitchen for a glass of water; sitting in the car with her foot resting on the accelerator, she jumped out again, on an excuse that she needed a handkerchief.

Coming out of the bedroom she noticed the long sjambok that rested on two nails over the kitchen door, like an ornament: it was a long time since she had remembered its existence. Lifting it down, looping it over her wrist, she went to the car with more confidence. Because of it, she opened the back door of the car and let out the dogs; she hated the way they breathed down the back of her neck as she drove. She left them whining with disappointment outside the house, and drove herself down to the lands where the boys were supposed to be working. They knew of Dick's illness, and were not there, having dispersed, days before, to the compound. She took the car along the rough and rutted road as near as she could get to the compound, and then walked towards it along the native path that was trodden hard and smooth, but with a soft littering of glinting slippery grass over it, so that she had to move carefully to save herself from sliding. The long pale grass left sharp needles in her skirts, and the bushes shook red dust into her face

The compound was built on a low rise above the vlei, about half a mile from the house. The system was that a new labourer presenting himself for work was given a day without pay to build a hut for himself and his family before taking his place with the workers. So there were always new huts, and always empty old ones that slowly collapsed and fell down unless somebody thought of burning them. The huts were closely clustered over an acre or two of ground. They looked like natural growths from the ground, rather than man-made dwellings. It was as though a giant black hand had reached down from the sky, picked up handful of sticks and grass, and dropped them magically on the earth in the form of huts. They were grass-roofed, with pole walls plastered with mud, and single low doors, but no windows. The smoke from the fires inside percolated through the thatch or drifted in clouds from the doorways, so that each had the appearance of smouldering slowly from within. Between the huts were irregular patches of ill-cultivated mealies, and pumpkin vines trailed everywhere through plants and bushes and up over the walls and roofs, with the big amber-coloured pumpkins scattered among the leaves. Some of them were beginning to rot, subsiding into a sour festering ooze of pinky stuff, covered with flies. Flies were everywhere. They hummed round Mary's head in a cloud as she walked, and they were clustered round the eyes of the dozen small black children who were pot-bellied and mostly naked, staring at her as she picked her way through the vines and mealies past the huts. Thin native mongrels, their bones ridging through their hides, bared their teeth and cringed. Native women, draped in dirty store-stuff, and some naked above the waist with their slack black breasts hanging down, gazed at her from doorways with astonishment at her queer appearance, commenting on her among themselves, laughing, and making crude remarks. There were some men: glancing through doorways she could see bodies huddled asleep; some sat on their haunches on the ground in groups, talking. But she had no idea which were Dick's labourers, which were merely visiting here, or perhaps passing through the place on their way somewhere else. She stopped before one of them and told him to fetch the head boy, who soon came stooping out of one of the better huts that were ornamented on the walls with patterns of daubed red and yellow clay. His eyes were inflamed: she could see he had been drinking.

She said in kitchen kaffir: `Get the boys on to the lands in ten minutes.'

`The boss is better?' he asked with hostile indifference. She ignored the question, and said, `You can tell them that I will take two and six off the ticket of every one of them that isn't at work in ten minutes.' She held out her wrist and pointed to the watch, showing him the time interval.

The man slouched and stooped in the sunshine, resenting her presence; the native women stared and laughed; the filthy, underfed children crowded around. whispering to each other; the starved dogs slunk in the background among the vines and mealies. She hated the place, which she had never entered before. 'Filthy savages!' she thought vindictively. She looked straight into the reddened, beer-clouded eyes of the headman, and repeated, 'Ten minutes.' Then she turned and walked off down the winding path through the trees, listening for the sounds of the natives turning out of the huts behind her.

She satin the car waiting, beside the land where she knew they were supposed to be reaping maize. After half an hour a few stragglers arrived, the head-boy among them. At the end of an hour not more than half of the labourers were present: some had gone visiting to neighbouring compounds without permission, some lay drunk in their huts. She called the head-boy to her, and took down the names of those who were absent, writing them in her big awkward hand on a scrap of paper, spelling the unfamiliar names with difficulty. She remained there the whole morning, watching the straggling line of working boys, the sun glaring down through the old amnms hood on to her bare head. There was hardly any talking among them. They worked reluctantly, in a sullen silence; and she knew it was because they resented her, a woman, supervising them. When the gong rang for the lunch interval, she went up to the house and told Dick what had happened, but toning it down so that he would not worry. After lunch she drove down again, and curiously enough without repugnance for this work from which she had shrunk so long. She was exhilarated by the, unfamiliar responsibility, the sensation of pitting her will against the farm.