FROM THE BLACK NOTEBOOK
209
for houses for everyone?--enough talent though admittedly so well
hidden under bushels at the moment that nothing but the most
generous eye could perceive it--enough talent, I say, to create light
where now darkness exists."
"From which you deduce?" said Willi.
"I deduce nothing. I am being struck by a new ... it's a blinding
light, nothing less ..."
"But what you say is the truth about the whole world, not just
this country," said Maryrose.
"Magnificent Maryrose
!
Yes. My eyes are being opened to-–
Comrade Willi, would you not say that there is some principle at
work not yet admitted to your philosophy? Some principle of destruc–
tion?"
Willi said, in exactly the tune we had all expected: "There is no
need to look any further than the philosophy of the class struggle,"
and as if he'd pressed a button, Jimmy, Paul and I burst out into one
Qf the fits of irrepressible laughter that Willi never joined.
"I'm delighted to see," he remarked, grim-mouthed, "that good
socialists-at least two of you call yourselves socialists, should find
that so very humorous."
"I don't find it humorous," said Maryrose.
"You never find anything humorous," said Paul. "Do you know
that you never laugh, Maryrose? Never? Whereas I, whose view of
life can only be described as morbid, and increasingly morbid with
every passing minute, laugh continuously? How would you account
for that?"
"I have no view of life," said Maryrose, lying flat, looking like a
neat soft little doll in her bright bibbed trousers and shirt. "Anyway,"
she added, "you weren't laughing. I listen to you a lot-" (she said
this as if she were not one of us, but an outsider) "-and I've noticed
that you laugh most when you're saying something terrible. Well, I
don't call that laughing."
"When you were with your brother, did you laugh, Maryrose?
And when you were with your lucky swain in the Cape?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because we were happy," said Maryrose simply.
