A Ripple From the Storm

  Anton was waiting for them. Maisie and Andrew were there too. The three had been drinking wine and were already festive, and Martha and Jasmine had to remind themselves that this was after all a wedding lunch. A big meal had been ordered. Martha ate loyally, watching herself become gay in proportion as her sense of unease deepened. She made jokes and chattered, carrying on a dialogue with herself at the same time. But if Anton had not arranged something special, wouldn’t I have been hurt? I would have thought him unimaginative? So why do I hate this so much? Yesterday he said, and I liked the way he said it, But, Matty, you must not think I would ever be unreasonable. This is not a marriage that would have taken place had it not been for the special circumstances, so we will both be reasonable … but I wish we could have done like Marjorie and Colin, and Andrew and Maisie – they got married and told us about it afterwards. But I simply can’t stand Anton when he’s trying to be gay, and doing the right thing …

  This miserable inner current took its own way throughout the long meal in the small hot overladen dining-room which was full of businessmen concluding deals over lunch.

  Towards its end Maisie asked Martha if she were sure she had to be at the meeting – ‘surely they could do without you for once?’ And Martha, while she knew quite well it would make no difference at all whether she were there or not, insisted that she was expected and must go. Again she felt Jasmine’s comprehending inspection of her.

  They separated on the pavement, Anton kissing Martha before them all, with an awkward jocularity quite foreign to him.

  Again Martha and Jasmine hurried away together, this time towards Jasmine’s car, in which the pamphlets had been stacked by Mrs Van’s office boy. Martha felt guilty: she should have gone with Anton. Jasmine was saying nothing. Martha, as she got into the car, burst out in the falsely jocular voice that reminded her of Anton’s a few moments ago: ‘I think the whole institution of marriage should be abolished,’ Jasmine, determined to protect Martha against herself, said quickly: ‘Anton certainly did us all well.’ She examined Martha’s set face, and said apologetically: ‘You know, Matty, I read something just lately: when the middle-class rebel, they become bohemians. When the working-class first break out, it’s important they do everything just right.’

  Martha understood that Jasmine was referring to them both, and she wanted to laugh at the idea of this demure and sensible girl thinking of herself as bohemian. So the root of Anton’s dogged determination to be correct in his behaviour was his working-class origin? In that case, she was being a snob. But she did not believe it, and said so to Jasmine, who insisted that ‘it was a well-known fact’, and continued to speak of the dangers of bohemianism lying in wait for them both all the way to the Location. The entrance to the place was marked by the fact that the good road gave way to rutted areas of red dust. The car bumped and hooted its way through masses of shouting, laughing, gesticulating Africans with their bicycles.

  The hall, a dusty little barn, with a clump of dust-filled trees beside it, was marked out for the afternoon’s event by five sleek cars that stood beside it. Jasmine’s made the sixth.

  The benches of the hall were crammed with men in the threadbare patched clothes of decent poverty, and they sat in silence, watching the platform, where Mrs Van presided. A woman who did not care about clothes, she was wearing a formal afternoon dress which normally she would have lifted down from her wardrobe for a garden party or to open a bazaar with a feeling of irritation that such conventions had to be heeded, but which she had chosen today to show she intended to do honour to an occasion. Beside her sat Johnny Lindsay in shirt-sleeves, his fine craggy face alternately giving encouragement to the Africans and tender approval to Mrs Van. Jack Dobie, representing Parliament, sat on her other side, his small and vigorous body held in readiness, his head cocked sideways, as if he were listening to something off-stage which heralded a humorous disaster.

  The literature table was by the door. None of the Africans came to buy. There were no women in the audience at all, so the sellers stacked the welfare pamphlets, How to Keep Your Baby Clean, etc., to one side.

  When Mrs Van stood up to speak the men in the hall rose in one movement and began a rhythmic clapping, and would not stop until she pressed them back on to their benches with a Canute-like gesture. She then proceeded to make some sensible and cautionary remarks in the spirit of the informal meeting which had taken place in her office that morning. This was not a meeting of the Social Democratic Party, commonly referred to as the Labour Party, the platform was in no sense to be considered representative of the Party, they were all individuals and speaking as such. The listening men leaned forward, frowning, their brows puckering. And before Mrs Van had come to the end of her speech, Mr Matushi was on his feet, saying passionately that every man present was a signed and paid-up member of the Labour Party – he corrected himself to say: Social Democratic Party, and the white people present were all members of the Executive, and he was speaking for every man present in welcoming the Social Democratic Party to the first political meeting ever to be held in the Location. It was at this point that the Location Superintendent, who had been standing like a sentinel at the door, his face grim with disapproval, left the Hall, obviously on his way to telephone to someone in authority.

  Now Johnny Lindsay stood up, and in the face of storms of applause which drowned every word he said, tried to insist that they were all individuals.

  The audience were on their feet again, a dozen men trying to out-shout each other. Mrs Van nodded at one of them, who cried out, his face working: ‘Now at last we know that there are some Europeans whose hearts are turned in kindness towards us, now we know that we have friends among the Europeans.’ There was a roar of grateful approval, and the three people on the platform nodded at each other, wryly, but delighted, relinquishing from that moment on all attempts to stem the flood.

  Now a man who had been sitting by himself at the end of a row stood up. It was Elias Phiri, who demanded to know, and with great command of bland language, if this was or was not officially a Social Democratic Party meeting, and if the audience was or was not to take what the platform said as official policy. He noted that Mr Dobie was present, and he, as everyone knew, was a member of Parliament: he was looking forward very much to hearing Mr Dobie speak. He sat down in silence; all the Africans in the Hall were looking at this, their apparent spokesman, with something like apprehension. There was a noise in the Hall like a hiss – the sharp involuntary intake of breath. Slowly the eyes turned to Jack Dobie who was on his feet.

  Jack began by saying that he was a supporter of African advancement … but a man leaped up to shout: ‘Advancement, Mr Dobie? You mean equality – we have for many years read your brave speeches, Mr Dobie. You have spoken for us, you have spoken for our equality.’

  Jack Dobie, head cocked on one side, smiling dryly, hesitated very slightly, and then remarked into the still attentiveness of the waiting audience that he was an old socialist, he came from a place in Scotland famed for its militancy and its socialist traditions, he came from the Clyde, and as a socialist he stood for the brotherhood of man … it was at this point that the audience finally swept up like a flame into passionate unity with the platform, who abandoned any attempt to keep the words and sentences measured by any thought of electors, white citizens or newspapers.

  One after another men rose from the body of the Hall, keen, fervent, desperately earnest men, holding small pieces of paper in their hands which they never looked at, since the flood of their anger or their hope fed words into their mouths which kept the audience laughing, clapping, groaning approval. One after another they demanded justice, freedom, brotherhood, kindness, understanding; they aired all the injustices that hurt them – phrased formally in the words of blue-books or white papers – the question of education for their children, the Pass laws, the fact that they had no vote, that their cattle were being killed in the Reserves – but every one of these bricks in the building of their servitud
e served as a stepping-stone to impassioned oratory. The platform answered questions, made small corrections of fact, sat smiling, and the four communists sat by the literature table, watching and listening, caught up in the hunger, the unity and the brotherhood that beat through the Hall like drums, and feeling that at last they were coming somewhere near the source of their need for service.

  And it was not long before the division between the platform and the literature sellers broke: one of the men in the Hall demanded why it was that the white workers – ‘for they work with their hands, they are workers, they call themselves workers’ – did not support the Africans, their fellow-workers, in their fight for their right to skilled work. Mrs Van nodded at Piet, Executive Committee member for the building trades, who leaped up on his great clumsy legs on to the platform and spoke for half an hour on the principles of trade unionism. There was a point, too, when Mrs Van interrupted a lean, bent, spectacled teacher who was demanding education – ‘for if we are children, as the Europeans say we are, then as children we demand education as a right so that we may grow to men’ – to say: ‘Men and women, sir, may I point out that there is not a woman here this afternoon? And why not? Are your wives fit for cooking and bearing your children but not to stand side by side with you in your struggle?’

  The audience seemed abashed, but rather in deference to Mrs Van’s qualities than to the force of her arguments. Whereupon Mrs Van invited Marie du Preez, in her capacity as secretary for a women’s organization, and therefore an expert on the subject, to address the audience on women’s advancement. Marie met a sideways grin from her husband with a dignified lift of her head, and went soberly to the platform. She, like Mrs Van, had put on an afternoon dress to do honour to the Africans, and, as she stood facing the audience, broad-faced, rather flushed, her capable body draped in flowered silk, her feet restless in high shoes which were hurting her (she had kicked them off under the literature sales table), she looked the image of a white ‘missus’ long used to handling servants. This question of women’s rights,’ she began, in a reasonable voice, ‘is a complicated one …’At which Piet, sitting between Martha and Jasmine, both of whom told him he should be ashamed, said loudly, while maintaining a husbandly grin: ‘You’re telling me.’ Marie stopped in the middle of a sentence, glaring at him. She put her hands on her hips, her body took on an Amazon’s pose, she allowed her eyes to return, slowly, to the audience, after a slow, diminishing inspection of her husband, and began: ‘The whole lot of you ought to be damned well ashamed of yourselves. Men! If there’s one thing that teaches me there’s no such thing as colour it is that men are men, black and white. You can’t tell me! There you sit, sixty of you, every man jack of you with a little woman at home running after you like great boobies with your food and your comforts, and out you come, lords and masters, to sit talking, making decisions, and when you get back home you’ll say: Is the supper ready!’

  The men listening, not sure how to take her, saw her husband lolling back in his chair and watching her with appreciative derision, and slowly they began to smile, and then to laugh, but with her, not against her. Marie, standing on two firmly planted legs, one hand on her hip, admonished them collectively with a dignified forefinger, and launched into an abridged account of the suffragette movement, the history of which she told them they would do well to study because if they, the so-called intelligentsia of the Africans, continued to treat their women as they were doing now she, Marie du Preez, would personally make it her business to see that the African women of the town started a suffragette movement of their own.

  At this point the Superintendent came back, scowling as bad-temperedly as when he had left. He stood, rather puzzled, at the door for a moment: Marie was declaiming at the top of her voice, calling the men in front of her a lot of conscienceless exploiters of human labour, arrogant slavedrivers, petty domestic dictators. Then, giving it up, he went to the platform and informed Mrs Van that the meeting had overrun its alloted span by half an hour and must close at once.

  The lecture on women’s rights thus abruptly being brought to an end, Marie returned to her husband’s side, remarking: ‘There, you old ram, that’s a piece of my mind for you and for all of you – a communist you call yourself.’ To which he replied, pretending to cringe and writhe: ‘What’ve you got for my supper?’ And she, with great dignity: ‘Wait and see.’ But she was unable to maintain it. She suddenly flushed and smiled at him in reply to his broad smile, and said in a normal voice: ‘All the same, you’re a pain in the neck and that’s a fact.’

  People were already rising to their feet, and as the three descended from the platform, groups of Africans surged around them in anxious insistence, as if this personal contact might bring their collective hunger nearer to appeasement. Some of them crowded around the literature table. In a few moments all the copies of Principles of Trade Unionism and How to Conduct a Meeting had gone, while the welfare pamphlets remained untouched. The Superintendent stood by the table watching, and making notes of the titles of the pamphlets.

  As the white people left the Hall, a group of women who had been standing under the bunch of trees came forward, pushing in front of them some small children holding bouquets. After urging, the children presented a bouquet to each of the white people. There was a great deal of nodding, smiling, shy curtsies.

  Martha and Jasmine sat in their car, the bouquets on their knees, both profoundly depressed. Jasmine was nearly in tears.

  ‘It doesn’t matter what one does in this bloody place,’ she burst out, ‘all we are is a bunch of do-gooders uplifting the poor. And do you know, Matty, what I was feeling all the time, I was hating those men for being so damned grateful, and I could feel myself becoming more and more condescending and pleased with myself inside …’ Here she burst into tears, and Martha put her arm around her. She had been feeling the same, and disliked herself for it.

  Almost at once Jasmine stopped herself crying and said: ‘Sorry, Matty, I’d forgotten this was a special day for you. Well, I won’t offer to help move your things – I expect you’d rather be alone. And I’ll spend the evening with my parents for a change.’

  ‘Are they speaking to you yet?’

  ‘They’re trying to marry me off to a business friend of Dad’s.’

  She tried to laugh, but failed. ‘You know, Matty, I’ve been thinking … I don’t know how to say it – but I go home, and there’s the house, nothing ever changes. Mum and Dad always the same, and when I’m in it it is hard to believe how the world is changing, and what it’s like in the group. And I think, suppose I married this man, well, he’s quite nice, in a couple of years I’d be just like them, and I’d be thinking like them … don’t you see, Matty – well, there are times when everything scares me.’

  Here she hurriedly squeezed Martha’s shoulders with a convulsive pressure of her arm, and said with forlorn cheerfulness: ‘Well, never mind, we’ll all be dead in a hundred years!’

  Martha found Anton, surrounded by packed suitcases and piles of books, seated on his bed in his hotel, waiting for her. It seemed that the lease for the new flat had not been signed and that he wanted her to go down to the lawyer’s office to sign it. She had expected him to have dealt with it, for she had searched for the flat, interviewed lawyers and landlord and made terms.

  ‘But I was at the meeting,’ she said, ‘I thought you’d fix it.’ She sounded peevish, and she hastened to alter the tone of her voice to a plaintive humour. ‘But, Anton, all you had to do was to sign the thing.’

  He said quickly, with a note in his voice she had not heard before, something grumpy and accusing: ‘But, Matty, you’re good at these things and I’m not.’

  Martha was silent from surprise. She had never considered herself good at practical things; while Anton was surely a practical man above anything else?

  But she said she would rush down to the office before it closed, sign the lease, get the keys and meet Anton at the flat.

  ‘But Matty, all t
his luggage here, how can I move it?’ He gazed at her patiently, waiting for her to solve this problem.

  ‘Anton, for God’s sake! Call a taxi, or ring up Jasmine and borrow her car.’

  There was a gleam of dislike in his eyes. She was amazed and frightened. Then she turned this corner of crisis by using the tone she despised, becoming gay and coaxing: ‘But, Anton darling, how can you be so silly?’

  She kissed him, he brightened, and said grumpily: ‘Well, Matty, of course you’re right.’

  She left him, running, for it was late, and almost collided with a young man on the pavement, who said: ‘Mrs Knowell, just a moment.’ She stopped. ‘Were you at that meeting in the Location this afternoon? Would you care to make a statement about it?’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I’m from the News.’

  Martha instantly sobered, and said: ‘You must see Mrs Van der Bylt.’

  ‘But she’s not in her office and I can’t get her at her house.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry – and I’m very late for something.’ Martha ran off, thinking: Trouble, trouble, trouble! But she forgot about it, because there was the signing of the lease, and then getting the flat into some sort of shape so they could sleep in it, and she hadn’t bought any food yet. She had understood that from now on all the practical details of life would have to be dealt with by herself. This was such a reversal of her idea of Anton that she needed time to think about it.

  Chapter Four

  When Mrs Van returned to her home from ‘the meeting in the Location’ (the reporters used this phrase first; and it stuck: thereafter, when anybody said, ‘the meeting in the Location’, it was in the way one might say: the year war broke out) she found herself faced with immediate demands on her temper and time of the kind she was very familiar with. As she entered the house her husband put his head around the door of his study and demanded to know where the servant had put his spectacles. Simultaneously, the house-boy – the servant in question – appeared to say that a missus was waiting in the living-room to see her.