A Ripple From the Storm (30 page)
Mrs Quest, delighted to find an ally in a woman she had heard of as Kaffir-lover, delighted that this Town Councillor, by repute so dangerous, was in fact sound, now grasped Mrs Van by the hand and said: ‘My dear, I’m so pleased you agree with me. It is really awful, isn’t it, these agitators should all be shot.’ She kept her hand on Mrs Van’s arm while she remarked generally around the room: ‘You see, it is really very dangerous what you are doing. I’ve always said so.’
Mrs Van said: ‘I’m going back home now. Perhaps you’d like a lift?’
Mrs Quest, uncertain what to do with her glass of wine, looked about for a place to set it down, saw nothing but bare boards, hastily drank it, said: ‘Thank you, my dear! And I would like to discuss this native problem with you – I think responsible people like ourselves ought to get together and form some vigilantes committees, because the Government doesn’t do anything, and we must protect ourselves.’
‘That would be a very good idea,’ said Mrs Van. She turned and said in a low voice to Martha, with an emphatic and rather angry nod: ‘If things are done in a regular manner, these situations need not arise!’
Martha said: ‘Regular? What’s regular about anything that happens? Don’t you see that it’s all a farce, everything …’ She turned away from Mrs Van and returned to her place on the bed.
Mrs Van, shrugging crossly, signalled to her allies Jack and Johnny, who followed her to the door, grinning with delight at the situation. There Mrs Quest remembered Martha, and said: ‘Go to bed early, you naughty girl, and get some sleep.’ She remembered her daughter had just got married, frowned, said hastily that she would see her in a few days, smiled at the company and went out.
People showed signs of dissolving into laughter, but Martha looked gloomy and strained, and nothing happened, until Athen inquired seriously: ‘I did not understand that woman, Comrade Matty. Is she your mother?’
Martha shrugged.
‘And what did she want you to do with these reactionary letters in the newspapers?’
‘We should read them and acquire a correct outlook on life.’
‘I do not understand you, Comrade Matty.’ Martha again shrugged. The Greek examined her for a moment, in silent severity, and then, speaking to her direct, as if they were alone, said: ‘I feel I should say something. There is a kind of laughter that is very bad. It is a mocking at the truth.’
‘Well, yes, I dare say.’
At this Maisie said: ‘I think Matty is upset, and I don’t blame her. I don’t think we ought to have a meeting when Matty and Anton haven’t even arranged their room yet.’
But Tommy, who had been waiting impatiently for some time, unable to understand the undercurrents, unhappy and disapproving of this marriage which he found even more irregular than Maisie’s and Andrew’s, burst out: ‘No, comrades, we must discuss something, I have to get my mind clear about something.’
So the meeting started, on the burst of Tommy’s furious demand for clarity, and for the first time without chairman, secretary, or any sort of formality.
‘The point is this. As I see it there is a fight blowing up in the Labour Party – I mean the Social Democratic Party – and I want to say something else too, all these names, all these names all the time, meaning different things all the time, Social Democratic used to mean revolutionary as far as I can see, and now they use it to be respectable …’ He banged his fists on the top of his head. ‘But that isn’t the point. It’s the African Branch that bothers me. As I see it, an African Branch is reactionary. It’s democratic to have natives, I mean Africans, as members of the Labour Party just like everyone else, going to meetings as individuals. An African Branch is segregation. Well, isn’t it? But Mrs Van and Johnny and Jack are good types, not colour-minded at all, and they support an African Branch and all the reactionaries support what is democratic. Well, I don’t get it. I simply don’t get any of it.’
Athen the Greek directed his firm, unsmiling sympathetic face towards Tommy and said: ‘That’s a good boy, comrade, you must always speak up for what you feel.’
Piet du Preez said with comic and clowning despair: ‘We should of course get our line straight about this little point. We should always have our line straight.’
Anton recovered himself from his lapse into irresponsibility and personal feelings, and sat up, swung his legs down to the floor, and said: ‘Comrades, it seems clear that we must analyse the situation.’
The meeting broke up at four next morning, and everyone went to sleep where they were, on the floor, or in loose bundles of tired flesh on the two beds. They were woken at six again by Maisie’s house-boy, who regarded his employers as friends and allies. He had brought them that day’s copy of the
News,
which had big black headlines: Agitators Inciting Africans to Revolt.
‘Baas, bass,’ he called out through the half-open door to Andrew, nervously averting his eyes from the dishevelled bodies all over the room. ‘Baas, baas! It’s the newspaper. It is saying bad things about you, baas. Oh it is wicked. It is saying wicked things.’
The origin of states gets lost in a myth in which one may believe but one may not discuss.
KARL MARX
The walls and pillars of the du Preez’ veranda, which had been absorbing the sun all day, still quivered off heat at eight in the evening. The members of the group, who had thought it might be cooler out in the quiet heavy-lying hot night air, changed their minds and returned to the big heatsodden living-room. It was only half the group. Last night Anton had said: ‘Group meeting tomorrow, eight o’clock.’
There were present Anton, Marjorie, Andrew and Marie.
‘Where’s Piet?’ Anton demanded before he had so much as sat down. He was angry, but with a new kind of stiff anger, as if with each new infringement of discipline he were inwardly nodding and saying: Yes, it was only to be expected.
Marie said: ‘He’s at the union meeting. And Tommy’s with him.’ It was now assumed that trade union and labour meetings came before group meetings; or rather, it was not so much an assumption, which would have needed decisions on a fundamental policy, as a fact. Ever since ‘the meeting in the Location’ the group had been shaken, pressured, squeezed this way and that because of the repercussions from that great event. In Piet’s trade union a battle raged. Piet had given a lecture on trade unionism to the Kaffirs, and this raised principles whose discussion brought men to the union meetings who normally never went near them.
In the living-room easy chairs were set in a circle. Stacks of literature on Russia stood everywhere among the children’s toys. The room had a look of easy family good-humour. Marie said: ‘We’ll have a spot of the drop that cheers – we might as well while we’re waiting.’
Anton said: This is a communist group meeting.’
Andrew said: ‘I’ll have a beer.’ Marjorie said: ‘Me too.’ Children defying teacher. Anton said nothing. He held his notes on his knees ready for his lecture, which was to be on the course of the war on the Eastern Front.
Marie brought in beer bottles, frosted with cold. The heat sagged through the room and the thunder rolled slowly overhead.
‘I’ve a notion we’ll have to wait some time,’ said Andrew. ‘Matty and Colin have gone to Jack Dobie’s lecture on India.’
‘They had no right to.’
‘Jack came to our place and asked Colin to come – Colin’s been studying up on India. And Matty was there and she said she would go with Colin.’
At the sound of his wife’s name Anton settled back into pale stoicism.
‘Oh, go on, have a beer, man,’ said Marie, and thrust a glass into Anton’s hand. He set the glass down without looking at it and asked: ‘And is Athen on duty? If not, why is he not here?’
‘Don’t ask me,’ said Andrew. ‘And Maisie’s not here because she’s not feeling so good.’ Anton never inquired after Maisie. It was his way of saying that he did not count her as a group member. Andrew always insisted on accounting for her. The tension between the two men had become acute.
Marie said: ‘For crying out aloud we’ll start slitting each other’s throats because it’s hot in a minute.’
She sat down yawning and spreading her legs.
‘Perhaps we should take a decision to have cocktails with our group meetings,’ said Anton with bitterness. It was true that the scene might have been set for a sundowner party.
‘Oh come off it,’ said Andrew. ‘Come off it. If things have gone wrong tonight, we can put them right next time.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Anton, ‘here we sit, drinking beer, and meanwhile our comrades are dying for us.’
He picked up a newspaper which had been lying on the floor. Its headlines were: German Front Cracking. General Frost Beats German High Command. German Armies Perishing of Cold.
All that winter the Russian armies, the German armies had been struggling together, millions of men struggling and dying, locked in cold and snow, locked together over hundreds of miles of front that stretched over wind-swept, blizzard-torn, frost-bitten plains, Northern plains tilted away from the sun into darkness and ice. Headlines, reports from the fronts, newsreels, gave messages of heroism and misery, but the voices came out of a terrible cold, like distant shouts from people struggling through a snowstorm.
Marjorie looked down at the big black print on the newspaper, saying Cold, Snow, Blizzard, Death and remarked: ‘We could do with a bit of that cold here.’ Her face was beaded with sweat, and she moved her big body continually into easier positions. She was trying to sound humorous.
Anton said: ‘Comrade Marjorie, is that your idea of a joke?’ Ever since her marriage, he had spoken to her as if he disliked her, and she met it with her own brand of dry tolerance. Now she frankly and loudly sighed, and Marie ostentatiously sighed with her.
Andrew said quickly: ‘Why don’t you give your lecture to us, Comrade Anton. After all, it’s better than wasting it.’
Anton raised his cold eyes towards him, lowered them to examine his watch, gathered his notes and began his lecture. It was analysis of this particular stage of the war, with emphasis on the reasons why there was no second front. Normally he spoke for half an hour. Tonight he finished it in ten minutes,
Marjorie said: ‘All the same, it’s like Napoleon, all those masses of men dying in the cold.’
Anton said: ‘Comrade Marjorie, historical parallels are sometimes useful, but don’t you feel this one is rather farfetched?’
Marjorie said tiredly: ‘No, why? Of course, this is socialism fighting for its life. But men are still dying of cold.’
‘Poor buggers,’ said Marie, splashing beer into her glass and spreading her legs out wider in front of her. ‘Poor bloody bastards. I wish the spring would come for their sake.’
‘You are, I presume, referring to the Red Army?’ asked Anton.
‘I was referring to the Germans as well.’
‘Comrade Ehrenburg has I think made the line quite clear. The Germans have proved themselves barbarians and fascists and must be considered as such. Put yourself into the place of the Russians. ‘
Marie said: ‘If the Russians hate the guts of all the Germans, then it’s natural. But speaking for myself, there are times when Comrade Ehrenburg makes me sick. I don’t see what all that nationalist drum-beating has got to do with socialism, and that’s a fact.’ She said this with a deliberate challenge, as if she had planned to say it for some time. She added, ‘And I keep thinking of those German boys, poor sods, fascists or no fascists, they’re human beings.’
Anton got to his feet. Marie stayed where she was, frankly played out, frankly indifferent. Her face was scarlet with the heat, and her arms and legs were slowly mottling with some kind of heat rash. The thunder was rolling overhead.
‘Wish to God it’d rain,’ said Andrew, in the bluff, let’shave-no-trouble voice which meant he was back in command of himself. He gave Anton a clout across the shoulders and said: ‘Do let up, there’s a good chap. We can all get our political lines straight when it starts to rain.’
Anton said: ‘Since there is no group meeting, I consider it’s our duty to go and support Matty and Colin at the meeting on India.’
‘Duty or no duty,’ said Marie, fanning herself, eyes closed, ‘I’ve had it until it rains.’
Marjorie, Andrew and Anton left her, and stood together on the veranda. Beyond the pillars the sky massed itself, darkly thunderous, lightning spurted and ran from one cloud mountain to another. The air was dry. For a week the clouds had been packing along the horizons, piling up, and thickening, but the rain held off. Tonight the air quivered and sang with the dry heat, and the dust shifted along dry earth under a small feverish wind.
‘Coming to the meeting?’ Anton said to Andrew.
Andrew said, after hesitation, ‘I suppose so.’ But he was ashamed, for he added heartily: ‘Jack Dobie knows his stuff and we should support him.’
When the car passed the flats where Marjorie lived she said apologetically: ‘I’m not feeling too good. This baby’s beginning to make itself felt.’
They dropped her, and drove to the hall where the meeting was. It was full. Andrew said: ‘Not bad, three hundred people for a meeting on India in this weather. And for God’s sake,’ he added, ‘don’t say anything about the heroism of the Russians or I’ll leave you and go to the pictures.’
Anton permitted himself to smile. They settled themselves, standing, against a wall, while Jack Dobie, an energetic little figure alone on the platform, worked himself up to his peroration: ‘Having bled India dry for hundreds of years it is our moral duty, etc’ Meanwhile a short, gingery, Cape-brandy-complexioned man jumped up and down and shouted: ‘Go back to the Clydeside. We don’t want you here.’ A group of local Indians, shopkeepers and teachers from the segregated Indian school, stood by themselves in a comer, kept their eyes fixed on the speaker, and from time to time muttered, ‘Shame, shame!’, shaking their heads sorrowfully. The body of the citizens listened in silence to the subversive views being put to them with the look of those prepared to keep an open mind about everything. The meeting, in short, was like all the meetings of that short epoch 1942 to 1945. The walls of the hall were still covered with posters from last night’s meeting, the Sympathizers of Russia’s Brains Trust on ‘Soviet Man – a New Species?’ Lenin, Stalin, and an assortment of Soviet generals gazed at each other over the heads of the crowd. Words like liberty, freedom, democracy, revolution drove one brave sentence into the next. If Lenin himself had appeared before these white-skinned petty-bourgeois, consigning them and their kind to the dust-heaps of history, invoking over their heads the masses of Africans (none were present that night, they were all safely asleep in the Location), he would have been immune from them, protected by the spirit of the time, and the image of a redstarred, hammered-and-sickled, frost-bitten, weary, bloodstained peasant. Along hundreds of miles of battle-front that stretched across dark and winter-bitten plains, the Red Army fought in choking snow and cold, and a breath of this cold air came into the hot and sultry little hall where men sweated in shirt-sleeves and the women fanned themselves with programmes emblazoned: ‘Let India Go Free!’ Jack Dobie marched from one end of the platform to the other, his Scots eyes blazing, shaking his fist at them and telling them they were blood-sucking imperialists and that freedom was indivisible.
Anton looked along the upturned faces for Martha. She was not there and must have gone home. Andrew was thinking of Maisie: he had reasons to be with her tonight. But both men knew that because of their rivalry they would stay out the meeting to its end, and afterwards take Jack Dobie off for coffee. He had been officially pigeon-holed by the group as ‘sincere, but too much of an individualist, and needed guidance by Marxists’. Unless it rained and although the thunder rolled above the tin roof, often drumming out the sound of Jack’s voice, there was no sign of rain, there would be no excuse to go home.
Five hundred yards away in a small bright hot room, Maisie Gale, briefly Maisie York, briefly Maisie Denham, now Maisie McGrew, a girl of twenty-four in the full of her pregnancy, sat with her belly resting on her sweaty thighs on the bed which was in the dayime a divan, and hollowed her hands around a small highly-coloured globe, her eyes fixed on the sandy-coloured area which represented the Sudan. Opposite her on a stiff chair sat Athen the Greek, his small brown muscular hands resting on his khaki knees, watching her with a brotherly and patient concern. At eight o’clock, under the impression the group meeting was at the Hesses’ flat above this one, he had knocked and found it empty, descended to this room to make inquiries about where the group was meeting, and found Maisie moving fast and clumsy about the small room, holding her stomach away from the sharp corners of chairs and tables, her fair babyhair glued to her head with sweat so that her face lengthened beneath it into a heavy, yellowish, stiff-staring mass of unhappiness. She had offered him tea, coffee, beer, told him to cook himself supper if he were hungry, sat down, got up, sighed, stood staring out of the window into the electriccrackling darkness, and finally informed him in a voice full of resentment that Andrew had gone to a meeting, but she hoped he would be back soon.
That morning Mrs Maynard had opened the door without knocking and informed the girl in a curt but at the same time obsequious way that Binkie had been given compassionate leave and would be in the town tomorrow. Since Maisie had said nothing at all, Mrs Maynard had left again, with a dignity that suggested a patient readiness to suffer injustice.
Then Maisie collapsed. She had ignored letters, telephone calls and even telegrams from the Maynards, but the actual presence of the black-browed and peremptory matron who was Binkie’s mother, whom Binkie so much resembled, had forced her to think: Binkie is coming. And then: The father of my child is coming. He will be here tomorrow.
Now she sat with one white, pudgy, rather grubby forefinger on the pink splodge that was Italy, and the other on the tiny black dot which was the city she lived in. She let her gaze move down across the blue of the Mediterranean where at that moment a naval battle was in progress, across the yellow of Egypt and the sands of the Sudan, down over Abyssinia, down across the great crack in the earth which was the Rift Valley, across the lakes and forests of Nyasaland and the empty dryness of Northern Rhodesia which produced copper, wasted in war, south to where she sat now in the small, shallow, heat-filled room. Then back her frowning puzzled eyes moved to Italy. Perhaps Binkie had not yet left? Perhaps he had been held up and she could have a few days’ grace? But most likely he was now somewhere in the air above Egypt, the Sudan, Abyssinia, travelling down over the curve of the earth, south and away from the cold of the war in Italy which was tilted darkwards away from the sun, south over the belly of Africa thrust forward into the sun, thrust into summer, where she sat and sweated and waited. She saw a tiny fly-like aeroplane move down over the earth’s curve, the sunlight deepening on its wings, and she lifted her eyes to Athen and said miserably: ‘I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong.’ Athen said for the tenth time that evening: ‘But Maisie, you knew he would come some time. You knew that.’