PARTISAN REVIEW
63
of
us was delegated to go along and find out what was happening.
This
turned out to be me.
The public meeting was in a side room off a ballroom in one
of the town's three hotels.
It
was furnished with a sideboard to hold
the extra supplies of beer and sausage rolls and peanuts consumed
so plentifully during the weekly dances, a palm in a pot
so
tall the
top fronds were being pressed down by the ceiling and a dozen stiff
dining room chairs ranged one by one along the walls. There were
eleven men and women in the room, including Dick. Unable to
understand immediately why this gathering struck me as so different
from the ones in which I spent so much of my time, I then saw
it was because there were elderly people among them. Our gatherings
loved only the young.
Dick was wearing his best suit in dark grey flannel.
It
was a
very hot evening. His face was scarlet with endeavour and covered
with sweat, which he kept sweeping off his forehead with impatient
fingers. He was reading an impassioned document . in tone rather
like
The Communist Manifesto,
which began: "Fellow Citizens of
Rhodesia! Sincere Men and Women! This is the Time for Action!
Arise
and look about you and enter into your Inheritance! Put the
forces of International Capital to flight."
He was standing in front of one of the chairs, his well-brushed
little head bent over his notes, which were handwritten and in places
hard to read,
so
that these inflammatory sentiments were being stam–
mered and stumbled out, while he kept correcting himself, wiping
off sweat and then stopping with an appealing circular glance around
the room at the others. Toward him were lifted ten earnest faces, as
if
at a saviour or a party leader.
The programme of this nascent Party was simple. It was to
"take over by democratic means but as fast as possible" all the land
and the industry of the country "but to cause as little inconvenience
as possible" and "as soon as it was feasible" to institute a regime of
true equality and fairness in this "land of Cecil Rhodes."
He was intoxicated by the emanations of admiration from his
audience. Burning, passionate faces like these (alas, and I saw how
far away we had sunk away from fervour) were no longer to be
seen at our Left Club meetings, which long ago had sailed away
on the agreeable tides of debate and intellectual speculation.
The faces belonged to a man of fifty or so, rather gray and