It had begun for me with Joel and Mary Seswayo; I did not know which. Now when, the second or third time I went to the Welshs’ flat, Isa said, “Would that African girl of yours like to come along next time, d’you think?” I felt as I did so often in the slightly uncomfortable, impermanent-looking homes of these young people, a sudden sense of my own climate blowing upon me. The way someone from an American city or a Scandinavian seaport comes in the course of a summer cruise to some unimportant little foreign island he has never heard of before and suddenly recognizes the warm breath off the beach more deeply than the streets of Chicago or Copenhagen. “Or do you think music’d be a bit much for her?”
The high English laugh of Jenny Marcus sailed out, a girl commanding attention in the pinkness and assertion of shape and flesh that sometimes precedes the ugly stage of pregnancy quite dazzlingly. “It’s all right for you, Isa, you haven’t got a servant. Whenever John wants to bring Nathoo Ram home for dinner I have to let Hilda go off. And he’s only an Indian, that’s not so bad. But the next day I always feel her looking at me in contempt; she knows he’s been there. Nothing infuriates your own servant more than the idea that you’ve lowered yourself to eat with a non-European.”
“And Nathoo Ram, too.” Her husband turned his head from his own talk. “I always see him look anxiously into the kitchen and see with relief old Jen battling there. …”
“Well, I’ll ask her—” I said to Isa.
A little man of twenty-four behind curly balding hair and glasses thick as bottle ends, said: “It’s a confusion of social and color barriers, surely? To Africans, if you entertain an African, you’re entertaining a houseboy or a cook. You see? Nathoo Ram’s not a lawyer, he’s the vegetable hawker known by the generic of ‘Sammy.’” But the young man was someone whom Isa “allowed” to be in her flat, one of those persons who fail to catch the imagination and so to whom no one listens. They ignored from him suggestions that, coming from someone else, would have provoked an evening’s wrangling. Now they were already talking of something else. He was left, as often, with the subject on his hands, discarded just when he had something to say on it. I should have liked to have heard him further, because what he had begun to say was a change of focus of the kind that interested me. But he was not interested in carrying on for me; already he was sitting silent and following the zigzag swerve of their new discussion with the quick eyes of a fan at a tennis match.
“Aren’t we going to hear the Couperin?” John Marcus was asking from among the records. Only his wife seemed to hear him, and pulled a face at him across the room. With a tremendous shrug he put the record down and squatted at her side. She bent, hanging her hair over their faces, and they whispered and laughed into each other’s ears and necks. Her mouth changing and her eyes crinkling with the look of someone being tickled, she looked out into the room but took no notice of it while he cupped his hand round her ear and she kept screwing up her face and saying, What? What?
I was still being talked about by two people behind me. Or rather my acquaintance with Mary Seswayo was being used by the resourcefulness of Edna Schiller to illustrate her Communist argument. She was a good-looking Jewess with an intensely reasonable manner and eyebrows that raised up a little at their inner limits, inquiringly, like the puffy eyebrows of a puppy. Her attractive clothes and the large collection of earrings that she wore seemed an abstraction; you could not imagine her among hairpins and lipstick, choosing which she would wear, before a mirror. There was the feeling that somebody else dressed her. It was the same with the young man she had with her, a handsome young American who despite a yellow pull-over and a pair of veldschoen had his big head and neck set with the dummy like perfection of Hollywood. Some other Edna must find time for him, too.
Now she was talking of me as if I were not in the room at all. “She befriends this girl, but what does it mean? — Like you and your sports grounds and recreation centers and sewing classes. A waste of effort on charity. That’s all it is, a useless palliative charity, useless in the historical sense. It’s damaging, even. The simple African who is not yet politically conscious is lulled into another year or so of accepting things as they are—”
“But this native girl probably is politically conscious. She’s seeking education, and the two go together. She may be one of the potential leaders you people are always looking for.”
Edna, once she had discovered the shortest distance from any subject to her own — and she had only one — was not to be deflected. “Unlikely. She will become a teacher and a bourgeoise and feel herself a little nearer to the whites instead of closer to the blacks. African leaders will come from the people.”
“Funny, in practice I thought that revolutionary leaders had usually come from the middle class?”
There was a groan from a young man lying on the divan near them. “For Christ’s sake, don’t start that. …”
“What it amounts to, then, is that you don’t approve of ordinary, nonpolitical friendship between black and white individuals?”
“Approve, nothing,” said Edna, coming forward in her seat. “It’s quite immaterial who your friends are, or what color. What I’m saying is, that even if they’re black, it’s unimportant to the struggle of the blacks against white supremacy.”
The young man sat up suddenly, with the dazed look of someone changing too quickly from the horizontal. “Christ, must everything be important to the struggle! Can’t I sleep with a girl, get drunk …” He fell back and muffled his face in the cushion.
Edna used the same degree of intensity to bring home a small point in a casual discussion as she did faced with the defense of a whole doctrine before the snap of a dozen shrewd dissenters. Her zeal released her like liquor and she did not seem to know the rise of her own voice or the persistence of her vehemence. “If people would take a look at what is to be done. The work that a handful of us have to do. You can’t tackle it in terms of soup kitchens. But, of course, I suppose people are afraid; can’t blame them. But you get used to it, it’s amazing. I know my telephone’s tapped. Twice last week there was a man asking questions in our building, some excuse about a survey, but we’re so used to it now. As Hester Claasen says (Hester Claasen was a trade-union leader of great courage and the cachet of toughness), you can smell a dick a mile off.”