But the people whom Paul had asked to sit on the “Trust” were black as well as white, all interesting speakers and all public personalities in one way or another, and when the discussions got started and the surface of the audience’s solemn attention was broken up by the pleasure of interest, a buzz of murmur or dissent, and often — for one or two of the speakers were really witty — by laughter, audience and speakers forgot themselves in one another, and in this perfectly natural relationship between human beings, the whole thing became a success. It was obvious, too, that Paul’s personality had a lot to do with this. Here, as always among people, he had the instinct of giving them what they wanted and then taking fresh stimulation from the giving. And then he had the advantage of being, in himself, as perfectly at ease with both Africans and Europeans as any white man could be in our time; he knew most of the audience, the individual foible or special point of view, and when opinions from the floor were called for, he could look out over the heads and bring in a response by resting his eyes in a knowing, smiling, challenging way on the very person who would be likely to have strong feelings on the subject under discussion. I watched him, sitting and listening to the speakers between the times when he would have to rise and sum up the “Trust’s” opinion; his mouth opening a little with a quick intake of breath now and then when some comment on or disagreement with what was being said almost moved him to interrupt, his body curled up like a spring, one leg over the other, elbow in the palm of the hand of the arm that was tightly across his chest, fingers of the other hand, that pushed against his cheek, twirling a strand of hair at his temple. Once he screwed up his eyes and looked out quickly over the heads at me with the abstracted following air of someone who feels the attention of another like a reminder. I had the queer moment of seeing him look at me for a second as it must be when he looked at a stranger; and then he winked, the purposefully lewd batting of an eyelid that he sometimes used in a very different situation.
So coming home in the car I felt, over the slight uneasy excitement that the thought of the morning, nearer now, claimed me (my parents had arrived back from Europe on Wednesday; I was going to spend my first week end with them), animated by flashes of the evening on the surface of my mind. I chattered about it; what this one had said, how that one could possibly hold such-and-such an opinion — but did not have much response from Paul. He leaned forward a little as he drove, with a silencing movement. It was only then that, quite taken up with my own talk, I felt he had not been listening, or rather had been resisting what I said.
“—What is it—?”
He frowned. And after a moment when we both listened, I not knowing for what: “It’s nothing. That ticking again. Must be something in the mechanism of the clock, that vibrates at a certain speed.” He settled back and after a short silence the dusty bright hall began to light up in my mind again. “It must be a hell of a surprise to a man like Carter Belham to find himself answering awkward questions on the methods of the press, to old Fube. And Fube was at him and at him, with his, I’d like to ask you further, and There’s just one more point. … Did you see. Once or twice Belham simply blustered. There just wasn’t anything he could say.” My voice sank into my thoughts. Carter Belham, the big, brandy-suave editor of one of the newspapers belonging to a powerful conservative group, nipped into discomfiture by the dry voice of the native schoolteacher (the kind of “decent” scholarly African he was accustomed to pleasing by calling him “Mister”) asking if he could tell him if any directive was given to newspapermen reporting affairs affecting Africans? — The editor trying to turn the advantage to himself by putting on that air of good-natured helplessness which is intended to suggest the bulldog worried at by something small and sharp-toothed: the bulldog restrained in his very possession of his own invincible jaw. “I’ll bet he would never have come if he’d known it was going to be like that?”
But Paul seemed suddenly very tired and he let my talk drop. In a little while he said, out of silence: “Half of them weren’t there. Sipho and Fanyana and the others. The ones who count weren’t there.”
“Oh, I don’t know. How can you say that—”
He lifted his hands off the wheel in a slight shrug. “You get all enthusiastic. The reign of the ear of corn.” (He was referring to the line of a poem by Lorca that I liked—“a black boy to announce to the gold-minded whites the arrival of the reign of the ear of corn.”) “But they don’t come any more. And they’re the ones who count, the ones who’ve really got something. Without them the others don’t get anywhere, their ideas will remain where they were. It’s always like that; there are a few who … you know, you see the same thing among ourselves, in a crowd like Isa’s. The hangers-on and the boys whose heads move somewhere. The hangers-on can only go so far as the heads take them.” He said after a moment: “Sipho would have asked some questions, all right. Belham and Dr. Lettica would have heard some calm cold logic from that black boy. … That look of making allowances for the poor inarticulate savage — the way Belham looked encouraging every time anyone black got up to speak — by God, that would have dropped off his red face as if Sipho’d suddenly taken a rabbit out of his own mouth. — Hell, if they’d been there. — I wanted a chap like Belham to see that his conception of the thinking African is out of date and third hand, bears as much relation to the real thing as a circus-trained ape to a man.”
“But wasn’t Sipho at the debate last week?”
“I’ve told you, they don’t come any more.” There was a growing movement, among the Africans, of non-co-operation with the whites. It had started with the policy of the Communists and the leaders of African Nationalism as a semiofficial affair, but now it was spreading and becoming something quite different: a kind of distaste, even in those Africans who had European friends with whom they could mix on decent dignified terms, for anything that was inspired or assisted by white people. Sipho was a friend of Paul’s; it was he who (in his person and what he told) in the first place showed Paul the refinement of frustration that comes to the educated African. He had asked Paul to help him arrange lectures and music recitals for the small group of his own kind who were starved for some sort of diversion in a society where the only pleasures allowed to Africans were old Wild West films (specially chosen as suitable for the primitive mind), all-night jive sessions on what was imagined to be the Harlem pattern, and illicit drinking dens.
“Well, he’s cutting off his nose to spite his face.”
“He’s right — he’s perfectly right—” Paul’s profile was closed against me. He spoke as if he were impatient with himself. “Anyone with any guts must do the same.”
The ticking noise — which was not the running of the clock, for that had stopped at fourteen minutes to five some day long before I had even met Paul — was the only consciousness we shared for the rest of the way. It was somehow impossible for us to go on talking of Sipho because we sensed it would not really be talk of Sipho, but a dragging up and examination of what we had settled to live by: Paul in the job he did every day, I in the symbol I had made of him for myself. Shut off from each other by this, something else that was unshareable, but this time for different reasons, took me up and washed me that much further away from this loved person whose familiar head, like a beautiful shell from which the inhabiting creature is absent, was only a little higher than mine in the dark, and whose elbow, as he changed gear, touched against my arm unnoticed. A light sick nervousness for tomorrow flowed back to me from where it had been waiting. Anything connected with home always brought up with it the emotional reactions of childhood, so that if I thought of something pleasurable related to Atherton and my parents, I would not feel the mild, easy sense of the pleasant with which I would be impressed by a pleasure on the same level arising out of my adult, independent life, but the high-flown excitement with which a child invests the trivial. Now, when I was entirely independent of my parents and their mores, the thought of going home to Atherton tomorrow and explaining that I was living with Paul reduced me to the feeling of chilly hollowness, damp-palmed and with my stomach tightened inside me, that I had known the day before a music examination. The fact that I was ashamed of this feeling, and could refute it utterly over and over in my reason, did not shift it. It remained sitting there inside my body like some old genie, released by the word “Atherton” to possess me.