It’s a Battlefield by Graham Greene Read Free Book Online

shop-fronts and newsagents’ posters sprang out and receded. The car took the corner in a wide skid and disappeared in the direction of King’s Cross. The policeman at the corner saluted. ‘Who was that?’ Jules asked. He had caught sight as the car passed of a lit interior packed tight with large men in soft hats, sitting in two rows, staring at each other without speaking.
    â€˜The Flying Squad,’ Conder said.
    Jules thought of their silence and of the talk to which he was going. Men would be making speeches to a late hour, reconstructing England in theory, abolishing poverty on paper. He felt sullen and dissatisfied as he turned the corner by the policeman and met the man’s amused glance. He wanted something he could follow with passion, but Communism was talk and never action, and patriotism puzzled him; he was not English and France meant nothing but holy statues and Napoleon III, prostitutes and stolen cigarettes. He wanted someone to say to him: ‘Do this. Do that. Go here. Go there.’ He wanted to be saved from the counter and the tea urn, the ‘Weights’, and the heartless flippancy of the café.
    â€˜Will something be done about Drover tonight?’
    â€˜Surrogate will speak, I expect, and Bennett. There may be a delegate from the garage.’
    He would have dedicated himself to any cause, any individual, even a woman, if he could have been given a motive to be as serious as those six policemen driving down Charlotte Street.
    â€˜This girl,’ Conder said, ‘Drover’s sister –’
    â€˜His wife’s sister.’
    â€˜Is she pretty?’
    Jules nodded. Nothing satisfied him that evening. Kay’s pretty, he told himself with depression, and amiable and light as myself.
    They were late at the meeting, and as they passed through the unlit vestibule, past the empty booking office, they could hear snatches of a speech. The dreary syllables rose and fell like tired feet. All through the hall one heard the tread of hunger marchers; the ugly makeshift banners dipped and fell in the hopeless rioting of innumerable Red Sundays. Jules was moved by the sincerity of the thousands who did not wrangle for leadership, who were ready to follow in patience and poverty. Three rows in front he saw Kay Rimmer crying with her head in her hands. He whispered to Conder: ‘We must save Drover. Somehow. There are thousands of us.’ Until the next speech began he thought that he had found the cause he wanted.
    â€˜There is no one here,’ Mr Surrogate said, ‘who would not gladly now change places wth Comrade Drover, no one so vile who would not with a joyful heart have struck the same blow against capitalist oppression.’ At the sound of his own voice realities receded like the tides; he had no picture in his mind of the condemned cell, the mask, the walk to the shed; he saw Caesar fall and heard Brutus speak. He called out with a breaking voice across the tip-up seats and the green faces, over the disused cinema, to Antony standing against the furthest wall: ‘Who is here so base that would be a bondman? If any, speak; for him have I offended.’ Somewhere in the shadows a girl was weeping and Mr Surrogate called again through the streets of imperial Rome: ‘There is no cause for grief. Every faith demands its sacrifice. When Drover dies, the Communist Party in Great Britain will come of age.’ The intellectual in the horn-rimmed glasses said, ‘Hear! Hear!’ and clapped.
    A man called Bennett asked: ‘What measures are being taken?’
    Mr Surrogate raised his hand. ‘I was coming to that. I am not on the executive committee of the party. I am trying to speak for the ordinary member. I propose that a collection be taken on the spot in aid of Comrade Drover’s widow and that a proportion of the collection recently held in London for the fighting fund be allocated to a suitable memorial.’
    Bennett