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By Root 379 0

our party organization. It was the sort of administrative work for which I was born. But – in spite of what has gone before – I will be less than fair to myself if I do not say that my labours were sweetened by the knowledge that I had become a public figure and an attractive one. It was the personality Browne had seen: the rich man with a certain name who had put himself on the side of the poor, who appeared to have turned his back on the making of money and on his former associates, who appeared to have been suddenly given a glimpse of the truth: I was now aware of his attractiveness. So in unlikely circumstances the London dandy was resurrected. I knew the affection and kindly mockery he aroused, and it was pleasant in those early days just to be this self. I had known nothing like it.

Create the scenes then. Imagine Browne, the leader, in his shabby journalist’s suit, energetic, enthusiastic, frequently breaking into the local dialect, for purposes of comedy or abuse. Beside him set myself, as elegant in dress as in speech: I knew my role. Imagine the public meetings in squares, in halls. Imagine the tours along dusty country roads in the late afternoon and at night, the headlights illuminating the walls of sugarcane on either side. Imagine the developing organization in the Roman house, the willing black hands of clerks from business houses and our civil service. Imagine the lengthening reports of our speeches in the Inquirer. Imagine that other mark of success: the policemen in heavy serge shorts, becoming less aggressive and more protective as their numbers grew. Their amiability was pathetic: it was like the amiability of the gangster who finds himself in polite society. Add an enlivening detail: the yellow light on shining black faces, an old crazed woman somewhere in the crowd proclaiming her own message of doom, and here and there the flambeaux on stalls which now, because they are part of the people, one and entire, the police will not move on or break up.

Add the smell of Negro sweat as, to applause, we make our way through our followers, shining eyes in shining faces, to the platform, they so squat and powerfully built, we so tall and slender. In this smell of heated sweat, once rejected, I tried to find virtue, the virtue of the poor, the labouring, the oppressed. Such is the vulgarity that mobs generate, in themselves and in their manipulators. The virtue I found in that acrid smell was the virtue of the protecting, the massed and heedless. It was Browne’s privilege to be less sentimental. ‘The old bouquet d’Afrique,’ he would mutter. And sometimes, when we were on the platform: ‘Did you get the old booky?’

It was genuine, this sentiment, part of his ambivalence. But it was also, increasingly, an attempt to reassure me, to tell me, in the shorthand of speech we had evolved for use in public, that we were as one. For other scenes have to be created, other details added: casual estate labourers, picturesque Asiatics, not willing to share distress, lounging about a country road at dusk, unaroused, polite only because of my name. Someone in our party struggles with a microphone or a pressure lamp. The impassive shopkeeper in his dark shop sells sugar or flour to a young girl, who is indifferent to our mission; as afterwards he sells us beer. Then comes the drive back through the still land: weak lights in silent houses. The mud and deep ruts surprise us. We are aware of the remoteness of the safe town and those facilities we have taken for granted. We sympathize silently with the picturesque people we have left behind. In this sympathy we feel confirmed in our mission and our cause. Time was all that we needed, to bind all in distress.

Fill the Roman house with people once again. Suppress all rowdiness and strenuous gaiety. But do not destroy the coldness that is the fate of houses which have been mentally abandoned by their builders before they are complete. Until they are warmed by new tenants these houses are never like places to live in. Remember the cold kitchen and the terrazzo of empty rooms where