COV02 - A Proper Marriage

by Doris Lessing

  But by now he seemed to her like a madman. She finished her dinner quickly, and said, ‘Why don’t you come with me to the meeting? There’ll be at least half a dozen civil servants there, it’s really quite respectable,’ she could not prevent herself adding.

  He simply kept the glare of his eyes fixed on her. But it was a blind glare, for he was seeing himself, the object of pity and sympathy for Mrs Talbot and - but she did not know who were the others.

  ‘Why not come? It’s very interesting, after all.’

  He kept silence, so she got her things and left him as he settled on a chair on the veranda with the look of a watchdog settling for the night, head on paws.

  ‘My mother’s coming in to stay,’ he remarked as she left. She did not reply. This did frighten her. She drove down to the meeting in a state of pure terror. It was not of Douglas, but of society. She could see her mother-in-law, her own mother, Mrs Talbot, the Maynards, massed behind him. They were all much stronger than she was. But as soon as she walked into the room where Jasmine nodded at her with a look of understanding, and William smiled over at her in calm support, as soon as she felt herself surrounded by people to whom ‘personal problems’ were the unimportant background to their real responsibilities, her fear vanished.

  There were about forty people in the room. This was a meeting of a subsection of the Sympathizers of Russia.

  She was already reading her paper, which was about education in the Soviet Union, when she saw that Joss was seated in a corner. He was in uniform. He was on leave from up north. And in another corner sat Solly, also in uniform. She felt confused at delivering a paper in front of those young men who had been her mentors in childhood. But she kept her voice steady, and continued, not looking at either of them.

  During the discussion that followed, neither of these men spoke at all. Anton Hesse controlled it, in that calm, correct way of his, which - as she saw with dismay - caused Sergeant Bolton to smile with sarcastic forbearance. It upset her that there could be personal antagonisms inside the group itself. But she was already familiar with this atmosphere where everyone in a room was in willing respectful submission to Anton, who was able to answer any problem with two paragraphs at least (one always felt he was reading from an invisible book) of clear and grammatical prose, while they were held in sympathy with Sergeant Bolton, who leaned forward intently, holding their eyes with his, one after another, and spoke with a sort of gentle intimate persuasion. It was extraordinary, this contrast between the open sarcastic antagonism of his attitude towards Hesse and McGrew and that intimate current of sympathy he established with the neophytes. There was an intellectual pole and an emotional one.

  When the meeting was over, about half the people left. The rest stood about, looking at each other. It had been decided there must be a meeting to ‘settle things once and for all’. They were all waiting for it to start. In the meantime, no one seemed ready to take the lead. Sergeant Bolton sat lounging on his part of the bench, from time to time exchanging smiles with whoever looked his way; while Hesse and McGrew sat silent in their corner, one smoking a pipe, the other a cigarette.

  Martha wondered why they did not start at once. Then she saw that people were looking towards Solly, who stood by himself against the wall, with a sarcastic smile on his face. She heard Jasmine whisper, ‘Damned Trotskyite’, and it hurt her that Solly should be thus cast out.

  She protested to Jasmine, ‘Oh nonsense, he’s perfectly all right.’

  Jasmine merely smiled. She nodded towards Solly so that Martha might see what was going forward. Solly and Joss were now isolated against one wall. They were exchanging a long stare. Both were rather pale, but smiled steadily, tight-lipped. The resemblance between them was striking at that moment, though they were so dissimilar. Solly was still a tall, lanky, unco-ordinated-looking youth. Joss was more solid, squat, and stronger in his khaki than he had been out of it. But both faces showed a keen, hard intelligence, a grim antagonism. Then Martha saw, with a suddenly pounding heart, how Solly let his eyes waver away from Joss’s stare. He looked for a moment under his brows at the others. He was still smiling, and very pale.

  ‘Well, good luck to your - decisions,’ he said, blurting it out. To Martha it sounded like an appeal. Then he turned and slammed hastily out of the room.

  Immediately the people in the room seemed to flow together in a long sigh of relief. It was only then that Martha understood that his staying there had been a demonstration, and it struck her as both childish and offensive. She looked towards Joss, who still remained against the wall, with an odd twisted smile, looking after his brother. Then he too sighed and looked around. At once several people went up, and one after another took him by the arm and spoke in low voices. Martha thought, I’ll ask him what to do, too. But she had to wait until the others had finished. Joss nodded and listened and smiled, but seemed not altogether happy in this position.

  When she at last was able to go up to him, he first smiled, remembering their childhood, and then stiffened when she began to speak. She clumsily tumbled out her problem; then she saw he was embarrassed. ‘I don’t see why everyone comes and expects me to sort out problems,’ he said with an unwilling smile. ‘I’ve been back on leave two days, and every person in this room without exception has been to ask my advice.’

  She said, ‘It’s the price you have to pay for being the big man from the Party down south.’

  He grinned, but said finally, ‘In the first place it’s all nonsense. I have no – authority. And secondly, I’ve been in the Army for two years.’ She looked so disappointed that he said, ‘You should think it all out carefully, and then do what you decide to be best.’ He added, ‘It’s not a small thing, breaking up a marriage.’

  She was indignant that Joss should offer so conventional a viewpoint.

  ‘But if you can’t stick it, then leave, of course.’

  She went on hastily, offering him a confused picture of quarrelling and misunderstanding – she bickered with her mother, her husband was forbidding her to work in politics: it was as if they were back in the district, and she was bringing him her problems as usual. But she saw that he was looking past her, and she turned to see that everyone was seated and engaged in making conversation so as not to hear what she was saying. She retreated in confusion to a chair, and Joss crossed the room and sat beside Hesse and McGrew. The three men sitting there inspired the deepest respect in them all. They represented the Party itself. They also inspired resentment. For everyone clamoured to start a group, and these three argued steadily against it. It was understood now that Joss, who could take an outside view of affairs, would finally decide it.

  Anton Hesse glanced around, saw that everyone was looking towards him, turned to Joss, and said, ‘You know what the situation is. I propose to analyse the position as I see it. Afterwards the others can argue against me.’

  He spoke for about half an hour. For most of the people in the room, it was the first time they had heard a Marxist explaining the world. It was right over their heads. He was in fact speaking to Andrew McGrew, Boris Krueger, Joss Cohen, Sergeant Bolton. For the others, such was their innocence that they were realizing that a vague enthusiasm for the Soviet Union was not Marxism - they had imagined they were already initiates when in fact they knew nothing. They listened, watching the four intent men, with an awed respect, while Anton Hesse analysed the world situation, considered the British Empire, dealt with the colony in which he now found himself; its class forces were thus, its potentialities so, and the stage of development it had reached was … The conclusion was ten minutes of facts, figures, quotations from white and blue papers, which were all neatly ranged in his head, for he had no notes.

  His final sentence was, ‘While everyone in this room would undoubtedly agree that a Communist Party is necessary and desirable, I submit that it would be inadvisable to start one with the existing cadres.’

  He stopped speaking, and looked at Andrew McGrew, who took the pipe from his mou
th and said, ‘I agree entirely. May I point out that of the twenty people in this room, fifteen will have left the colony within a few months of the end of the war?’

  The six who would remain were Jasmine, Martha, Betty, her husband, Boris, and a young girl who had drifted in to join them, a delightful eager creature of about twenty, a schoolteacher recently arrived from England. These five looked towards Joss. They felt that he, one of them, brought up in the colony, would understand them, whereas these cold-minded logicians would not, for if every word Anton Hesse had said was true - and they were too ill-informed to know whether it was or not – he completely ignored the passion for service which filled them all.

  But Joss said, ‘I would like to hear what the others have to say.’

  Sergeant Bolton at once began to speak. Immediately the atmosphere changed. He said that Comrades Hesse and McGrew were probably right - theoretically. But he did not set himself to be a theoretician. All he knew was, the masses of the people in the country were suffering under a yoke of oppression, and if he could set them free, that was enough theory for him. There were more people in this room than there had been, very likely and for all he knew, when Lenin met for the first time with his comrades. If they started a Communist Party, they would soon have all the decent people in the colony with them. Comrades Hesse and McGrew were defeatists and - he felt he ought to say - unable to feel the atmosphere of the time. It was the psychologically correct moment to start a Communist Party …

  He was speaking, not to comrades Hesse, McGrew and Cohen, but to them, the beginners. He would turn those intense burning black eyes on theirs, hold them for a moment, then on the next person; he was leaning forward, passionate, dedicated, inspiring. He had an extraordinary power to rouse them. They would have risen at a word from him and gone into the streets to die. And yet, the very moment those potent black eyes had moved on, each felt a faint uneasiness and glanced as if for help towards the three men who sat silently watching in the corner.

  When Sergeant Bolton stopped speaking - on the cry, ‘We should go out into the streets, we should go into the locations, we should go among the suffering masses of the country!’ – something unexpected happened. For Boris Krueger began to speak. It was only then that they realized he had been very quiet, not only this evening but during any other such discussions.

  He too was very pale. He was upset and angry. He said in a dead silence that he agreed entirely with Comrades Hesse and McGrew. This colony was extremely backward. (This aroused the most violent resentment in the breasts of the colonials, even though they all agreed with him.) It was correct and appropriate to further the most advanced forms of organization already in existence — such as the Sympathizers of Russia, the Help for Our Allies, and the Social Democratic Party. Also, they had the duty to educate themselves. He would like to say here and now that they were in danger of splitting what organizations there were. Sergeant Bolton’s fondness for appealing for immediate revolution at committee meetings of the Help for Our Allies would succeed only in losing all their respectable sponsors - without whom no money could be collected.

  At this there was a soundless heave of mirth from Sergeant Bolton, and a spontaneous groan of sympathy for him and his viewpoint from everybody but the three members of the Party. For those same respectable sponsors aroused a quite remarkable degree of contempt in Sergeant Bolton.

  Anton Hesse said quietly that Boris was quite right. No one but an amateur would use the Help for Our Allies as a platform for revolution.

  Sergeant Bolton turned to Anton Hesse with a sudden violent movement, and was opening his mouth for a torrent of words, when Boris intervened with a long statement which amounted to a complete denial of Sergeant Bolton’s bona fides.

  All the time Boris was speaking, Sergeant Bolton shook with silent derisive laughter, and he interrupted before Boris had finished. He might not be a formal member of the Party himself, he said, but he had spent the last fifteen years of his life with the real people, the real working class, and that was more, he thought, than Boris could say.

  To which Boris replied stiffly that in Poland he had been a member of the Party for five years, and he thought it was correct to say there was very little he did not know about agitation and underground methods of work. But there was a time and a place for fomenting revolution, as Sergeant Bolton would know if he had not such a contempt for theory. He wanted to know why Sergeant Bolton insisted on being so conspiratorial in a country where there was no need for it–

  But here Sergeant Bolton exploded in a puff of laughter and the word ‘Democracy!’

  Boris lost his temper and said angrily that there were degrees of democracy - he did not consider it was anti-revolutionary to say so.

  To Martha, Jasmine, and the others, this was extremely painful. They longed only to hurl themselves ‘for once and for all’ into complete self-abnegation; and if they were asked to spend the rest of their lives in prison, so much the better. To hear Sergeant Bolton, who aroused them in flaming sympathy, attack the Party, which was how they thought of Hesse, McGrew and Joss, checked them in their feelings - they wanted a complete unanimity, a fused purpose ‘for once and for all’.

  But all this time Anton Hesse and Andrew McGrew and Joss sat watching the dogfight between the two men, and saying nothing.

  At last Boris turned direct to them, with a clear reproach that they had been silent, and appealed, ‘I would like to know what Joss thinks.’

  Everybody looked at Joss. Boris insisted, ‘I suggest he sum up - let’s give him the final word.’

  There was a cry of agreement. After a quick look around at his disciples, Sergeant Bolton also nodded.

  Joss shifted his legs uncomfortably, smiled, and said, ‘I’m prepared to give my opinion. I have no responsibility for anything else. I’m a rank-and-file member of the Party down south, and that’s all.’ He paused and said, ‘I agree with Boris. I think you should run the existing organizations, and start a discussion group on Marxist lines. You should also do a great deal of self-education. Perhaps that’s of more importance than anything else.’ With a small smile he added, ‘I do not agree with Comrade Bolton that theory does not matter.’ A dispirited silence followed. He said quietly, ‘Do I have to remind you that every face in this room is white?’

  ‘That seems to me sectarianism,’ said Sergeant Bolton. ‘We can easily recruit the Africans. There is no problem.’ ‘Perhaps. Perhaps not.’

  This cautious, almost flippant remark caused Sergeant Bolton to reap a harvest of support from the eyes of the disciples. He at once cried out, ‘Let’s take a vote on it.’

  Boris said angrily, ‘You suggest a vote on whether or not we start a Communist Party? That isn’t the way to do things.’

  ‘Why not? It’s the democratic method,’ said Sergeant Bolton.

  ‘Listen,’ said Boris, with heated calm. ‘The Communist Party is a world organization. You have no right to start little groups here and there as you like. You should at least inquire from a superior body - the Party down south, for instance.’

  ‘We should start one, and then inform them. You don’t suppose they’d be sorry?’

  At this everyone laughed, even Hesse, McGrew, and Joss.

  There was a shout of ‘Let’s take a vote.’ Hands shot up everywhere. They remained in the air for a very long time. Andrew McGrew’s hand went up, then Anton Hesse’s.

  ‘It’s decided,’ said Sergeant Bolton, quiet with triumph. He looked coldly towards Boris and said, ‘The majority is against you.’

  ‘I do not consider myself bound by such a vote,’ said Boris quietly. He was dead white. There was sweat on his forehead. ‘It’s irresponsible and amateurish.’ He looked at Anton Hesse and Andrew McGrew and said angrily, ‘I’m surprised you should vote for it.’

  Andrew said, ‘Well, let’s see how things work out.’ Anton said nothing.

  Boris asked Joss, ‘Why didn’t you vote? Does it mean you don’t think there should be a party, or you don�
�t think it’s your affair?’

  ‘I’ll be back in the Army inside a week,’ said Joss. He looked embarrassed, however. ‘I’ve said what I think.’

  Sergeant Bolton said pointedly, ‘Half the people in the room are in uniform - not everybody finds that an excuse.’ But he did not pursue it; what filled him with contempt in Boris was allowed to pass in Joss.

  Boris stood up, smiling a steady unhappy smile. The others were shocked to see that his eyes were filled with tears. ‘You can count on me with anything to do with Help for Our Allies, or the Sympathizers or that sort of thing.’

  ‘You’re simply scared of losing your job,’ said Sergeant Bolton, with his sarcastic smile.

  There was a deep indrawn breath around the room - they were all shocked.

  Boris said, ‘I am not afraid of losing my job. I’m not even a British national yet. But if I were I would take the same line.’ He looked down at the bench where his wife was still sitting. Betty was flushed; the delicate small face was wet with tears. She was unconsciously wringing her hands.

  She rose suddenly, put her hand in Boris’s arm, and said indignantly, ‘You’re a lot of — children!’

  Sergeant Bolton smiled steadily.

  Boris again said, ‘I’m surprised that Comrade Hesse and Comrade McGrew should take this line — I’m surprised …’

  These two men, in their turn, were looking uncomfortable. But before they could say anything, Boris had gone out, supporting his wife. They could hear her crying as she went down the corridor.

  ‘And now,’ said Sergeant Bolton, ‘let’s get cracking.’

  Joss rose and said, ‘I’ve got to get home now.’

  There were cries of protest, but he simply shook his head, smiled, said, ‘Good night,’ and went out. He left behind him an impression of criticism. Authority had gone with him. They all looked towards Anton and Andrew to supply it.

  ‘Now we’ve got rid of those saboteurs,’ said Sergeant Bolton, ‘let’s start work.’