Free The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood Page B

peasants now rendered homeless. Comrades, the Chinese section of the I. A. H. appeals to us for funds to fight Japanese imperialism and European exploitation. It’s our duty to help them. We’re going to help them.”
    The red-haired man smiled as he spoke, a militant, triumphant smile; his white, even teeth gleamed in the lamplight.
    His gestures were slight but astonishingly forceful. At moments it seemed as if the giant energy stored up in his short, stocky frame would have flung him bodily from the platform, like an over-powerful motor-bicycle. I had seen his photograph two or three times in the newspaper, but couldn’t remember who he was. From where I sat, it was difficult to hear everything he said. His voice drowned itself, filling the large, damp hall with thundering echoes.
    Arthur now appeared upon the stage, shaking hands hastily with the Chinese, apologising, fussing to his chair. A burst of applause which followed the red-haired man’s last sentence visibly startled him. He sat down abruptly.
    During the clapping, I moved up several rows in order to hear better, squeezing into a place I had seen was empty in front of me. As I sat down, I felt a tug at my sleeve. It was Anni, the girl with the boots. Beside her, I recognised the boy who had poured the beer down Kuno’s throat at Olga’s on New Year’s Eve. They both seemed pleased to see me. The boy shook hands with a grip which nearly made me yell out loud.
    The hall was very full. The audience sat there in their soiled everyday clothes. Most of the men wore breeches with coarse woollen stockings, sweaters and peaked caps. Their eyes followed the speaker with hungry curiosity. I had never been to a communist meeting before, and what struck me most was the fixed attention of the upturned rows of faces; faces of the Berlin working class, pale and prematurely lined, often haggard and ascetic, like the heads of scholars, with thin, fair hair brushed back from their broad foreheads. They had not come here to see each other or to be seen, or even to fulfil a social duty. They were attentive but not passive. They were not spectators. They participated, with a curious, restrained passion, in the speech made by the red-haired man. He spoke for them, he made their thoughts articulate. They were listening to their own collective voice. At intervals they applauded it, with sudden, spontaneous violence. Their passion, their strength of purpose elated me. I stood outside it.
    One day, perhaps, I should be with it, but never of it. At present I just sat there, a half-hearted renegade from my own class, my feelings muddled by anarchism talked at Cambridge, by slogans from the confirmation service, by the tunes the band played when my father’s regiment marched to the railway station, seventeen years ago. And the little man finished his speech and went back to bis place at the table amidst thunders of clapping.
    “Who is he?” I asked.
    “Why, don’t you know?” exclaimed Anni’s friend in surprise. “That’s Ludwig Bayer. One of the best men we’ve got.”
    The boy’s name was Otto. Anni introduced us and I got another crushing hand-squeeze. Otto changed places with her so that he could talk to me.
    “Were you at the Sport Palace the other night? Man, you ought to have heard him! He spoke for two hours and a half without so much as a drink of water.”
    A Chinese delegate now stood up and was introduced. He spoke careful, academic German. In sentences which were like the faint, plaintive twanging of an Asiatic musical instrument, he told us of the famine, of the great floods, of the Japanese air-raids on helpless towns. “German comrades, I bring you a sad message from my unhappy country.”
    “My word!” whispered Otto, impressed. “It must be worse there than at my aunt’s in the Simeonstrasse.”
    It was already a quarter past nine. The Chinese was followed by the man with fuzzy hair. Arthur was becoming impatient. He kept glancing at his watch and