A Ripple from the Storm

The waitress came over. She had been at school with Martha and they smiled at each other. She held the menu card for Anton in a way that Martha could see meant she was ironically impressed by this queer foreign bird. ‘The young lady will have a large portion of stew and vegetables,’ said Anton. ‘And some stewed fruit.’

The waitress transmitted the order to a black waiter who was passing, like a manageress; and went to flirt maternally with a table full of aircraftsmen. Her tone to the black waiter was automatically sharp and disdainful. Martha noted this familiar phenomenon for the thousandth time, and told Anton about the incident with the Indian store-hand and the black children. Discouragement returned as she talked about it; and Anton listened in silence, finally saying, because she obviously demanded some comment from him: ‘Capitalism creates divisions between human beings which will vanish on the advent of socialism.’

The black waiter deposited a plate in front of her. The waitress interrupted her sparring with the airmen to inquire: ‘Everything all right, Matty?’ and then, to the waiter, ‘Jim, I keep telling you not to …’With a sharp gesture of impatience she followed the waiter, who had gone hastily to the screen that hid the kitchen door. From behind the screen their voices came: ‘Jim, I keep telling you, if I’ve told you once I’ve told you a hundred times about the knives and forks.’

‘Yes, missus, but the boss said.’

‘I don’t care what the boss said. I’m telling you.’

‘Yes, missus.’

Martha said obstinately: ‘I sometimes think a good deal more than socialism is needed to cure this place.’

‘Socialism,’ said Anton, ‘will cure everything.’

‘You haven’t lived here, you don’t know.’

‘I have the advantage of having been one-fourth a Jew in Nazi Germany.’

This impressed her again with the richness of his experience as compared with hers, and she abdicated, saying nothing further, concentrating on her food.

‘You will ruin your digestion,’ said Anton. The tense mouth creaked into a small fatherly smile.

She thought: I wonder if he tells that silly Austrian woman about her health and her digestion? Her look at him must have been too openly speculative, for his face changed. ‘And who are you bringing to the meeting tonight?’ he asked. It sounded almost accusing; but not, as Martha’s instinct told her, on political grounds: she said flirtatiously: ‘No one. It seems I was too occupied with William to do my work properly.’

He held his eyes on her, so that she felt the heat creep up her neck, and said: ‘As I said before, women have special problems.’ But this time she did not like it: the heat in her face was for distaste of him. She said: ‘I don’t think I want any stewed fruit,’ and got up. He collected his papers, paid for his meal and hers, and followed her to the pavement where she stood, back to the café door, looking at the street. She was thinking: After all, he’s been with that Austrian woman for a long time … If he’s interested in me (and her instinct told her he was) then perhaps I have something in common with her. The thought made her despise herself; for while she pitied Toni Mandel she did not respect her. She reflected: It would be so much more convenient for Anton if he had me instead of her: his life wouldn’t be in two parts. The cynicism of this surprised her, and she said aggressively: ‘Why don’t you bring Mrs Mandel to the group?’

He said: There are people unfitted for politics. She is not a political person.’

‘I thought you said that everyone must be political, that everyone is. You once said that if you were put alone with any person in the world on to a desert island for a week you could convince them of the rightness and logic of communism.’

‘Yes, yes, yes. But meanwhile we must make allowances for circumstances.’ Now they were climbing the dark stairs. ‘So you are not bringing anyone? Do you know who the others are bringing?’

‘I saw Marjorie today. She’s bringing Colin Black.’

Even in the dark of the stairway she could feel that he had stiffened. ‘And who is Colin Black?’

‘You’ve seen him at club meetings. He’s her boy-friend.’

She remembered the special quality of Anton’s regard for Marjorie, and she thought: Perhaps he’s been thinking of taking her on? But he must have noticed that she and Colin were always together? Now the light from the open door of the office shone on to Anton’s face and it was set hard. The office was full of people, Marjorie among them, who was sitting next to Colin. Usually Anton greeted her first, Martha remembered: this time he did not greet anyone but went stiffly to the table, seated himself, and arranged his papers without looking around at the others who, because of his unmistakable command of them, fell silent as they waited where they had arranged themselves on the benches around the walls. On each face was a look of joyful expectancy; and Martha’s spirits rose out of the conflict of doubt and despondency she had felt below, in Black Ally’s and on the pavement. She sat down, examining the new faces.

She knew them all, save for the airmen who were with Andrew, five men in the thick grey uniform, and sitting together with the look of a group within a group. Colin, Marjorie’s young man, was a fat, dark, solid, spectacled civil servant who surveyed them all in turn, solemnly, between affectionate glances at Marjorie. On her other side was an extremely pretty slim dark girl who was a secretary in one of the commercial offices. Her name was Carrie Jones. Jasmine had brought an African whom none of them had seen before, a large man who sat benevolently watching them. Jasmine was also responsible for a married couple, Marie and Piet du Preez. He was a great beefy good-natured fellow, one of the prominent officials in the white trade union movement. His wife was a serious, pleasant-faced woman who looked as if she were dressed for an afternoon tea, wearing a tight floral dress and white high-heeled shoes. On the other side of Piet sat a small lad, an urchin of seventeen or so, a protégé of his, presumably, from the trade union. He had a red and uncomfortable face, peeling from sunburn; aspiring earnest grey eyes; and his hair, rough-gold-surfaced from sunlight, was plastered down with cream, but plastered in vain, for it was already rising in thick lively tufts from his crown.

These fifteen people regarded each other with respectful interest, in such deep silence that the chatter and clatter from Black Ally’s below filled the room together with the smell of food which competed with the chalky office smell.

Andrew McGrew, who had taken off his jacket and made himself comfortable by rolling it into a ball and stuffing it into the small of his back, took the pipe out of his mouth long enough to nod at Anton and say: ‘Let’s shoot.’

Anton had been showing by the set of his shoulders and his lowered hostile head that it had been agreed there should be no more than ten people here tonight. He said without looking up: ‘First it should be made clear on what basis we are assembled.’

Andrew said impatiently: ‘Everyone is here because they believe in communism.’

There was movement around the room, and small exclamations of agreement and interest. Anton’s pale eyes now raised themselves and moved from one face to another: ‘Yes, yes, but we must make our basis for being here clear.’

Andrew seemed about to speak, frowned irritably, and decided against it. Jasmine hastily said, obviously trying to ward off any friction between the two men: ‘It was decided to bring people to this meeting who wanted to be recruited as members. And it was decided that you should give a short lecture on Marxism.’

Anton said stubbornly. ‘It is essential to know whether the people in this room consider themselves recruits as members or not.’

‘I think Mr Hesse is quite right,’ said Piet du Preez. ‘Speaking for myself, I’m not sure where I stand. I don’t mean about communism. I got mixed up in the Party down South last year, and it seems OK to me. But we ought to know about this group. There’s a lot of talk in the town. But is it a formally organized communist group or a discussion group?’

Anton said nothing. Jasmine therefore looked towards Andrew who said: ‘This is a communist group. A secret communist group. But the lads here from the camp came along simply to listen and see if they wanted to join. Comrade Anton seems to think that he shouldn’t speak at all until he knows whether people want to join.’

‘In that case,’ said Anton, ‘it should be defined as follows: the people here have come to listen to a discussion on Marxism, after which they will decide whether or not they will join the group.’

‘But that’s what we said all the time,’ said Marjorie, amused and impatient. Martha had observed that the girl had been trying to catch Anton’s eye to gain from him his usual fatherly approval of her, and was now hurt because his eyes met hers without any sort of acknowledgment. He said coldly: ‘Precisely so. But we have to know exactly how we stand. And now I shall speak for three-quarters of an hour on Marxism, with particular reference to the dialectical materialist conception of history, after which there will be discussion. Then the people present will decide whether or not, on the basis of what they have heard, they wish to join.’

‘Actually,’ said the pretty dark girl, leaning forward, ‘most of us know about the Party, don’t we? I was recruited in London last year. Well of course I was on holiday so perhaps it doesn’t count, but I do know a little, and I thought most people here did.’

Anton, controlling irritation, slowly turned over papers.

Andrew asked: ‘Is there anyone here who has not had some connection with the organized communist party?’

The lad near Piet went dull red. Piet good-naturedly jerked his elbow into him, and put up his hand like a schoolboy and said: ‘I haven’t done anything yet.’

At which the African, Elias Phiri, nodded in reply to Andrew’s glances and said: ‘I’m ignorant of these matters. But I am very interested.’

They regarded him with a warm sympathy: after all, it was on behalf of his people they were all here. He accepted their glances with a broad smile.

‘Now we all know where we are,’ said Andrew. ‘The lads here have had experience in Britain. But it does no harm to have the principles stated.’

‘None at all,’ agreed Anton quietly, holding them with his eyes, one after the other. He began: ‘Comrades, this is the dawn of human history. We have the supreme good fortune and the responsibility to be living at a time when mankind takes the first great step forward from the barbarity and chaos of unplanned production to the sunlight of socialism – from the babyhood of our species to its manhood. Upon us, upon people like us all over the world, the organized members of the communist party, depends the future of mankind, the future of our species.’

He spoke slowly, drawing the sentences out one after another from his brain where they were stored waiting, and handed them to the listeners, his voice measured, unhurrying, not cold so much as anonymous.

Martha found herself leaning forward, tense, on her patch of hard bench. When she looked around, the others were in the same condition of joy and release. It seemed to her this unhurrying voice was cutting the past from her, that ugly past which Maynard had described that afternoon as a record of misery, brutality and stupidity, ‘a bunch of knaves administering a pack of fools’. It was all finished. She was feeling a comprehensive compassion: for the pitiful past, and for the innumerable unhappy people of the world whom she was pledging herself to deliver.

Also, the calm voice was linking her with those parts of her childhood she still owned, the moments of experience which seemed to her enduring and true; the moments of illumination and belief.

It said: ‘Comrades, the infinite complexity of events, each acting and interacting, so that there is no phenomenon in the world which is not linked with and affects every other – in nature nothing happens alone …’ and she was returned to a knowledge of the thrust and push of knitting natural forces which had grappled with the substance of her own flesh, to become part of it, in the moments of illumination in her past.

It said: ‘Comrades, men make their history …’ and she felt her shoulders straighten, with an influx of strength, as if she had been given a gage of trust. So had she felt years ago when the Cohen boys at the station put books into her hands, as if they were giving her a key and trusting her to use it well.

It said: ‘Comrades, the bourgeois illusion of eternity, the illusion that the present system of government is permanent …’ and the terrible fear that haunted her, the nightmare of recurring and fated evil was pushed by the words into a place where it was no longer dangerous.

It said: ‘The motives of men making history in the past were often good; but the ideology of reformers often had no connection with what they actually accomplished; this is the first time in history that men can accomplish what they mean to accomplish; for Marxism is a key to the understanding of phenomena; we, in our epoch, see an end to that terrible process, shown for instance in the French Revolution, when men went to their deaths in thousands for noble ends – in their case, liberty, fraternity and equality, when what they were actually doing was to destroy one class and give another the power to rob and destroy. For the first time consciousness and accomplishment are linked, go hand in hand, supplement each other …’ And Martha felt as if a light had been turned on for her: she might still admire the great men she had been used to admire; they had been misguided, that was all. And she herself need not dwindle out (like her father, for instance) savage with the knowledge of belief betrayed. There could be no more misguided passion for the good, or soured idealism.

She was swung, because of the calm and responsible certainty of Anton Hesse’s voice, on to a state of quiet elation and purpose. She knew that everyone in the room felt as she did. She was linked with them all, and from the deepest needs of her being. The people in the room, listening, exchanged small trusting smiles with each other; eyes, meeting, pledged faith with each other and with all humanity.

Anton Hesse spoke for more than three-quarters of an hour. It would not be said of him that he was carried away – he was not; but his words had the power and passion of the great men from whom he had taken them; and the confiding silence of the fifteen people listening released in him a faith in them which had most certainly been missing when he had begun to speak. His very pale-blue eyes, shining from the white light over his head, moved from one face to another – not in any sort of appeal; but in certainty, because the words he used were a proof of goodness and trust.