The Sun Between Their Feet Read Online Free Page B

Harry who was keen. Dick sat on the floor on a cushion. Wild bohemian ways, these, for well-brought-up young whites. Hisforehead puckered like a puppy’s while he tried to follow wild unRhodesian thought. He, like Tom, was a neat, well-set-up youth. Perhaps the Post Office, or at least in Rhodesia, is an institution that attracts the well-ordered? I remember he reminded me of a boiled sweet, bland sugar with a chemical tang. Or perhaps he was like a bulldog, all sleek latent ferocity, with its little bulging eyes, its little snarl. Like Tom, he was one for extracting exact information. ‘I take it you people believe that human nature can be changed?’
    At the second meeting he attended, he sat and listened as before. At the end he enquired whether we thought socialism was a good thing in this country where there was the white man’s burden to consider.
    He did not come to another meeting. Harry said that he had found us seditious and unRhodesian. Also insincere. We asked Harry to go and ask Dick why he thought we were insincere, and to come back and tell us. It turned out that Dick wanted to know why The Left Club did not take over the government of the country and run it, if we thought the place ill run. But we forgot Dick, particularly as Harry, at the zenith of his efficiency and general usefulness, was drifting off with his future wife to become a hardware store manager. And by then Tom was lost to us.
    Suddenly we heard that ‘The Party for Democracy, Liberty, and Freedom’ was about to hold a preliminary mass meeting. One 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 sideroom 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 therewere elderly people present. 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 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 stammered 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. Towards 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 régime 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 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