Читать книгу Five Silver Daughters - Louis Golding - Страница 13

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The fact was, Silver had gone over to the enemy. He had become a sweater, an exploiter. The anarchists couldn’t believe it. After all, he had been, in a sense, their ring-leader. It is true that a few people turned up in the Oleander Street kitchen even during the nadir of Silver’s repute, during the week or two that followed his defection. But these were either creatures of habit, or young men whose visits had next to nothing to do with politics. As for the others, if chance brought them past Silver’s doorstep, they shook their heads sadly. They had not thought Silver capable of such duplicity.

Silver was at least as unhappy as they were. In his soul he couldn’t detect that he was in any way different from what he had been before. He had been a workman then. He was a boss now. But he wasn’t what you could call a born boss. It had just happened, as it just happens you get caught in a shower or slip on a lump of orange-peel.

He was naturally a friendly soul. He liked to have people about him just dropping in, by the dozen if they liked. There were moments when he devoutly wished he had never won that wretched prize in the lottery. Then he would recall old Horowitz wheezing over his machine, the eyes growing more blurred from year to hopeless year. He would recall the moment of his transfiguration, when hope blazed up in his eyes like a sword. He was far off in Palestine now, perhaps this moment making his way to the Wailing Wall, his step more lissome than it had been in Bridgeways not long ago, dragging along from the factory to the synagogue, the synagogue to the factory. Perhaps even now, in his grave on the hillside, he lay at peace, the holy earth pressing down on his eyelids.

“Well, dead or alive,” sighed Silver, “Horowitz is happy, anyhow!”

But he himself was not happy. In the old days he could hardly move off his doorstep without hearing a kind word or seeing a hand waved at him. Now he fancied that people deliberately turned their backs on him when he went by. If he saw a knot of people talking together, he was sure it was his old friends whispering about him, pointing the thumb of scorn over their shoulders. He crept from place to place like a criminal who thinks that every window goggles with eyes.

It was doing no good to Mrs. Silver, either. She had four unmarried daughters, and a married daughter with a baby and another coming. That might have been enough to keep the hands of most mothers full. But children were not in Mrs. Silver’s line. The glory of being a capitalist’s wife did not make up for those grand Saturday nights. She laid in great stores of lemon and serried pound-bags of sugar. But it did not entice the anarchists back again. The kettles boiled away dispiritedly on the hearth.

Polednik smiled dourly down his thin nose. “The emperors and kings may breathe freely again. They can dismiss their personal bodyguards now. The Prime Ministers, too, need no longer quake behind their tail-coats and white waistcoats.”

“Stolypin?” asked Susan quickly.

“Poor Peter Arkadievitch Stolypin!” he mocked. “If he had delayed the Royal visit to the theatre in Kiev but a few more months, until Sam Silver of Oleander Street had disbanded the anarchists, he might have escaped the anarchist’s bullet!”

“There is another Stolypin where that one came from!” Susan pointed out.

Polednik’s eyes darkened. “The fools!” he cried. “The fools! Will they never learn that for every victim they bring down in high places they lock up a thousand workmen in prisons or hurl them beyond the Urals into Siberia? Look! I’ve had news to-day from Helsingfors! ‘At this moment the Kossacks are chasing our men along the streets of St. Petersburg, lashing out at them with their nagaikas! Over in Tzarskoe-Selo, Nicholas and Orloff, Alexandra and the fat sow Vyrubova, are laughing till the tears run down their faces!’

“They will laugh,” said Polednik sombrely, “on the other side of their faces before they are many years older!”

No. Polednik did not desert Silver during this period. He was no anarchist. He did not believe that back-alley capitalists were any more noxious to his cause than those muddle-headed kitchen praters. There was more room nowadays in the Silver house to write letters, forward reports, compare notes with Soho, Vienna. “I congratulate you, Nicholas!” he muttered between thin pale lips.