• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 388 0

of the movement lay in the Roman house. It also lay in our undeniable success. We attracted support from all races and all classes. We offered, as it soon appeared, more than release from bitterness. We offered drama. And to our movement there was added a name which made mine fade a little. It was the name of Deschampsneufs: Wendy, indifferent to the recent past, heedless of rebuff, presuming on the eccentricity of an ancestor. What could I do? How could I put that relationship right? There was a welcome for her: she was right. She came to the Roman house and ruled it for two months, and I was helpless before her assurance. She became the mother to us all in her brisk young-girl way; she offered the final benediction of her name and her race, both of which separated her from us. Ugly, flat-footed, squeaky-voiced!

Rumour did things to her. It attached her to dockers. It attached her to Browne. It finally attached her to me. It was a favourable rumour in the early days. Later it was one of the things to be used against me: it proved that even in the beginning I had been corrupted by glamour and as such was prompt to betray. Wendy relished every rumour. Whenever we were at a meeting together she did what she could to suggest that our intimacy was of the sacramental sort I have described. And the people were favourable. They adored Wendy for her sacrifice. The squat men with bright eyes in dumb faces offered her the protection they offered the rest of us. She moved among them like their ugly queen. And as for me: it will come as no surprise that I became, at least so far as appearances went, what others saw in me. It was play for me, play for her.

At the end of two months she pronounced herself bored with the movement and bored with the island. Everyone forgave her. She flew off to join her brother in Canada. And from Canada for the next year I received a series of letters from her brother. He was still painting and had just discovered Hinduism. He set me the riddles of the universe and of existence and asked in so many words for ancient wisdom. I did what I could.

A twinge of jealousy, an alarm of loneliness: this was what I felt when Wendy left. I envied her her freedom and saw her as the freest of us all. I was grateful to her too for the relief she had provided from the intensity of those days. It was an intensity made up of confusion, dishonesty, fear, delight, awe. My awe was not the awe of the others. It was wonder and puzzlement at this suddenly realized concept of the people, who responded and could be manipulated, for whom tactics of the broadest sort could be planned in the Roman house. And with this wonder there went, I can confess it now, a great awakening fear of those shining faces; a fear just buried under the delight I felt at being protected by this foolish strength, as virtuous as the smell of its sweat; a fear just under my delight as speaker and manipulator, the new possessor of the sense of timing, with the instinct now for the right place for the big word, to arouse that gasp of admiration, the instinct for the right place for the joke with which we abolished the past, the right place for the dandyism which, with me, was like the comedian’s catchword when he plays to an audience who knows him well. And dishonesty: those speeches, whose brilliance so many commented on and travelled distances to hear, had as their basis contempt, the knowledge that it didn’t matter what was said. The presence was enough. Whatever was said, the end was always the same: applause, the path made through the crowd, the hands tapping, rubbing, caressing my shoulder, the willing hands of slaves now serving a cause they thought to be their own.

Confusion: in the end it possessed us all. We were dazed by success. We didn’t know whether we had created the movement or whether the movement was creating us. And I come back to the awe. When I examine myself I can think of no cause, no politician’s speeches stirring enough or convincing enough to send me into the streets, to make me one of a manipulable crowd. We zestfully abolished