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

said: ‘He’s not dead yet.’
    â€˜We can’t disguise from ourselves,’ Mr Surrogate said, ‘that there’s little hope. The petition sheets, of course, will be handed to everyone as he goes out.’
    A man in a heavy overcoat stood up. ‘I’ve been asked to come ’ere,’ he said, ‘by the garidge. Couldn’t we pass some sort of resolution now, on the spot, askin’ Parliament . . .’
    The horn-rimmed intellectual rose beside Mr Surrogate. ‘Quite impossible,’ he said. ‘Quite impossible. We are more than ten persons. By 13 Charles 2, Stat. 1, we should all be liable to imprisonment. It’s out of the question.’
    â€˜Sit down,’ Bennett called, and Mr Surrogate and the man from the garage sat down hastily. ‘Sit down,’ Bennet repeated.
    The treasurer said: ‘I’m not taking my orders from you, Comrade Bennett. If the meeting –’
    â€˜Sit down.’
    Mr Surrogate crouched over his shoe-lace. He was wondering bitterly whether all movements ended in a scrimmage of individuals for leadership. He thought of the first Fabian Society, of the ladies in their Walter Crane dresses and shorn heads and cigarettes, their belief in the perfectibility of the human character, and their patronage of house painters and plumbers. He remembered the arguments at midnight going home over Chelsea Bridge in a hansom with a chosen companion.
    â€˜Now,’ Bennett’s voice said above him, ‘we can get on to business.’ Mr Surrogate looked up and away. He knew only too well his mind’s trick of remembering causes in human terms: the Fabian Society in terms of that midnight hansom and the first tentative pure-minded discussions of Free Love and the Emancipation of Women with a girl who would not be serious even when she was in bed with him.
    â€˜Or is there any other intellectual who wants to ’ear ’is own voice?’ Bennett continued with his eyes on Mr Surrogate; but Mr Surrogate looked away in deep despair. For years now, passing through every stage of socialism, he had believed with complete sincerity that he would one day get into touch with the worker; but the plumber who had written a Fabian Essay was the man of that class he had known most intimately. He was the only one, an elderly man with steel spectacles and a background of religion and hedge schooling, who had been wholly serious, who could bandy back and forth with Mr Surrogate the abstractions he loved: Social Betterment, the Equality of Opportunity, the Means of Production.
    Personalities! Mr Surrogate shuddered. They had always betrayed him. Women whom he had wished to emancipate flirted with him, and when the lovely abstractions of Communism had lured him into the party – Comradeship, Proletariat, Ideology – he found there only Bennett. He resented even Drover’s intrusion as an individual to be saved and not a sacrifice to be decked for the altar. In a cause was exhilaration, exaltation, a sense of Freedom; individuals gave pain by their brutality, their malice, their lack of understanding. He could live in a world of religions, of political parties and economic creeds; he would go mad rubbing shoulders at every turn with saviours, politicians, poor people begging bread. And yet he could not be happy alone among his glamorous abstractions; he wanted a companion to help to confirm his belief that these things were real – Capitalism and Socialism, Wealth and Poverty – and not these other things, champagne and charity balls and women bearing their twelfth child in an overcrowded room.
    â€˜Is that girl here?’ Conder asked.
    Jules said: ‘We’ll catch her after this.’
    â€˜There’s a story here for the morning papers,’ Conder said, ‘but how can I use it? My faith to the party would be broken.’ He ran his hand distractedly over his bald head, talking on in a low voice,