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 a lost girl, pure of body, walked about, thinking of other landscapes. Fill these rooms now with a new and more appropriate feminine atmosphere. It is the atmosphere of dedication and mutual loyalty, in which speech is soft, statements, however inexact, are never violently contradicted, and even drink, served by loyal women to deserving men, is taken sacramentally.
A court had developed around us. There was competition to serve; and among these helpers there was, as we knew, murder in the wings. Outside the gates strange men began to appear in the evenings. We thought at first they were from the police, and no doubt in the early days one or two were. But we got to know the faces. They were of people who had come unasked from the city to protect us. So with the court there came drama. Drama created itself around us. When reports came to us of violence, in various districts, the protection around the house increased.
What had begun could not, it seemed, be stopped. Were we in the court responsible? In the feminine atmosphere of the Roman house all was goodwill and dedication. A sacramental quality attached not only to food and drink but to the liaisons that had grown up among our courtiers, between handsome men and ugly women, handsome women and mean-featured men. Sex a sacrifice to the cause and a promise of the release that was to come: so different from the cartoon unreality I had found in the relationship between Browne’s sister and her boy-friend, ugliness coming to ugliness in mock humanity, on the only occasion I had been to Browne’s house, when we were both schoolboys at Isabella Imperial.
In the Roman house itself, then, those interiors I had feared to enter opened up to me. In this atmosphere delight could not be openly proclaimed. And I will say that the reports which increasingly reached us of violence, more and more racial in character, filled us with awe. We were already sufficiently awed at ourselves, sitting up in the still nights, the splashing fountains drawing attention to the silence, assessing our progress, writing speeches, planning tours. We felt we had discovered something good and true in ourselves. We, I say. We, I perhaps felt. But this awe was something which excluded me. For our courtiers, men and women in poor jobs in teaching and the civil service, it was awe of a sort I can only call holy. I write with controclass="underline" this awe was moving and frightening to behold. It was the awe of the ungifted who thought they had, simply through enduring, suddenly discovered, in this response of the ungifted among their people, the source of the power and regeneration they had waited for without hoping to find.
I couldn’t be sure where Browne stood in this. He was as dedicated as the rest. But he was more frivolous than any of us dared be. We met regularly, but we were never as close again as on that first evening in the Roman house. It was as though each had declared himself irrevocably then, and further probings were unnecessary. So that, absurdly, we became close again on the public platform, when we each became our character.
The awe of our court excluded me, I say. I sometimes thought: they are presuming, they are asking too much of me. But I could only assent, and the time soon came when I felt it was up to the others to make some worthy reassuring statement when an Asiatic vendor was beaten up in the name of our movement, or a white girl insulted. This had to be put aside. It was superficial. Those were my own words. I heard them echoed. The truth of our movement lay in the Roman house, the court inside, the guard outside. In my own silence and assent there was dedication to the organization I had built up. There was also vanity: the vanity of the prime mover who believes it is in his power to regulate what he has created. There was no self-violation in the article I wrote for The Socialist. I wrote that violence in the Americas was not new. It had come with Columbus; we had lived with violence ever since. The cry was taken up by the court. But I noted that they continued in their special awe.
The truth 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.