A Sport of Nature Read Online Free PDF

refectory where black waiters served lunch to the schoolgirls, one had said to a black man, Don’t lean your smelly arm over my face.
    Pauline made Carole repeat the remark.
    Don’t lean your smelly arm over my face
.
    Pauline was staring at her husband to impress upon him every syllable.
    â€”That’s what we pay through the nose for. Serves us right. Let’s take them out of that place
now
and put them in a government school. Take them away at once.—
    Joe’s small features were made smaller and closer by the surrounding fat of his face. His dainty mouth always moved a moment, sensitively, before he spoke. —Where to? There’s nowhere to go from anything that happens here.— He put on his glasses and gently studied the two girls, his daughter and his wife’s niece, while Pauline’s voice flew about the room.
    â€”Exactly! Idiots we’ve been. No possibility to buy your way out of what this country is. So why pay? Racism is free. Send them to a government school, let them face it as it’s written in your glorious rule of law, canonized by the church, a kaffir is a kaffir, God Save White South Africa—anything, anything but the filth of ladylike, keep-your-little-finger-curled prejudice—
    It was the first time the niece saw the full splendour of this aunt. Pauline’s eyes rounded up attention; her long, rough-towelledhair, prematurely and naturally marked with elegant strokes of grey while Olga’s blond streaks required artifice, seemed to come alive, stirring and standing out as physical characteristics create the illusion of doing in people possessed by strong emotion. The maid Bettie, bringing in a parcel that had been delivered, changed expression as if she had put her head through a door into the tension of air before thunder.
    Joe heard Pauline out. —No, we won’t concede, we’ll confront. We’ll explain to Miss Gidding what we expect of the school; what we mean by table manners.— (He caught Hillela’s eye to bring a smile from her.)
    Again the two chairs turned to one another facing the desk in a headmistress’s study.
    Pauline’s rising inflections, the text of which her daughter and niece could supply like words that go along with a tune, came through the walls to the anteroom where they waited, but no doubt it was the cross-examination technique of inaudible Joe that must have convinced the headmistress of need for the course she took. Hillela had not witnessed the incident at school, she had been eating at another table, but she was a member of the family and was called with Carole into the presence: parents, headmistress behind the desk. The headmistress wished to apologize for the offence given by the behaviour of one of their fellow pupils. Lack of politeness to the staff, whether black or white, was not tolerated at the school. The girl in question would be informed, and so would her parents. But it was to be understood by Carole and Hillela that the matter was not to be spread about as a subject for school gossip. Humiliating a fellow pupil would be a repetition of the original offence. —We want to guide, not accuse.—
    Joe took them all off for an icecream before he returned to his office. Pauline was elated and sceptical, every now and then drawing a deep breath through narrowed nostrils, her black eyesmoving as if to pick out faces in an invisible audience. —‘The parents are such important people’—
    â€”She did not say important, she did not say that—
    â€”All right, that’s what she meant—‘she is quite sure such behaviour wasn’t learnt at home’. Well, then, must have been learnt at school, mmh? You heard me put that to her. How absolutely ridiculous, anyway, that schoolgirls shouldn’t wait on themselves. But no, the procedures of the Northern Suburbs dinner table are those into which young ladies are to be inducted—she didn’t