the mass of faces that crammed all the windows. The train trailed off, as they had seen it so often before, across the soiled and factory-littered veld, leaving a long smudge of wind-torn black smoke across the clear calm sunset sky.
Anton said: ‘Has anyone prepared an agenda?’ and Andrew remarked in reply: ‘It was you who convened the meeting, Comrade Anton.’
‘Yes, that is so, that is so.’ He had been leaning back against the wall on the bench, arms folded, watching the others come in: Andrew, Martha, Jasmine, Marjorie. Now he unfolded himself upwards off the bench and into the chair behind the small white deal table, with the movement of a hinged knife opening and shutting. He watched them all in silence, waiting. The large electric bulb over his head cast a strong white light and made him even more fair and pale than usual, taking the colour from his ice-blue eyes. Recently the women had been remarking to each other: ‘I hope Anton looks after himself.’ Or, ‘He doesn’t look strong, does he?’ Yet he was a strong man: he had the strength of extreme control, and the contradictions in the face added to the impression. The structure of bone was firm, narrowing too sharply towards the small pointed chin, yet it was an obstinate chin. The skin which covered the thin flesh was fragile, very white, and scored with dozens of minute dry lines which quivered into tense meshes around the eyes and mouth, particularly the mouth, which, though not small, added to the impression that the upper half of the face was too spacious for the lower. Yet it was a mouth continuously focused with the pressures of his self-discipline.
His contained intensity never failed to make people feel uncomfortable. Sometimes, after he had finished speaking, they might exchange a small grimace – not critical, they did not feel that – but as if they were confessing: ‘Heavens, we’ll never be able to live up to that!’ But if there was irony in it, it was a criticism of themselves and not of him who took upon himself a burden of self-discipline and thereby released them into the freedom to be comparatively irresponsible.
There was something of this quality of ironical admiration in the air now, as they waited for him to begin speaking. But it seemed he was in no hurry to do so, and Jasmine at last said demurely: ‘Comrade Anton will now analyse the situation.’
He lifted the icy shaft of his gaze at her, and said: ‘No, comrades, I will not. It seems to me that no one here’ – and now he looked with accusation at Andrew – ‘has ever considered what an analysis of the situation – a real, Marxist analysis of the situation means. At least, our situation in this country has never been analysed. Not once. We have been too busy to think. Yet a real communist never takes an action which does not flow from a comprehensive understanding of the economic situation in a given situation and the relation of the class forces. We have merely rushed into activity spurred on by revolutionary or so-called revolutionary phrases.’
The contempt in this, aimed at the absent Jackie Bolton, affected Jasmine, who looked wistfully towards the place where he had always sat, crouched in a gap between a cupboard and the wall, radiating calm sarcasm.
Martha was thinking uncomfortably: It’s all very well, but all this time Anton has been sitting here, listening and watching but he waited until Jackie actually left before exploding like this.
Andrew said comfortably: ‘You are quite right, comrade. But things have happened very quickly, and they’ve got out of hand. Now we must pull ourselves together. And I wish you would make a statement of some kind that we could use as a basis for discussion.’
‘Got out of hand,’ said Anton impatiently. He had a way of isolating an idiom, listening to it, and giving it back to them for consideration. ‘Got out of hand is correct. If things have ever been in our hands. We are running the progressive bodies in the town. But how? Why? Above all, how?’
‘Well, well,’ said Andrew gruffly. ‘Well, well, well.’
‘Perhaps, Comrade Anton, you could make an analysis and we could discuss it,’ said Marjorie hurriedly. Anton patently softened as he glanced at her. Marjorie’s small, fair fragility, her intense sincerity, seemed to put her, for Anton, outside ordinary criticism. They all felt it; so, obviously, did he, for now Comrade Anton collected himself from his moment of weakness, gave his cold circling glance around the room and said: ‘We are supposed to be communists. Yes, that I believe is what we call ourselves. I’m not going to analyse the situation, comrades. That is something which is serious and will take time and thought. But I am now going to explain what the word communist means, and we can then, if we consider it desirable, begin to analyse the situation.’ Again he collected them all into his concept of nobility by the circling sweep of his eyes. ‘A communist, comrades, is a person who is utterly, totally, dedicated to the cause of freeing humanity. A communist must consider himself a dead man on leave. A communist is hated, despised, feared and hunted by the capitalists of the world. A communist must be prepared to give up everything: his family, his wife, his children, at a word from the Party. A communist must be prepared to work eighteen hours a day, or twenty-four hours, if need be. A communist is continually educating himself. A communist knows that in himself he is nothing, but in so far as he represents the suppressed working people he is everything; but he is not worthy to represent the working people, unless every moment of his life is dedicated to becoming worthy of them. The working people of the world are the inheritors of all culture, all knowledge, all art, and it is our task to explain this to them, and they will not listen to us unless we ourselves are people they can respect.’
Here the three women looked towards Andrew who was after all just as much of a communist as Anton. He was leaning comfortably back on his bench, pipe in his mouth, contemplating Anton and nodding from time to time.
‘A communist,’ Anton said, ‘must remember that if he has personal weaknesses, it will be laid at the door of the Party.
A communist must always order his private life in such a way that the Party cannot be blamed for it. A communist must so respect himself that when he goes to the workers he is not afraid to look them in the eyes.’
The word communist, repeating itself through Anton’s sentences, was a reiteration of responsibility and goodness; and Martha could feel the exaltation that seemed to be the natural air of this small dirty room heighten. At the same time there was something lacking. It was, after all, a very empty room with Jackie Bolton and William gone. They were not, tonight, ‘the group’. They were five people.
Marjorie said hurriedly: ‘Comrade Anton, I think we ought to recruit more comrades because it seems to me – I mean, the things you are saying … there ought to be more of us.’
Comrade Hesse smiled gently at her confusion, but at once collected himself. ‘It does not matter how many we are. When Lenin began, there were probably no more than we are here.’
Instantly they were transported into the very heart of their vision: during the last few decades when people in the West have suddenly become communists, they have always been contemporaries of Lenin. They felt themselves to be in a vast barbaric country (though not their own) sunk in the sloth of centuries, members of a small band of men and women with rifles in their hands, prepared to die for the future. They pictured themselves, moving fugitive from one hiding-place to another; saw the mob of ragged workers storming the Winter Palace; heard Lenin say: ‘Comrades, we will now proceed to build socialism.’
Andrew said gruffly: ‘I don’t mean any disrespect to anyone if I say that no one here is Lenin.’
They laughed and the mood was broken.
Anton did not laugh. His face
