A Ripple From the Storm by Doris Lessing Read Free Book Online Page B

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