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They remember how Mary Adams was afflicted with malignant inferiority as a girl in provincial little Lebanon. Her father was head hawker in the public market, a loud man with a mean soul. Her mother was doting and desperately middle class. Mary was a pretty girl stricken with panic by society's failure to come running to her feet more often than it did. Her nature preened itself and craned for admiration, thus repelling it and thrusting the girl into bitter, pitiful snobbery. She grew to despise Brand, or any one, who thought well of her. Yet so determined was she to excite notice and envy that when she met a mild-mannered young English secretary in Cape Town, she invented for him a grand character, paraded him in Lebanon, married him and went to England. She sprinkled lordly names in her letters, sent money home. . . . Really, she was working in a store to make ends meet.
Brand van Aardt had fallen back on the plain little school mistress, Emma, telling her honestly she was second choice. She had accepted honestly, wanting him even that way. They had grown together, honest friends, not exalted but not unhappy. He had amassed wealth. When Mary Glenn came home with her ineffectual husband and her fraying tissue of appearances, Brand had unobtrusively put them on the farm. It was a livelihood for Elliott Glenn, who was supinely grateful. For Mary it was a refuge, but also a torment. Her snobbery remained swollen while her pretences shriveled and her beauty went.
One of her last pretences had been to make Elliott go hunting on the veld every year, as bigger men did. She could then send game to impress her friends. Even with the baby coming she had insisted he leave her to hunt. Elliott's usual hunting partner failing, she let little Jackie go.
Here is her trouble when Brand and Emma reach her in response to her summons: Elliott is days late in returning. Something has surely happened, probably to the boy. Wracked already, she is bitter with hate for Elliott when he does appear, dry-mouthed, caked with dust, to say he has lost Jackie in the trackless, beast-run hunting veld, lost him completely. There is a nightmare of searching. Mary's baby is born, prematurely but alive, in a desert railway shed. The boy is not found. Back on the farm, Mary's hatred for Elliott shades into insane belief in the boy's return, insanity that rasps into Elliott until answering hatred is aroused in him. Their lives stand stark, brutal, and he blurts out—something that overshadows his ineffectualness and her pettiness, a fact terrible enough to make them see themselves pinned together inseparably in the vise called Life.
The Significance. There is a rigid directness about this story, a dramatic intensity achieved without sensational devices, that makes it notable. Mrs. Millin's is a disciplined intelligence that can find important work close at hand and perform its task without ostentation. Her book is a sort of Main Street in the Greek manner. There is severity, clarity, grave pity.