Doris Lessing - A Ripple from the Storm

‘We’ve just been running around like a lot of chickens – without discipline, without analysis, like chickens.’

‘We’ve been meeting, we’ve been discussing, we’ve taken decisions,’ said Marjorie, sounding positively tearful.

‘Decisions? We’ve taken decisions and no one has obeyed them. We’ve been a bunch of anarchists.’

‘The way to end anarchy,’ said Jasmine, ‘is not to abandon organization, but to strengthen it. ‘

‘I must say that that is my opinion,’ said Andrew. ‘I cannot see how Comrade Anton can suggest a new vote or decision now. We voted once before. Formally this is a communist group. Now let us make it one.’

Anton was silent. At last he said: ‘Very well.’ He was silent again, and said: ‘We have a committee. I suggest the committee meet. Jackie’s gone …’ His expression said plainly how pleased he was that this was the case. ‘But there’s Andrew, myself and Jasmine.’

‘But there are three committee members for five people,’ said Martha. Anton shot her an angry glance.

‘The committee’s silly,’ said Marjorie. She blushed at her own agitation, while Anton smiled towards her. ‘I consider it is not correct to have a committee while there are so few of us,’ she said in a responsible way. The others smiled at each other, with fondness.

‘Very well,’ said Anton, ‘but first, before recruiting cadres – that is, if we do recruit them, we’ve got to reorganize our existing responsibilities. We have to do something about the Aid for Our Allies.’

‘We’ve got control of it in our hands,’ said Jasmine. It was the last time she was to speak in Jackie Bolton’s voice. The ghost of Jackie Bolton was exorcized, and for ever, by the way Anton said: ‘Yes, yes, yes, we have control of it.’

The triple ‘yes’, was the nearest he ever got to humour: it was in fact an ironic, critical deadly assent that always made people shrink inwardly. ‘That’s nothing to congratulate ourselves about. There’s nothing easier than to get control of organizations. Any fool can do it. It’s a question of understanding the psychology of a crowd, or a public meeting. If a drunken fool wants to make himself important and play the revolutionary, it’s not a matter to congratulate ourselves on.’

Jasmine’s face was burning. At moments when Marjorie showed distress, Anton seemed almost to protect her until she had recovered, but it appeared he felt no such chivalry for Jasmine. He continued to stare at her, while he said: ‘I think it is likely that Comrade Bolton has wrecked that organization. It remains to be seen whether he has completely wrecked it. It will certainly never be the same again. We have to see what we can do. The first thing is that there must be a respectable secretary.’

When anyone but Anton used the word ‘respectable’, it was with a small smile like a jeer; Anton used it like a measure of status. ‘The former committee was ideal. Perr, Forester, and Pyecroft were the right officials. Comrade Bolton saw fit to force their resignation against the unanimous decision of this group.’

‘But now that Trotskyist Boris Krueger is in control – and he will be, since he’s a friend of that old fuddy-duddy Gates, we’ll have to get it out of his hands,’ said Marjorie.

Anton said: ‘Yes, yes, yes.’

Jasmine asked at last: ‘Have you reassessed Boris’s character, Comrade Anton?’

‘I see no reason why Kreuger should not be in control.’

Again Jasmine said, querulous and puzzled: ‘But Comrade Anton, he’s a Trotskyist.’

There was a long uneasy silence. For the months of what they all privately thought of as ‘Jackie Bolton’s régime’ neither Anton nor Andrew had demurred when Jackie had jeered at Boris and his wife. The jeer had been collective, and automatic.

Anton said at last: ‘Boris is an opportunist and so is his wife. But he’s quite capable of running Aid for Our Allies.’

Guilt stirred in them. After all, Boris had been a personal friend. They had liked him – in a former incarnation. But Anton’s attitude was more than an insult to them; it was frivolous. For months they had abused Boris Krueger and his ally Solly Cohen. They had even (if it is possible to cut people with whom one constantly sits on committees) cut them both. So whether or not Anton had seen fit to reassess his estimate of Boris it was too late. Andrew spoke. When he did so it was in a change of role: after all, he too had concurred with Jackie, called Boris a Trotskyist. Now he spoke ironically: ‘Comrade Anton, you might have expressed yourself on this point before. And the fact is that any proposal we make on any committee, Boris always is in opposition. That goes for Solly Cohen and for Betty Krueger. Will you please consider that fact for a moment?’

‘Boris has been trying to keep Help for Our Allies moderate, and to restrict its activities to its purpose, which is to raise money for the Soviet Union. Also to run this magazine, which we all agree is a good thing, combining factual propaganda and fund-raising. In my opinion Boris’s line has been right and ours wrong.’

He now steadily regarded them. They were too confused to say anything.

‘But aren’t they Trotskyists then?’ asked Marjorie earnestly, blushing.

It was a remarkable fact that none of the girls knew what a Trotskyist was; they had accepted it as a term of abuse. For that matter, they knew nothing about Trotsky, except that he had tried to wreck the Russian Revolution. They associated the word with something destructive, negative, oppositionist for opposition’s sake – with the cautious temporizing of the Perrs, Foresters and Pyecrofts, with the tendency of Boris and Betty to insist continuously on not alienating the citizens of the town by being too extreme; and with the way Solly Cohen would come to all their meetings and rise to make speeches about the Soviet Union full of facts and figures which contradicted their own. It was a fact more remarkable than any other that ‘the group’ spent most of their time plotting ways to circumvent the Trotskyists’ – though the people they called Trotskyists’ had little in common, and were in fact hostile to each other. Between the Terrs, Foresters and Pyecrofts’ and people like Solly Cohen and Boris there was mutual contempt; and in fact there was a gap much wider between the first group and the second, than between Solly and Boris and themselves. Above all, between the attitudes of mind of the mass of the people living in the Colony, either white or black, and the small number of people that made up the Trotskyists’ and ‘the group’ was a gulf so deep that from the other side of it the various sects making up the Left were practically indistinguishable, and described impartially as ‘Reds’ and ‘Bolshies’.

Now, for over an hour, the five people in this room discussed what their ‘correct attitude’ should be to the ‘Trotskyists’ and emerged with the following conclusions: that they should be watched; that they should not be allowed to gain control of anything; that they should not be allowed to know that the group existed; that they should be ‘exposed’ at public meetings when they made statements detrimental to the honour of the Soviet Union. They were all deviationists, social democrats, left-wing sectarians, right-wing temporizers – these terms were flung about at random and without further definition. Simultaneously, however, they should be ‘worked with’ and ‘made use of’. As for Boris Krueger, he was misguided but fundamentally sincere (Solly Cohen was not sincere) and should be given to understand that they, the group, considered him appropriately placed on whatever position he might be able to get for himself on the Aid for Our Allies Committee.