A Ripple from the Storm

The three men on the platform had their heads bent together. Mr Perr got up and said that he found it quite impossible to serve on a committee which was being made use of by communists for their own ends. Either they must be got rid of or he would offer his resignation. He remained standing while Mr Forester and Mr Pyecroft also offered their resignations. There was a long embarrassed silence, while they gazed authoritatively at Jackie, apparently expecting him to resign.

Meanwhile, Jasmine was making agitated signs at Jackie to the effect that he ought to resign, for the sake of keeping the society together. But he returned an openly defiant stare.

The silence continued. Then the three men expressed their apologies, and went out of the hall, leaving the officers’ table empty. It seemed no one knew what to do next.

Anton Hesse got to his feet; but Boris Krueger was before him. Boris said it was very unfortunate that this had occurred; and everyone must hope that Mr Forester, Mr Perr and Mr Pyecroft would reconsider their decision. In the meantime they must elect a temporary chairman so that the meeting could elect new officers. At this, a clergyman from the bank of respectable patrons got up to say that he was quite unable to understand the storm which had blown up out of a blue sky but it seemed to him essential that the society should continue, since it was performing a useful service for the war-effort, and he would like to second the last speaker’s suggestion that a temporary chairman be elected. He would like to suggest Mr Krueger.

He was speaking in an affable, apologetic public voice. The expressions on the faces of the respectable patrons were affable and apologetic. People were nodding and smiling in an attempt to make humour save the day. But it was no use: everything was false and unpleasant.

Boris Krueger, since there were no dissensions, climbed on to the platform and said that while he hoped everyone agreed with him that every effort should be made to get the officers to reconsider their decision, he called for nominations from the floor for alternative officers. He waited, standing.

No one spoke. There were perhaps six hundred people crammed together under the chocolate and gold ceiling in McGrath’s ballroom, and they were all silent.

Then Anton Hesse got up and said in his correct manner that perhaps some of the patrons would consent to act as officers? From this Martha understood that Anton was afraid they would lose all their respectable patrons. Boris turned to consult the body of twelve or fourteen people, sitting behind him. They shook their heads, one after another; but it was not possible to tell whether this was because they were too busy to do the actual work, or whether they were considering offering their resignations. On most of their faces strong distaste was mixed with the humour they still continued to offer to the members. Again Anton rose to urge the Reverend Mr Gates (the man who had just spoken) to be chairman. Mr Gates, after a pause, agreed to act as chairman temporarily, and Anton sat down, with a look of satisfaction which explained to Martha that she had under-estimated the danger of the entire body of respectable patrons resigning en bloc. She had learned to have the deepest respect for Anton’s political flair in spite of, perhaps because of, the cold formality of this tall, stiff German who frightened her a little even now, after seeing him every day for months.

Boris Krueger stood down and Mr Gates again called for nominations. A man nobody knew suggested that the last speaker should be secretary. Anton got up and said very smoothly that he was a German, technically an enemy alien, and it was clearly undesirable that this society should have such a person as a secretary. He sat down. The cold bitterness behind his words was such that everyone in the ballroom felt positively guilty. A young girl stood up and said impulsively that she could not see why one of Hitler’s victims should not be the secretary of a society whose aim was, after all, wasn’t it? – to defeat Hitler. But the silence which followed was uncomfortable. Rumours pursued all the foreigners in the town to the effect that they were enemy agents, and Anton Hesse was no exception. Boris Krueger, knowing this, knowing that he too was popularly supposed to be in the pay of Germany, stood up to give public support to Anton, in spite of the fact that political bitterness had prevented the two men from speaking to each other for some months. Boris said that Anton was right: he was a foreigner himself, and therefore able to make such remarks without being suspected of prejudice; and he would like to take this opportunity of saying how fortunate it was Mr Gates had agreed to be chairman, because it would be highly undesirable for a foreigner to be chairman, even temporarily, of a society such as this. He had intended to sound magnanimous, but he smiled uncomfortably around the audience, his spectacles gleaming. Mr Gates thanked Mr Krueger for his remarks ‘with which he did not necessarily agree’ – and again called for nominations. And again there was silence.

At this William proposed Jasmine as secretary. She had resigned from the position three months before because she was also secretary of Sympathizers of Russia, but when a dozen hands shot up from the hall to second the proposal she nodded a demure agreement.

There remained the position of treasurer. It was agreed that the committee should be empowered to co-opt one.

Mr Gates then announced the next item on the agenda which was an address by Mr Horace Packer, MP, on the course of the war on the Russian Front. There was a storm of relieved applause; the people who apparently had been on the point of slipping away from the hall now settled themselves again in their seats.

Jackie Bolton, who had been sitting and smiling as if the unpleasantness had had no connection with him at all, now rose with a conspicuously negligent ease and began squeezing his way out along the row of chairs. He came to where Martha and Jasmine were, laid his hand on Jasmine’s shoulder and said: ‘I have to be back in camp by twelve. We must have an urgent group meeting. Get them all together, will you?’

Jasmine, visibly torn by the conflict of her love for him and her complete disapproval, said uncomfortably: ‘But, Jackie, how can we possibly go now?’

‘Oh, find someone else to do the literature.’

‘We can go to the office when this is over.’

‘No. We’d better meet in the park.’

‘But why?’

‘It’s safer,’ said Jackie, with weary importance.

Jasmine’s eyes and Martha’s met involuntarily out of embarrassed disapproval of these histrionics, but Jasmine said: ‘Very well, but we had better all leave separately.’

Jackie Bolton went out, with the eyes of all the people in the hall on him. Jasmine proceeded to write a series of little notes: to Andrew McGrew, Anton Hesse and Marjorie Pratt; folded them up, and handed them to people at the ends of the rows of chairs the addressees sat in, as if she were releasing into the air three carrier pigeons. Then she approached a young aircraftsman who had been anxious to help in the past, asked him to guard the literature sales, and, haying made all arrangements, nodded at Martha and William. Martha, William and Jasmine quietly left the hall after Jackie. Already Anton and Andrew and Marjorie were reading their notes and looking towards the door. The group’ – conspicuous with discretion, were leaving the meeting in a body.

Jasmine found Jackie smoking moodily on the pavement outside McGrath’s. This time it was he who approached her elbow with his hand – not in apology, for one would never expect that from Jackie Bolton, but in a laughing declaration of intimacy. Jasmine said at once: ‘Jackie, you’ve behaved very badly.’ He laughed at her, and the two set off together towards the park. Martha and William followed. Inside the ballroom Mr Horace Packer’s statements were earning great applause. There were continuous storms of clapping. From outside it sounded like heavy rain on a tin roof: the small overall rattling of individual drops striking metal together in a swelling and subsiding din of sky-flung rain. Martha instinctively glanced up at the sky, which was clear and moonlit.

‘Why the park?’ she demanded, irritably humorous.

‘He’s got news. He really has.’

‘What news?’

‘Oh, perhaps it’ll come to nothing.’

All Martha’s dissatisfaction with Jackie, and with William for associating himself with Jackie, culminated in: ‘He’s got no sense of discipline at all. He’s just an anarchist really.’

But at this William said in the tone of a man humouring a woman: ‘Why are you so cross, Matty?’ And he did a couple of dance-steps along the pavement.

Feeling herself to be humoured, she remembered how often recently William had reminded her of Douglas. She therefore humoured him by telling him a chatty and gay story about something that had happened that morning in the office, because – although she had not yet admitted this to herself, it was not worth disliking William when he was bound to be leaving her so soon.

Exchanging amiable bits of news, they reached the big open gates of the park. Ahead, dark spires of conifers reached up into the moonlight. Under the trees, Jasmine’s pale dress spotted with shadow and with moonlight drifted beside the black lean shape of Jackie. A springy mat of pine-needles gave under Martha’s feet, and she watched her black shadow shift and break along the dark trunks of the trees.

The two couples met where a white path blazed in the bright light, bordered thick with clumps of canna lilies sculptured out of shadow.

‘The others won’t know where we are,’ said Martha.

‘Then they’ll just have to look for us,’ said Jackie, laughing.

There was a bench set in the grass beside the path. Jackie stepped high over the clumps of lilies to sit on the bench. On the back was written: For Europeans only. Instinctively he straightened himself, and turned away from it. His face in the moonlight showed a sharp and angry repugnance. When he noticed the others had watched him, had noticed what he felt about the segregated bench, he said histrionically: ‘Bloody white fascists.’ Then, for the first time that evening he looked uncomfortable, and walked away ahead of them to where a small Chinese-looking pavilion stood at the end of the path, surrounded by flower-beds. The night-air was thick with mingled scents. From this pavilion a band from the African regiment played on Sunday afternoons while the people of the town lay about on the grass, or sat in deck-chairs, eating ice-cream, smoking, gossiping.

Jackie sat on the chill dry grass beside the pavilion and the others joined him. Almost at once William leaped up and said he must go and see if he could find the others. He went off. There was an officiousness in his bearing which Martha disliked, and chose not to notice; but Jackie looked after him, smiling, and said: Sergeant Brown, Administration. His dark face was hallowed into dramatic lines and folds by the sharp moon. He smiled at the two girls, one after another, as if he owed allegiance to neither. Suddenly he was simple, natural and direct. He was a man who would always be at his best alone with women.

‘When I leave here,’ he said quietly, ‘what I’ll remember will be this park.’

He spent whatever free time he had in the park, lying on the grass with an anthology of poetry.

Jasmine’s breathing changed; he heard it, remembered that after all she was interested in the possibility of his having to leave, and laid his hands on hers.

He looked straight up into the starlit solemnity of the sky and began to quote:

How to keep – is there any any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or

brace, lace, latch, or catch or key to keep Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, from

vanishing away?

His voice was drowned by the whine of aircraft engines: an aeroplane, landing lights flicking, went past overhead.

Jackie said in cockney: ‘Half of a wing of one of those mucking machines would rebuild a whole street in that mucking slum my mother’s in.’ He was coldly, deadly serious. He waited until the aircraft had dipped, a silver shape in the silver light, past the trees and continued with the poem in his other voice. The rest of the group, shepherded by William, were approaching through the shadows, but Jackie went steadily on, and not until Anton Hesse, Marjorie, Andrew and William stood over them did he acknowledge their presence by raising his voice at them:

Come then, your ways and airs and looks, locks,

maiden gear gallantry gaiety and grace …

He stopped and added laughing: ‘But that is counterrevolutionary of course.’

Andrew, gruffly annoyed, said: ‘What’s this, a poetry-reading?’

Anton Hesse, his rough pale hair as white as sand in the moonlight, his eyes glinting with white disapproval, said: ‘Why have you convened a meeting here? What is the reason for fetching us all up here and leaving the other meeting?’

Jackie said: ‘Because I thought it would be more pleasant to sit in the park than in that dirty little office.’

Jasmine said with determination: ‘We should elect a chairman.’ Her tone said plainly that she did not intend to be moved, by the poetry or by anything else, away from her determination to criticize Jackie.

‘Andrew,’ said Marjorie. They all agreed. They were now sitting in a circle on the grass.

‘Now, Comrade Jackie,’ Andrew said in blunt annoyance, ‘you convened this meeting. I should like to say first that if you really fetched us here because you wanted to admire the moonlight then I, for one, wish to pass a vote of censure.’ The formal chairman’s voice sounded so absurd here, in the spaces of the big park, that he added, smiling: ‘But only as a matter of form.’

They all laughed and became, instantly, ‘the group’.

‘Anyway,’ said Jackie, ‘all those social democrats and Trotskyists are spying on us. I caught Boris sniffing around in Black Ally’s Café yesterday.’

The group tightened still further out of its units.

‘I brought you here,’ Jackie said, lowering his voice, ‘to say that I’ve found out that all of us service types are likely to be posted at any moment.’

‘What makes you think that?’ demanded Corporal McGrew. He was shaken; alone of the airforce men he liked his stay in the Colony and did not want to leave.

‘I got young Peters in the canteen and screwed it out of him,’ said Jackie. There was a chorus of contemptuous exclamations. A great many men from the camp attended the Progressive Club meetings. They were mostly aircraftsmen and of a type: this last was not clearly understood, however, until a certain Sergeant Peters began attending their meetings: he was so unlike the others that comparisons were forced on them. He was a clipped, almost mincing young man with a habit of leaning forward over a question, head on one side, a disagreeable smile on his small pink lips, saying: ‘Do I take it that you mean to imply … ?’ Jackie Bolton, whose particular genius it was to establish a swift persuasive intimacy with people, had gone home one night on the camp bus with this youth who was being querulous because Andrew McGrew had said across the floor at the meeting that he was a typical member of the corrupt petty bourgeoisie. Sergeant Peters was slightly drunk. He had told Jackie that he had been appointed by the camp commander to attend all the ‘Red’ meetings in town so as to take down the names of all the airmen present. He turned in a list of these names, with a short précis of what each had said, after every meeting. He was unaffected by Jackie’s jovial contempt for him; and a remarkable situation developed where, while informing on his fellows to the commander, this instinctive spy would then immediately go to Jackie Bolton and tell him everything he had said, for as he explained: ‘If the Labour Government gets in and you Reds take over, things might be quite different at Home and I don’t want to be on the wrong side.’

‘He told me that I and William are for the high jump. The CO’s got it into his head that we are extremely subversive.’

‘Judging from the way you went on tonight I’m not surprised,’ said Andrew.

‘Yes,’ said Jasmine firmly, bracing herself to criticize her man, although she was fighting down tears because he was leaving. ‘We’ve got to discuss your behaviour, Jackie.’

‘What it amounts to is this,’ said Martha. ‘That because you are leaving you don’t care what sort of difficulties you make for us.’

‘Oh, I can’t be bothered with all this small-town nonsense,’ said Jackie airily. And he got up from the grass and strolled off towards the pavilion, hands low in his pockets, whistling.

The six people who remained were silent: they were agreeing without words that since Comrade Bolton was leaving them, they would let it all drop.

Comrade Bolton was now strolling beside the clumps of moon-blotched lilies as if enjoying a pleasant evening walk.

Anton Hesse, who had not said a word until now, demanded: ‘Comrades, I must have permission to speak.’ He was coldly, contemptuously angry: his anger tautened their sense of responsibility.

‘Comrade Anton,’ said Andrew, with the small tinge of irony his manner always held when Anton was in question.

‘We have been behaving like a bunch of amateurs

‘I agree,’ interrupted Jasmine eagerly. Her eyes were following Jackie’s dark shape at the far end of a path; her face was contracted with pain, yet she was listening closely to the argument: ‘We’ve made every mistake we could make. We had decided, quite correctly, that the Aid for Our Allies should be kept respectable and unpolitical, that its task was to raise money for medical supplies for the Soviet Union and nothing else, and that it should be run by that bunch of social democrats – under our guidance, of course. Now, because of Comrade Bolton it will most likely lose all its sponsors; Trotskyist Krueger will have control of it because he’s in with Gates, unless Jasmine makes it a full-time job controlling it: Jasmine has allowed herself to be secretary again when she already has far too much to do.’

Here Jasmine said demurely: ‘Oh, I don’t mind. I can manage.’

‘No,’ said Anton sharply. ‘That is nonsense. The essence of good organization is never to do anything oneself that someone else can do as well.’ Here they all laughed, but Anton said, ‘Yes, yes, yes. You laugh. But you wouldn’t laugh if you had learned anything at all. The basic trouble is, we have neglected our theory. The sort of thing that happened tonight is a direct result of not seriously analysing the situation …’

Here they smiled: the phrase, analysing the situation, was peculiarly Anton’s.

‘Yes, comrades. Analysing the situation. And now. It will soon be eleven o’clock. The airforce comrades must get to their buses. But I propose that we convene a meeting to fundamentally reorganize the work of this group. Because things cannot continue like this.’

Here Jackie Bolton returned to the group, and seated himself beside William instead of beside Jasmine. The two men already had a look of being distant from the rest. They all realized that Jackie had been making his farewells to the park and, in a way, to them all: he was already thinking of the next place the fortunes of war would drop him into.

‘Very well,’ said Andrew. ‘I agree with Comrade Anton.’ Andrew and Anton always agreed with each other although they could not address two words to each other without the hostility sounding in their voices. ‘We must have a special meeting. I take it everyone agrees. Tomorrow night there is the committee meeting of the Progressive Club. The night after there is a five o’clock meeting of the Sympathizers of Russia. At eight o’clock at our office there will be a special business meeting of the group. Attendance obligatory. No excuses will be accepted.’ He stood up, saying to the other two men from the camp: ‘We’ll miss our bus.’

The three airforce men became a group separate from the civilians, led by Jackie, who said in cockney: ‘Cerm on, mates, cerm on, get moving naow.’ They went off into the shadows under the trees. Anton and the three women remained. Anton nodded at them, formally, as was his way, and he departed in another direction, without offering to see any of them home. Now the girls separated: Jasmine to her home where she would be met by silence; Marjorie to the boarding-house; and Martha to the room she was renting in the house of the widow Carson which was very close, being opposite one of the gates of the park.

Martha said to herself: I must walk slowly and enjoy the moonlight. She was conscious that the moment she left the group she felt as let down as if a physical support had been removed. ‘I’m not alone enough – I should enjoy it when I am.’ But she was almost running across the park. As usual a demon of impatience was snapping at her heels, pushing her into the future. Her dissatisfaction at the evening, at Jackie Bolton, at the months of her life in the group had crystallized in the form of words Anton Hesse had used. They had been behaving like a bunch of amateurs. Well, the day after tomorrow some serious analysis would set them on the right path; as these words slid through her brain it was as if they rolled up the past months and pushed them away. Two days ago, walking through the park with Jasmine, the girls had agreed, as if talking about some period a long way behind them, that they had been very romantic and irresponsible when they had joined the group. That conversation with Jasmine now seemed a long time ago. So much experience and active learning had been crammed into each day of the four months since she had walked out of her husband’s house that she thought of herself as an entirely different person.

The white gates of widow Carson’s house gleamed just ahead. Now Martha did walk slowly. She knew that as soon as she got inside she would fall over on to her bed and sleep, and she had to think: she was thinking that she had been informed William was leaving, and she ought to be unhappy about it. But she was not. She was relieved. Two days ago William had come to her room to say that ‘he had reason to believe’ that Douglas, her husband, had put pressure on to the camp authorities to get him posted. More, that ‘he had evidence’ that Douglas was thinking of citing him as corespondent in a divorce case. Martha had listened to this, conscious of dislike for William. Her own contempt for any forms of pressure society might put on her was so profound and instinctive that she as instinctively despised anyone who paid tribute to them.

When Douglas had threatened her with the machinery of the law, she had shrugged and laughed. When William spoke of ‘getting legal advice’ and she understood that he was enjoying the idea of a fight with Douglas over the possession of her – then, for a few moments, she had seen the two men as one, and identical with the pompous, hypocritical and essentially male fabric of society. That was why she now felt relief at the idea of William’s going. Yet, in the eyes of this small town, ‘Matty Knowell had left her husband and a child for an airforce sergeant.’ She succeeded in suppressing her amazed dismay at this view of herself by the device of never thinking of the people who, so short a time ago, had made up her life. She lived in ‘the group’ and did not care about the judgments of anyone else. She felt as if she were invisible to anyone but the group.

Outside the Carson gates she stopped. This was because what she referred to as ‘coping with Mrs Carson’ was becoming more of a strain daily. So much of a strain in fact that now she abruptly swerved off so as to walk around the block and collect her energies for what might follow.

When Martha rented this room she had informed the widow that she intended to live with William Brown: she had spoken defiantly: for the moment Mrs Carson represented the society she despised. But Mrs Carson had merely seemed puzzled. The irregularities of behaviour under the outward forms of conformity in this small Colonial town might be more easily tolerated than in, let us say, a small town in Britain, but they did not take the shape Martha insisted on for herself. The widow Carson did once inquire if Martha was going to marry Sergeant Brown when the war was over, but Martha said, obviously irritated, that she didn’t know. Mrs Carson sighed and remarked that her own daughter, now happily married to a Johannesburg businessman, had been unhappy in her first two marriages. Martha did not seem to see any parallel. It had crossed Mrs Carson’s mind that perhaps Martha believed in free love? But the phrase had associations which did not fit in with Martha’s manner, which was alarmingly unfrivolous. She therefore ceased to think about it; she returned to her private preoccupations and was interested in Martha only in so far as the young woman would enter them with her.