Where in the long scale did Sammy come? For now there were rough ropes on my wrists and ankles and round my neck. They led through the streets, they lay at her feet and she could pick them up or not as she chose. It was torture to me as I rode away with the miles of rope trailing, that she did not choose. She was perhaps tied herself in another direction? But I did not believe it. At my fever heat, processes went on more than apace. I was a local and specialized psychologist. I had seen her eyes, knew them and her untroubled. What fool was it insisted that he should know where she had been when at the same time he knew how thin that thread was in the beginning? There had been no risk. Her quality was untouched and the only risk was that somewhere and somehow she might meet the inscrutable chance and be set on fire. I walked in my room, beating my hands together.
The party was a relief. Robert Alsopp was in the chair and the air was thick with smoke and importance. The others were standing or sitting or lying, full of excitement and contempt. Everything was bloody, comrades. Butpassion, we know where we are going if no one else does. Sammy, you’re next. Now keep quiet, comrades, for Comrade Mountjoy.
Comrade Mountjoy made a very small report. In fact he had not worked out any report from the Y.C.L. at all. He vamped. But the smoke and the technicalities the urgency and passion were a place hollowed out. So when I came to my lame conclusion I was disciplined and directed to undertake some self-examination. I began it there and it is still going on; but I remember my first decision; namely, to write to Beatrice that very night and be honest. I remember my second decision, too, and that was that I would never bring Beatrice into this home from home because she would have first to go to bed with Comrade Alsopp. He had a wife who didn’t understand him just as though he were a bourgeois school teacher instead of a progressive one; but what with the war only a week or two off, the decay and break-up, the excitement, nobody noticed that this was not Marxism but the oldest routine in the world. Nevertheless, it provided our more personable females with a kind of graduation and, as it were, softened them up.
Comrade Wimbury was speaking. He was very tall and vague, and he was another teacher. I remember how we were ruled by Alsopp and Wimbury because they were, if I could only have seen it at the time, an act of low comedy. Alsopp had an immense bald head, a ruined face with a wet lecherous mouth scrawled across it. He was broad and most impressive at the table; but then you found he was not sitting down but standing up. He had the stumpiest legs of any man I have ever seen. He did not sit on a chair. He leaned his seat against it. Wimbury, on the otherhand, had a tiny body so that when he sat by Alsopp his narrow chin and rabbit face only just appeared over the table. But if he stood up, this doll’s body was elevated on two stilt-like legs that pushed him right up towards the ceiling. That evening, he was giving us our political lecture and he was proving with a wealth of reference and initials that there would be no war. It was all a capitalist plot to do something, I forget what. We listened and nodded wisely. We were on the inside. We knew that in a few years the world would be communist: and of course we were right. I tried to sink myself in listening; but the ropes were still there.
That night I wrote Beatrice a letter. The Christmas card had taught me that words are our only communication, so it was a long letter. I wish I could read it now. I begged her to read the letter carefully—not knowing how common this opening was in such a letter—not knowing that there were thousands of young men in London that night writing just such letters to just such altars. I explained about school, about the rumoured aphrodisiac. I went back to the first day when I had sat by Philip and tried to draw her. I explained what I had
The party was a relief. Robert Alsopp was in the chair and the air was thick with smoke and importance. The others were standing or sitting or lying, full of excitement and contempt. Everything was bloody, comrades. Butpassion, we know where we are going if no one else does. Sammy, you’re next. Now keep quiet, comrades, for Comrade Mountjoy.
Comrade Mountjoy made a very small report. In fact he had not worked out any report from the Y.C.L. at all. He vamped. But the smoke and the technicalities the urgency and passion were a place hollowed out. So when I came to my lame conclusion I was disciplined and directed to undertake some self-examination. I began it there and it is still going on; but I remember my first decision; namely, to write to Beatrice that very night and be honest. I remember my second decision, too, and that was that I would never bring Beatrice into this home from home because she would have first to go to bed with Comrade Alsopp. He had a wife who didn’t understand him just as though he were a bourgeois school teacher instead of a progressive one; but what with the war only a week or two off, the decay and break-up, the excitement, nobody noticed that this was not Marxism but the oldest routine in the world. Nevertheless, it provided our more personable females with a kind of graduation and, as it were, softened them up.
Comrade Wimbury was speaking. He was very tall and vague, and he was another teacher. I remember how we were ruled by Alsopp and Wimbury because they were, if I could only have seen it at the time, an act of low comedy. Alsopp had an immense bald head, a ruined face with a wet lecherous mouth scrawled across it. He was broad and most impressive at the table; but then you found he was not sitting down but standing up. He had the stumpiest legs of any man I have ever seen. He did not sit on a chair. He leaned his seat against it. Wimbury, on the otherhand, had a tiny body so that when he sat by Alsopp his narrow chin and rabbit face only just appeared over the table. But if he stood up, this doll’s body was elevated on two stilt-like legs that pushed him right up towards the ceiling. That evening, he was giving us our political lecture and he was proving with a wealth of reference and initials that there would be no war. It was all a capitalist plot to do something, I forget what. We listened and nodded wisely. We were on the inside. We knew that in a few years the world would be communist: and of course we were right. I tried to sink myself in listening; but the ropes were still there.
That night I wrote Beatrice a letter. The Christmas card had taught me that words are our only communication, so it was a long letter. I wish I could read it now. I begged her to read the letter carefully—not knowing how common this opening was in such a letter—not knowing that there were thousands of young men in London that night writing just such letters to just such altars. I explained about school, about the rumoured aphrodisiac. I went back to the first day when I had sat by Philip and tried to draw her. I explained what I had
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