Read Online The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire by Doris Lessing - Free Book Online Page B

evident,’ Incent was saying, or chanting, in a low voice that gathered power, ‘that we are here at the fulcrum of a dynamic! What perspectives stretch before us as we stand with one foot in the shameful and turgid past and the other in the future where the forms of life will become ever more vibrant and luminous and where, grasping opportunities in hands that have lost timidity, we build happiness where nothing is now but sullen misery …
    Calder’s group began to emit angry noises, and Calder shouted, ‘Come on, lad, let’s hear your concrete proposals.’
    Incent, brought up short, stood smiling vaguely, his Rhetoric jumping and jolting through him so that his hands twitched, and so did his mouth.
    Krolgul said in a low voice: ‘A concrete proposal! You ask for an action, an act! I’ll tell you what act waits for you to –’
    â€˜â€“ to fill it with the inevitability of history …’ saidIncent, almost tentatively, for his impetus had been checked and he could not regain it.
    â€˜Yes,’ said Krolgul, more loudly. ‘An act which will speak for you to the tyrants who –’
    â€˜â€“ fatten on your anguish!’ shouted Incent.
    Krolgul: ‘Grice the Guts, Volyen’s minion, Volyen’s symbol, he stands here among you as Volyen; seize him and –’
    â€˜Grab Grice!’ shouted Incent, jumping up and down. ‘Drag him before the … before the …
    â€˜Bar of History,’ prompted Krolgul. And, with an almost unnoticeable gesture of his hand, he made Incent keep quiet, so that Incent stood with his mouth loose, his eyes half closed: the image of a sleeper, or of someone in a trance.
    Suddenly from the band of workers came the shout, ‘Yes, that’s it, drag him to judgment, let’s try him …
    â€˜Down with him,’ shouted Incent. ‘We will drag him from his palace, we will make him stand here among us all-’
    â€˜Among the
people
,’ prompted Krolgul – and Incent was lost. Standing there among us, his arms raised above his head, he seemed to flicker and shine with the life that Krolgul was feeding into him. No check there now; Incent was his, and everyone in that courtroom leaned towards him in a kind of yearning, a hunger. And, Johor, I must tell you that I was affected myself. Oh, how small and meagre and pitiful suddenly seemed to me all our efforts, above all our language, so cool and measured and
chosen.
I saw myself as, I knew, those miners saw me at that moment: a figure apart from them, their lives, their efforts, an alien figure sitting quietly on a bench, indifferent and passionless.
    But simply because of my distance, and because anything I said must seem so wrong, even brutal, I knew they would listen, and I remarked, with no raising of the voice, no show of willing self-immolation and sacrifice: ‘And once you havedragged Grice from the Residency, and even killed him, what difference will that make to Volyen? You will have a new Governor at once, and possibly one much worse.’
    A growl, a groan from the men, who looked, as if at their own lost potentiality, at the exalted Incent. But Calder did allow his eyes to flicker over me, just once, with a look of dislike that I was weak enough to find painful.
    â€˜And,’ I inquired, ‘just how do you propose to drag him from his palace?’
    Krolgul said: ‘We shall go out into the streets and the meeting places and we shall say to the people, Come with us … And that’s all we shall need.’
    â€˜I think perhaps not quite all,’ I remarked, in the same flat voice. Meanwhile I had turned my head just enough to see that Grice was visible to anyone who chose to glance up at the little window. He was leaning forward, gazing with sombre passion down at us. And particularly at Incent, the ennobled youth, who was chanting softly to himself: ‘Freedom or death,