A Ripple From the Storm (23 page)

‘We don’t think babies should be killed simply because of nonsense about illegitimacy,’ said Martha. She added, feeling she had been partly dishonest: ‘I don’t know why it should be Andrew – but he’s a kind man.’

‘Yes, he is,’ Maisie agreed at once.

Martha heard nothing of her for a week. Then she came into the office and invited Martha for lunch.

Her mood had manifestly changed. For the first time since she had known her, Martha saw Maisie anxious.

‘It’s like this,’ she said. ‘I’m worried. Suppose I get fond of Andrew and I don’t want him to divorce me, then he won’t like it and I’ll be unhappy. Well, I don’t want to be unhappy. I’ve got enough troubles.’

This statement caused Martha to feel a pang which she recognized with disapproval as jealousy. For the kindliness of Andrew over Maisie’s baby had caused her to feel warm towards him, and she had even been thinking: I was a fool to let myself get involved with Anton instead of Andrew. She saw that Maisie had already become fond of Andrew.

Martha said: ‘He’ll be going back to England after the war.’

‘I know. And I’m sure I’d hate England. But don’t you see, Matty, there’s something not right about this, it’s too coldhearted.’

Martha sent a message to Andrew. He came into town that afternoon, and she set herself to convey to him, without actually saying so, that Maisie’s objection to this practical arrangement was the fact that it was practical. She watched Andrew’s face change from complacency into gratitude. He said: ‘Well, I’m quite partial to the lass myself. Where does she live?’

The group maintained a discreet silence about Maisie and Andrew for several days. This was hard to do, the signs of joy were so strong on Andrew’s face that it seemed positively dishonest not to notice them. Then he announced that he was marrying Maisie, and with the pride of a man in love. He was looking for a flat for Maisie. He even said he did not approve of women working while they were pregnant, adding with a calm nod towards Anton that he didn’t give a damn what they thought in the Soviet Union on this subject – he was old-fashioned. No one said a word of criticism.

They were delighted. The group was filled with a spirit of warm, though wry pleasure; as if something wilfully beautiful had been offered to them. That is, they were all delighted save Anton, who invited them to consider the consequences.

Marjorie remarked, smiling dryly: ‘The group is going to have a baby – but it’s not my baby! ‘

Meanwhile, new decisions had been taken about the work of the group. A ‘fundamentally new policy’ had come into being, and, oddly enough, not as a result of the fundamental analysis demanded by Anton, but because of a remark of Jasmine’s.

They were all assembled in the du Preez’ living-room, engaged in the routine management of the half-dozen societies they were now responsible for, when jasmine said: ‘I met Mrs Van der Bylt in the street today, and she wanted to know why I had dropped my work in the Labour Party. Well, of course I couldn’t say I couldn’t stand that bunch of social democrats any longer.’

‘But Jasmine,’ said Marie du Preez, ‘I’m still a member. Surely you’re wrong? I didn’t know we were expected to stop being members. Why should we?’

The questions of principle raised here were immense, but not gone into: Anton said calmly that of course Jasmine had been wrong.

Jasmine went to a Labour Party Committee meeting, to which she was invited to go as an observer, and returned saying that it would be quite easy to co-opt four or five of the group members on to the committee. Mrs Van, who was a really progressive person, not at all like the others on the committee, had said she would be pleased to have them there. She proposed to co-opt them.

Martha, Marjorie, Colin, Marie and Piet were instructed to attend the next committee meeting. Carrie Jones, invited to do so, refused. She took this opportunity of saying that she wished them luck, but she felt she would never make a communist. Next day it was announced in the
News
that she was engaged to the manager of the firm to which she was secretary.

The group, feeling that this had been inevitable, congratulated her and afterwards did no more than describe her as fundamentally petty bourgeois. In fact, Carrie Iones, who had always been less of a communist than any of them, incurred less censure from them than any of the other renegades. They continued to greet her when they saw her, and spoke of her with amiable contempt.

Within a month, the balance of the group activities had entirely changed. The societies such as the Progressive Club and Sympathizers of Russia ran almost by themselves. The committees of these organizations were practically interchangeable, with one or two outside people on each for respectability’s sake.
The Watchdog,
farmed out to dozens of sub-agents, sold phenomenally, and with so little trouble that Martha could never rid herself of a feeling that there must be something wrong with a political activity that needed so little effort.

After the five had been co-opted on to the Labour Party Committee, there was a meeting at the du Preez’ house at which Anton, after lengthy analysis, decided that it was their task to influence the Labour Party.

It was a meeting at which there were two new faces.

Maisie was present, listening lazily, watching Andrew, who was now her husband, with affection.

Also there was a new man from the camp, a Greek fresh from fighting in the mountains with the communist forces. He was now training to be a pilot. He was a small, dark, lean man, with burning serious eyes and an impressive gift of silence.

He said nothing about the political decisions taken that evening, on the grounds that he did not understand the conditions in the Colony.

Andrew and Maisie left early. Anton remarked that he did not think Andrew should have brought Maisie without asking them first. The Greek asked who she was, and they told him the history of the couple.

He listened gravely. At last he nodded, saying: ‘That is good. That I like to hear very much.’ He leaned forward, his thin brown hands pressed between his two knees, looking into their faces. ‘Comrades, we live in a terrible and ugly time, we live when capitalism is a beast who murders us, starves us, keeps from us the joy of life. As communists we must try to live a life as if the ugliness was already dead. We must try and live like socialists who care for each other and for people, even while we are hurt all the time by capitalism which is cruel. And so I am happy to hear about these two comrades. That shows we in this room are real communists. I am proud and happy to be with you in this room.’ With which he rose, nodding at them all gravely, in turn, saying he would attend the group meetings when he could.

Anton said nothing. Athen, newly arrived guerrilla fighter from the mountains of Greece, had more right than he to make judgments. So they all felt, and he knew it.

Chapter Two

The six, Jasmine, Martha, Marjorie, Colin and the du Preez entered their first executive meeting together, and five minutes late. The room was familiar to them, because they had rented it for various meetings of their own. It was a large brown dusty room, of the kind in which it seemed they spent most of their lives now, but distinguished from their own office by two large pictures, one of Ramsay Macdonald and one of Keir Hardie. With themselves, there were twenty people present. At the table of office sat Mrs Van, and beside her an elderly clergyman, a tall greyhound of a man with a thin pleasant face, who surveyed them all, impartially, with determined goodwill. Mrs Van was a large woman, Dutch by origin, calm, matter-of-fact, controlled. Short grey hair lay flat beside serene cheeks. Her eyes were small, blue, direct. She wore a dress that looked like an overall.

A big untidy Scotsman was speaking as they settled themselves. Martha recognized him. He was Mr McFarline, whose existence she had forgotten, since it belonged to three incarnations ago, her girlhood on the farm. His fist rhythmically jabbed into the air beside him, and he was chanting the classic phrases of the socialist credo with every appearance of passionate belief. Martha was stunned, in spite of expecting to find such evidences of hypocrisy in the Labour Party. Mr McFarline was the richest man in ‘the district’. One of the richest men, they said, in the Colony, especially since he had bought up a lot of city property which was in the path of new development, He was famous for the illtreatment of his African workers, and was probably not able to number the half-caste children who shared his features in the compounds of the mines he owned, but did not run.

This man orated about the brotherhood of humanity while the six listened, careful to keep from their faces any look of irony. They were determined to make a good impression. It was obvious to these connoisseurs of political meetings that a good deal was going on under the orderly surface that Mrs Van was so ably preserving.

There was something else: a sense, in the way people spoke, of weight and consequence. They were all being reminded that in the group meetings they might represent world communism, but that what decisions they took affected little but themselves. This was the executive of the Social Democratic Party which had seven members of Parliament and was the official opposition to the Government. What was decided in this room presumably had some effect on the course events took in the Colony. If the atmosphere of self-dedication which was the natural air they breathed was absent here, they were being introduced unexpectedly to a feeling of power. Why had they been invited here at all?

The item on the agenda which made it clear was soon reached. Mrs Van remarked that six newly formed branches of the Party had asked the Executive Committee to appoint delegates to attend meetings on their behalf: the branches were remote, three of them several hundred miles away, and they could not afford to send delegates. Mrs Van reminded the meeting that she had put forward the six names of the new delegates to the last meeting, and they had been approved. She then paused and waited for comment.

Mr McFarline was whispering to the man beside him who was nodding vehemently. The words ‘barely a quorum last time’, were audible. It seemed, then, that Mrs Van had put forward the names at a time to suit herself, and that the faction who would have opposed them was represented by the Parliamentary members, who made their feelings quite plain by directing long hard stares towards the six communists.

Mrs Van had, in short, put a fast one over on her opponents, and they were taking their defeat badly. And yet these men were expressing admiration as well as resentment in their scarcely-concealed grimacing grins towards the table where the chairman and the secretary sat. And Mrs Van, although she was placidly in command of herself, could not refrain from directing at them a single steady beam of quiet triumph. It was as if she had laughed out loud.

And so, the six were thinking, they were here as pawns in some internal battle they did not yet understand. Mrs Van, who was notoriously unsympathetic to communism, a lady of the utmost respectability (she had been a town councillor for many years now) felt so passionately about something, some issue, that she was prepared to saddle her own side with the weight of six communists? The meeting wore on. It was conducted with such devotion to the rules that they could only admire Mrs Van, for it was clearly she who had brought this job lot of people to such a pitch of discipline. The chairman, a delightfully sympathetic man, was obviously chairman by virtue of his personality, and not because of his efficiency. He lost his way in the agenda, slipped up continually over resolutions and amendments, and corrected himself with self-deprecating charm when Mrs Van put him right, which she instantly, firmly, and maternally did.

Meanwhile, the seven members of Parliament continued to lounge and smoke, arms crossed, legs outstretched, in the poses of men who have sat too long on hard benches.,

It was not until the end of the agenda that the six understood why they were here. It was an item called African Membership, and now the members of Parliament showed by their sudden attention that this was why they were here too.

Mr McFarline rose to his feet and said that while there was no one in the Colony more passionately devoted to the welfare of the blacks than himself, he thought the establishment of African membership was inopportune because … But he was ruled out of order, Mrs Van pointing out that the decision to have African members had been taken at the last meeting, and the question now was: What form was this to take? She added that if the Parliamentary members attended executive meetings more often, or read the minutes with attention, they would not be quite so out of touch with the affairs of the Party.

At this, Mr McFarline’s neighbour, a dark and lean man with the rancorous speech and eye of the self-hater, delivered himself of half a dozen brief remarks about Kaffir-lovers and do-gooders.

He was ruled out of order with the same maternal severity.

Mrs Van said with the utmost amiability that in view of the lateness of the hour and the heatedness of people’s feelings, the whole subject had better be left to the next meeting.

‘But it’s been put off twice already,’ said Mr Playfair.

‘It has been put off,’ said Mrs Van, ‘because of the inability of certain Parliamentary members to attend, but I am quite prepared to put it off again if everyone agrees?’

Anger broke out from the opposing faction, and during the noise Mr McFarline was heard ejaculating to his dark lieutenant: ‘That lot will have the vote next time; they haven’t got it this meeting.’ And he nodded with dislike towards the six communists.

‘We can discuss it now or at the next meeting, as you prefer,’ remarked Mr Playfair, after Mrs Van had whispered to him.

The dark man put his lips to Mr McFarline’s ear. Mr McFarline, grinning, said: ‘I’m in agreement with a postponement.’ He added: ‘There are a lot of branches that have lapsed and need whipping up.’ In short, he intended to strengthen his own side as Mrs Van had strengthened hers. His look at her was triumphant. But she nodded, a small smile at the corners of her mouth: she could not have said more clearly: You think you’ve done me but you haven’t.

Mr McFarline hesitated, apparently wondering who would have the advantage from a postponement devoted to the ‘whipping-up’ of the constituencies.

He was seen to cast a practised eye over the people present now, counting up his supporters. Mrs Van did the same.

He said: ‘I think it would save time if we took a vote now.’

Mrs Van agreed. They all agreed. Whereupon Mrs Van blandly pointed out that the six newly co-opted members were entitled to vote on this issue according to … here she produced the constitution and read the relevant clause.

Mr McFarline frowned, but had to agree she was in the right.

The vote was then put, the six communists voting with Mrs Van’s faction: African membership of the Party was confirmed; and their votes were to count the same in the affairs of the Party as the white members. The question as to whether they should form themselves into special branches or not was to be discussed in a fortnight’s time.

The meeting broke up. The six communists remained where they were, watching how people would disperse for clues as to how they were aligned. They were waiting, too, for some kind of explanation from Mrs Van.

Martha was watching Mr McFarline. She half-wanted him to remember her. Throughout the meeting his eyes had been on her, sometimes with the hard glance which she earned as a member of the communist faction, sometimes with the frankly assessing stockman’s look of a woman-lover, and this she resented now for the same reason she had years before – he was an elderly man and had no right to look at her like that!

Now he came over to her, a big smiling man, easy with the good-nature of power, and said: ‘Lassie, don’t I know you?’

She was confused when she did not want to be; Mr McFarline, lover of women, was shedding on her an impersonal kindly warmth, his brown eyes were extraordinarily shrewd and even gentle. She felt herself instinctively raising her hand to her hair in a coquettish gesture. She let it drop, and said: ‘I was Martha Quest.’ Mr McFarline nodded, fitting his memories together. He said, tentative and inviting: ‘So now we’re going to be comrades in arms?’

Martha said: ‘Hardly comrades, Mr McFarline!’

He nodded, laughed out, switched off the warmth of his attention, and turned away. His bilious lieutenant who had been watching him during his passage with the communist faction now went after him with a taut cold face. Three other members of Parliament went with them.

Piet du Preez said to Martha: ‘You’d better watch it. That’s an old swine if there ever was one. He boasts that if all the women he’s had were laid end to end they would cover the railway lines between the Zambesi and the Limpopo – only he doesn’t express himself quite so nicely!’ His eyes were enjoying Martha’s confusion. It was one of the moments she was made to learn something about herself: the men of the group were all watching her and she felt exposed.

Marie came to her rescue by shaking her husband’s arm and saying: ‘That’s enough from you – if I didn’t keep you in order you’d be as bad.’

Colin and Marjorie stood to one side, listening. He had his hand on her elbow; her forearm dangled loose below it, and her hand was a fist. Marjorie said: ‘What’s the joke?’ moving a step nearer, stopped by Colin’s grasp. Martha, still irritable because she had responded to Mr McFarline, noted the proprietary hand, the stiff resenting forearm, and thought, disliking Marjorie: Why did she marry him? What for? She doesn’t love him … I’ll tell Anton today it’s no good us going on.

At this point Mrs Van came towards them, Mr Playfair had remained, and one of the members of Parliament, a small battling Scotsman, Jack Dobie; also a tall thin freckled man, grey-haired and eager-faced — this was Johnny Lindsay, an old miner from the Rand.

Mrs Van said smiling: ‘I am very pleased to see you all here.’

Jasmine and Piet, both old friends of hers, stood forward, like official representatives of the group.

Mrs Van laughed, a warm girlish laugh, and said: ‘Well, we’ve won that round – and it serves those old so-and-sos right for not attending meetings.’

The group laughed in response, but not as frankly: being allies of Mrs Van had its difficulties, since, by their definition, she and her friends were all reactionaries.

Johnny Lindsay said cheerfully: ‘That’s one thing we can count on you communists for — you’re fine on racial questions.’

Here Mrs Van, Jack Dobie, Mr Playfair and Johnny Lindsay all nodded and smiled together, and the group finally understood exactly why they had been co-opted on to the executive.

That lot can’t stand you,’ said Jack. His small fighting face was lifted by the chin, aggresively thrust out in a characteristic gesture, as if presenting itself to enemies with every belief in the power of that sharp point to repel no matter how strong a fist. ‘They hate your guts,’ he added, but with a mock-threat in it now, like a growl. ‘And, comrades, let me tell you – I’m from the Clyde, I’ve worked with the Reds all my days, and so you’d better not get up to any of your tricks. I’m warning you, you won’t get away with it.’

And now they all laughed together in a relief of tension, liking each other.

Jasmine said in her demure way: ‘But, Jack, communists are always prepared to work with the labourites on certain issues.’

He growled out: ‘So you’re prepared to work with us, is that it? Well, I was a member of the CP myself once, so I know it all – and watch your step.’

Mrs Van said, stern and formidable: ‘You can be communists outside this room, but in here you’re members of our Party and please remember that.’ She gave them an emphatic nod. ‘We’re in the habit of taking our rules and regulations as seriously as you take yours!’

At which Johnny said: ‘And our Mrs Van is a mistress of rules and regulations – and aren’t that bunch sorry for it now!’

The general laugh was led by Mrs Van’s full-throated ringing peal, the laugh of a girl who was still buried somewhere in that large, placid matron’s body. ‘Come and have a cup of tea in my office,’ she said. ‘We need to do a little plotting.’

Mrs Van’s personal office was in the same building, across the court – the usual dingy square of soil surrounded by a veranda off which rooms opened.

The six group members, with Mr Playfair, Johnny Lindsay and Jack Dobie, sat themselves around Mrs Van’s tidy paperfiled, filing-cabineted office, noting that above Mrs Van’s head hung two portraits: Nehru and Gandhi. They drank tea and did not plot; there was no need to, for they were all in harmony. The issue was clear. These were all people who felt deeply about the situation of the Africans of the Colony; they did not need to support each other in their belief that Africans, though deprived of a vote, should somehow be introduced, even if in small ways, to political responsibility, and if being members of this particular political party was a small way, it was better than nothing. Mrs Van’s faction wanted the African members to form a branch because it would educate them in democratic procedure. The reactionaries, led by the members of Parliament, did not want black men in the Party at all. Jack Dobie, member of Parliament and therefore a traitor to
his
group, since he did not stand with them on this issue, spoke of them as career men and white trade unionists.