A Ripple from the Storm. Doris Lessing

      Martha and Marjorie laughed. Anton did not laugh. He said: ‘Since I am an enemy alien and am forbidden political activity, my list is scarcely as impressive as Jasmine’s.’ He was examining Jasmine critically. ‘Comrade,’ he said, ‘this must stop. This is nothing but slackness. No one can be secretary of more than one organization and do it efficiently. You will hand over the secretaryship of the Sympathizers of Russia to Matty, and the secretaryship of Aid for Our Allies to Marjorie.’

      ‘It is, after all, a question of elections,’ said Martha.

      And now Anton stared at her. ‘Comrade,’ he said, ‘a communist can always get himself elected. We are always the best people for the job. We are always reliable, punctual, and prepared to work harder than anyone else. If we are not better than anyone else, we are not communists at all. We do not deserve the name.’

      He began collecting his papers together, ‘I declare the meeting closed,’ he said.

      ‘But, comrade, we have made no decision about these people we are going to draw into the group.’

      ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ said Anton, moving towards the door.

      ‘But we have taken a decision to bring them in.’

      ‘Not more than one person each,’ said Anton. ‘I shall give a lecture on the broad outlines of dialectical materialism. That means there will be no more than ten of us, at the outside. We must keep control of what we are doing. We must stop all this girl-guide running about. We are revolutionaries. So called.’

      Marjorie said, affectionately mischievous: ‘Anton, you should have more tolerance for us. We must seem pretty poor stuff to you after your experience, but you don’t bother to hide it.’ She was blushing again, because of the effort it took her to tease him.

      He allowed himself to smile. Then his face stiffened, and, looking before him at the dirty wall, he said in a soft exalted voice: ‘Yes. It is hard to become a real communist, a communist in every fibre. It is hard, comrades. I remember when I first became a communist, I was given some words to learn by heart, and told to repeat them whenever I became filled with doubts or despondency.’ He raised his voice and quoted: ‘Man’s dearest possession is life; and since it is given to him to live but once, he must so live as to feel no torturing regrets for years without purpose; so live as not to be seared with the shame of a cowardly and trivial past; so live that, dying, he can say: All my life and all my strength was given to the finest cause in the world – the liberation of mankind.’ His face was strained with exaltation. He turned and went out, without speaking.

      ‘But I know that,’ said Marjorie, aggrieved. ‘I’ve got it written out and pinned over my bed.’

      ‘So do I,’ said Jasmine.

      ‘We all know it by heart,’ said Martha. They all felt misunderstood by Anton, and held to be smaller and less heroic than they were. ‘It was the first thing of Lenin’s I ever read,’ she added.

      ‘Well, we’ll have to live up to it,’ said Jasmine, speaking, as usual, in her demure, almost casual way.

      The three young women went together through the park, talking about the Soviet Union, about the Revolution, about ‘after the war’ – when, so it was assumed among them all, a fresh phase of the Revolution would begin, in which they would all be front-line fighters, fighters like Lenin, afraid of nothing, and armed with an all-comprehensive compassion for the whole of humanity.

       Chapter Three

      Martha spent a good deal of time anxiously during the next few days because it seemed that she alone among ‘the group’ knew no one who was ‘ripe’. She had no relationships with anyone but the group, Mrs Buss and Mrs Carson. True that in her capacity as member of so many committees she had been presented suddenly with several dozen new acquaintances, all in love, in their various ways, with the Soviet Union because of the new, exultant public spirit; all willing to attend an indefinite number of meetings and lectures on the most diverse subjects. But she did not think they were ‘ripe’. She felt guilty that she had not been ‘working’ on them, so that at least some may have made the journey from a willing compliance with the yeasty new mood to the utter self-abnegation which was the essence of being ‘ripe’.

      The people who were going to be brought to the decisive meeting all had close personal ties with members of the group. Martha pondered over this, and decided she was at fault because she had spent too much time with William; that the ardour she had devoted to William would, had she been a real communist, as Anton used the word, have been spent on several people. But it was only with half her mind she was able to believe she had been at fault. If she had longed for nothing else steadily all these years it was for a close complete intimacy with a man. She realized it was not Jasmine who had made her a member of the group, but William. If, then, she wished to influence other people to join the group, she would have to give them what she had given William? But it was impossible.

      There is a type of woman who can never be, as they are likely to put it, ‘themselves’, with anyone but the man to whom they have permanently or not given their hearts. If the man goes away there is left an empty space filled with shadows. She mourns for the temporarily extinct person she can only be with a man she loves; she mourns him who brought her ‘self’ to life. She lives with the empty space at her side, peopled with the images of her own potentialities until the next man walks into the space, absorbs the shadows into himself, creating her, allowing her to be her ‘self’ – but a new self, since it is his conception which forms her. Such a woman is recognizable often enough not by her solitude but the variety and number of her acquaintances and friends with whom she may be intimate but who, as far as she is concerned, do not ‘really’ know her.

      Martha knew, with William gone, she was not so much lonely as self-divided. Her loneliness, the moments when she said to herself, ‘I am lonely,’ had a pleasurable pain; her old enemy, the dishonesty of nostalgia, was very close, and the ease with which she succumbed to it made her irritated with herself. For she was being nostalgic for something she had already outgrown. Her ‘self’ with William was something she had never been before, it was true: they had been like two children, playing inside the shelter of the group, they had been almost brother and sister. They had spoken of meeting after the war, but that was in their roles of being in love, being lovers, and it was not the truth. Already Martha was impatient to be rid of that image of herself, so much less than she was capable of being. But who, next, would walk into the empty space? She knew of no one; not one of the men about her now fed her imagination, or at least, not more than for a few moments of fantasy.

      Meanwhile, she told herself, she must become a good communist. And she must recognize that while she had certain capacities as a communist others would always be beyond her. For instance, she could never ‘work’ on people. She would find Anton at some suitable moment and ask if a real communist, a good comrade, could simply admit to herself that she had limitations.

      The thought of this interview with Anton gave her sensuous pleasure. The individual members of the group had all exchanged personal confessions, in a compulsive desire to share everything of themselves. Anton did not. One could not imagine him doing so. At the end of a meeting, or during an interval between meetings, when the others sat around in couples, talking of their pasts in a way which made them offerings to the future, he would dryly excuse himself and go off back to the hotel room where he lived.

      But they all knew that in the same hotel stayed the Austrian woman Toni Mandel; and while his private life was certainly his own affair (even though they all insisted their private lives must be subordinated to the group) they could not help feeling she was not worthy of them. At meetings she would clutch his arm with both hands, looking up into his face with a great deal of arch vivacity. Walking along the pavements towards or away from meetings she tripped beside Anton, letting out small cries of laughter. She was an elderly girl, rather lean and dry, wearing strict broad-shouldered suits in the style of Marlene Dietrich; her fair frizzy hair bounced