13

While Rud was making this American trip Bodisham's conceptions of organisation were being greatly elaborated and defined. For a while his influence made Rud the passionate advocate of thinking things out—even at the price of delay. An obscure instinct for timing may have contributed to that.

Bodisham insisted upon a series of conferences with practically all the Group present and participating. The egg of the world revolution was indeed incubated in meetings very like tutorial classes. Our dramatic and romantic dispositions would have it otherwise, but that was the course reality chose to take. It was begotten of a sentence, it was fostered in talk. In the beginning was the Word. There is no strong, silent man in the history of the world renascence.

"I've got so little to say," said Dreed, and he was the nearest approach to speechlessness in the Group.

"All the more reason for coming to listen," said Rud.

They had to understand each other, Bodisham urged, and to keep on understanding each other. "You have to talk a movement into being," he said, "and you have to keep it alert by talk. You have to write and keep on writing memoranda on the different expressions of our fundamental ideas, as fact challenges them. It is laborious but absolutely necessary."

So long as Lenin lived, Bodisham argued, he wrote and talked and explained, and when he died progress in Russia turned its face to the wall. The hope went out of the Russian experiment. "You have to play the role of Lenin in our movement," said Bodisham. The Common–sense Party had to keep alive mentally even if it risked serious internal conflicts. Rigidity was a sign of death. Fixed creeds were the coffins of belief.

Rud assimilated Bodisham and rendered him with a vigour Bodisham could never have shown.

"We've got to bring more men into this, and perhaps a different sort of man, and we've got to scrap any delusion that we're going to make tools of them. Those damned Bolsheviks were always playing obscure games, with each other as pieces, until Stalin swept all the others into the discard. Choked by their own self–conceit. We've got to avoid that sort of thing. This idea of using other people and capturing other people, is an idiot's dream. We aren't that superior. We've got to find certain necessary supplementary men. What do we know of the air, any of us here? What do we know of transport? What do we know of handling troops? We've got to find men for all that, sympathetic, different men. We've even got to bring them into this council; their new blood, their new ideas, their new point of view; and we've got to assimilate them. And assimilate ourselves. 'Assimilate', that's the word. But mutual assimilation. When we've got a common philosophy and a common objective; then we can advance in open order. We shall be a great team. But we've got to make sure of that common set of ideas. Maybe we shall find our formulae difficult for some of these new types. If we keep our minds open, we may find that they are right and that our formulae have to be modified. Probably—it's a thought that shouldn't dishearten us—but probably we don't know everything."

To which Bodisham nodded approval, adjusted his glasses and tried not to look like a teacher hearing a recitation.