"How can you bear to let them touch you? " Margaret was watching the hills. Their crop was maize.
Margaret had been on the farm for three years now. And off they ran again, the two white men with them, and in a few minutes Margaret could see the smoke of fires rising from all around the farmlands. Through the hail of insects, a man came running. What is cursing words. "All the crops finished. Margaret was wondering what she could do to help. Old Smith had already had his crop eaten to the ground. 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. Now she was a proper farmer's wife, in sensible shoes and a solid skirt.
But it's only early afternoon. It's thirsty work, this. Now there was a long, low cloud advancing, rust-colored still, swelling forward and out as she looked. The cookboy ran to beat the rusty plowshare, banging from a tree branch, that was used to summon the laborers at moments of crisis. The men were her husband, Richard, and old Stephen, Richard's father, who was a farmer from way back, and these two might argue for hours over whether the rains were ruinous or just ordinarily exasperating. We'll all three have to go back to town. It was a half night, a perverted blackness. If we can make enough smoke, make enough noise till the sun goes down, they'll settle somewhere else, perhaps. What does cursing mean. " They all stood and gazed. In the meantime, he told her about how, twenty years back, he had been eaten out, made bankrupt by the locust armies. And then, still talking, he lifted the heavy petrol cans, one in each hand, holding them by the wooden pieces set cornerwise across the tops, and jogged off down to the road to the thirsty laborers. Stephen impatiently waited while Margaret filled one petrol tin with tea—hot, sweet, and orange-colored—and another with water.
Over the rocky levels of the mountain was a streak of rust-colored air. The men were throwing wet leaves onto the fires to make the smoke acrid and black. The air was darkening—a strange darkness, for the sun was blazing. Activity where cursing is expected crossword puzzle crosswords. Her heart ached for him; he looked so tired, the worry lines deep from nose to mouth. And then: "Get the kettle going. And she noticed that for all Richard's and Stephen's complaints, they did not go bankrupt.
The telephone was ringing—neighbors to say, Quick, quick, here come the locusts! Margaret looked out and saw the air dark with a crisscross of the insects, and she set her teeth and ran out into it; what the men could do, she could. Quick, get your fires started! Up came old Stephen again—crunching locusts underfoot with every step, locusts clinging all over him—cursing and swearing, banging with his old hat at the air. She still did not understand why they did not go bankrupt altogether, when the men never had a good word for the weather, or the soil, or the government. The rains that year were good; they were coming nicely just as the crops needed them—or so Margaret gathered when the men said they were not too bad.
They are heavy with eggs. A tree down the slope leaned over slowly and settled heavily to the ground. Out came the servants from the kitchen. Margaret supplied them. "Those beggars can eat every leaf and blade off the farm in half an hour!
The locusts were coming fast. He picked a stray locust off his shirt and split it down with his thumbnail; it was clotted inside with eggs. Insects, swarms of them—horrible! It might go on for three or four years. By now, the locusts were falling like hail on the roof of the kitchen. Asked Margaret fearfully, and the old man said emphatically, "We're finished. Old Stephen said, "They've got the wind behind them. Behind the reddish veils in front, which were the advance guard of the swarm, the main swarm showed in dense black clouds, reaching almost to the sun itself. When she looked out, all the trees were queer and still, clotted with insects, their boughs weighted to the ground. She never had an opinion of her own on matters like the weather, because even to know about a simple thing like the weather needs experience, which Margaret, born and brought up in Johannesburg, had not got. It sounded like a heavy storm. Then up came old Stephen from the lands. Soon they had all come up to the house, and Richard and old Stephen were giving them orders: Hurry, hurry, hurry.
More tea, more water were needed. Old Stephen yelled at the houseboy. Now on the tin roof of the kitchen she could hear the thuds and bangs of falling locusts, or a scratching slither as one skidded down the tin slope. "We haven't had locusts in seven years, " one said, and the other, "They go in cycles, locusts do. " It was like the darkness of a veldt fire, when the air gets thick with smoke and the sunlight comes down distorted—a thick, hot orange. At the doorway, he stopped briefly, hastily pulling at the clinging insects and throwing them off, and then he plunged into the locust-free living room. Margaret answered the telephone calls and, between them, stood watching the locusts. So Margaret went to the kitchen and stoked up the fire and boiled the water.
At once, Richard shouted at the cookboy. The sky made her eyes ache; she was not used to it. Margaret heard him and she ran out to join them, looking at the hills. The locusts were flopping against her, and she brushed them off—heavy red-brown creatures, looking at her with their beady, old men's eyes while they clung to her with their hard, serrated legs. They are looking for a place to settle and lay.
"Imagine that multiplied by millions. She kept the fires stoked and filled tins with liquid, and then it was four in the afternoon and the locusts had been pouring across overhead for a couple of hours. Then came a sharp crack from the bush—a branch had snapped off. Nor did they get very rich; they jogged along, doing comfortably. She held her breath with disgust and ran through the door into the house again. He looked at her disapprovingly. Beautiful it was, with the sky on fair days like blue and brilliant halls of air, and the bright-green folds and hollows of country beneath, and the mountains lying sharp and bare twenty miles off, beyond the rivers. The farm was ringing with the clamor of the gong, and the laborers came pouring out of the compound, pointing at the hills and shouting excitedly. The iron roof was reverberating, and the clamor of beaten iron from the lands was like thunder. "Get me a drink, lass, " Stephen then said, and she set a bottle of whiskey by him. So that evening, when Richard said, "The government is sending out warnings that locusts are expected, coming down from the breeding grounds up north, " her instinct was to look about her at the trees. Their farm was three thousand acres on the ridges that rise up toward the Zambezi escarpment—high, dry, wind-swept country, cold and dusty in winter, but now, in the wet months, steamy with the heat that rose in wet, soft waves off miles of green foliage. And then there are the hoppers.
Margaret thought an adult swarm was bad enough. 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. Overhead, the air was thick—locusts everywhere. The earth seemed to be moving, with locusts crawling everywhere; she could not see the lands at all, so thick was the swarm. This comforted Margaret; all at once, she felt irrationally cheered. Nothing left, " he said.