Читать книгу Five Silver Daughters - Louis Golding - Страница 4

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It was Saturday night. The anarchists were gathered in the Silver kitchen in Oleander Street. They often turned up on week-nights, too; but there was something more ceremonious about the proceedings on Saturday nights. That is to say, they all knocked at the front door once-twice, then once-twice again. Within doors things were pretty much the same. They all talked assassination and drank tea-with-lemon.

Vaguely speaking, they were anarchists. All except Polednik, who did not speak vaguely. It did not occur to Mr. Silver that he was not an anarchist; for why else would all these odd gentlemen be knocking at his door once-twice, then once-twice again, every Saturday night? But he was a gentle and hospitable creature; he would have given them house-room if they were a gang of pogromchiks who wanted to organise a pogrom in Doomington, and they had nowhere else to go for a quiet talk about details. He would have ushered them into the kitchen, and Mrs. Silver would have made tea-with-lemon for them, too.

None of them was very clear about the doctrines of anarchism, excepting Polednik, who was quite definitely not an anarchist. They had not read Bakunin and Kropotkin, but they would take any amount of trouble to rescue a fly that had fallen into the milk and hold it before the fire till it got dry again. If it got shrivelled up in the process, and curled up its little wings and legs and died, they would look at each other and wonder how it happened. The conversation that was going on during the performance with the fly might be, as likely as not, some vague plan for the assassination of one or other of the European Royal Families.

The conspirators did not drink whisky or vodka or any of the more fiery liquors. They drank tea-with-lemon, sucking it, in the Russian fashion, through a cube of sugar wedged between their teeth. Even the Gentiles amongst them tried to drink that way, though they were not skilful at it, and would much sooner have drunk beer than tea. But seeing that tea it was, and no help for it, they would have preferred to drink it out of pint cups, strong as ink, with any amount of milk and sugar. But they felt it more anarchistic to suck their tea through cubes of sugar; it was Russian, international even; it gave the tea a faint flavour of dynamite.

For, of course, there were Gentile anarchists among the habitués of Silver’s kitchen. The lines of cleavage that were recognised there were between exploiters and exploited, not between Aryan and Semite. If those Jews had been living in the country that had once belonged to them, the conversation would have been all about Jehu and Rehoboam, and the best time and place to have at them with a battle-axe.

It was well known that Silver entertained anarchists in his kitchen. Newcomers to Oleander Street walked past the front door a little fearfully, particularly on Saturday nights, as if they expected one of the anarchists to come bursting out any moment on his way to St. Petersburg. It would be unpleasant if he dropped one of the bombs in his hurry. But older inhabitants took no notice at all. They even said that if Mr. and Mrs. Silver had had no daughters, there wouldn’t have been anything like so many anarchists going in and out of the place.

Nobody could have called Mr. Ponski and Mr. Pontrevitch, for instance, really serious anarchists. They were in love with two of the Silver daughters; they were sometimes not quite certain themselves which two they were. So they never got very serious about it. Or perhaps the truth was that the Silver daughters were so completely oblivious of their existence, that the two young men didn’t feel encouraged to get serious about it. They wrote poetry, it is true, but it was not poetry about the Silver daughters. It sometimes got printed in the Yiddish Press. The impulses which drove them to write poetry were not at all the same as those which drove them to be, in a general way, anarchists. It was extremely tender poetry about their mothers, which they read out in high fluting voices to the other conspirators, of whom many could not keep back their tears. There is a whole corpus of Yiddish poetry which celebrates the melancholy condition of being separated from your mother, or, if you are a mother, from your son. It has an anthem, which begins:

A brievele der mamen

Sollst du nit versamen

which, roughly translated, means

A letterlet for your mother

Should come before all other.

That was the sort of poetry that Mr. Ponski and Mr. Pontrevitch wrote. But it was not so succinct as that. It gave them more pleasure to see their poetry in print than it would have done if they had seen Nicholas the Second decapitated before their feet. It also helped to console them for not being loved by the Silver girls. They carried their cuttings about with them in their wallets, and, though they could have recited their poems backward, they always insisted on taking the cuttings out of the wallets and unfolding them as breathlessly as if they were newly found Sappho papyri; and, indeed, after a few months’ hard use that was exactly what they looked like.

You couldn’t say of Mr. Emmanuel, either, that he was very much in the way of an anarchist. Mr. Isaac Emmanuel was clerk to the Jewish Board of Guardians, and he lived in Magnolia Street, the next street parallel to Oleander Street on the north side. His back door faced the Silver back door across an entry four feet in width. That was convenient, for a person occupying Mr. Emmanuel’s position in society could hardly have been seen paying a public front-door visit to the Silvers. Mr. Emmanuel believed in Love, and so did all the other habitués, though none of them believed quite so fervently as he that Love was a solace for all ills, and that everybody should be loved everywhere on all occasions. Mr. Emmanuel was much addicted to addressing public meetings, but he found the Silver kitchen the next best thing to a platform. For it did not in the least matter whether Ponski or Pontrevitch were reading poems about their mothers, or whether Dan Jamieson, the Socialist candidate for Parliament, was rehearsing his election address; Mr. Emmanuel went striding up and down the kitchen, gesticulating with his pince-nez, talking, talking; stopping for one moment to gulp down half a tumbler of tea, then once more talking, talking.

The fact was that Mr. Emmanuel did not believe in bombs. He saw no reason why Nicholas the Second and the other crowned heads of Europe should not be loved like any working-man. And in so much as he did not believe in acts of individual terrorism Polednik was no anarchist, either. He was actually a strong anti-anarchist. He was a member of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, with whom it was a matter of faith that the enemy was not certain individuals but certain classes in their entirety. They disliked a bourgeois manufacturer of shaving-brushes quite as much as a Romanof, but they held that the spectacular elimination of one or the other did no more than strengthen the hands of reaction. It produced a spasm of nauseating pity even among horny-handed working-folk. It was Polednik’s intention some day to eliminate the enemy, not in ones, but in millions. He shared the intention with exiled comrades in London, in Geneva, in Vienna. He shared it with secret comrades in clothing-factories in St. Petersburg, in Ukrainian cellars where intellectuals furtively forgathered to unpack forbidden pamphlets and decipher cryptograms.

So that, strictly speaking, Polednik had no place at all here in Oleander Street, among the Silver anarchists. Yet where else should he betake himself on the damp Doomington evenings? The sound of his own voice was no enchantment to him, as it was to Mr. Emmanuel; for which reason he crept away from the clubs and forums where working-men whistled wordily against each other, like winds on moorlands. He burned with no visible fire like the red-cheeked, red-bearded, red-tied Socialist, Dan Jamieson; wherefore he stood upon no soap-boxes at street-corners, shaking his fist. His heart was jagged with a blue-green coldness like glacier ice, and the years of his exile had not melted one single needle of his implacable intention. With that intention his eyes, too, were blue-green and cold. There was only one single person living who could, but not invariably, cloud with a faint haze the steely disks of his eyes. This was, in fact, a Silver daughter, the third of them, Susan. Well might the folk of Oleander Street say of the Silver kitchen—no daughters, no anarchists.

Yet Polednik, as we have insisted, was exactly not an anarchist: as Polednik himself once or twice tartly insisted, but had given over insisting long ago. How could you knock sense into the addled pates of the lachrymose poets, Ponski and Pontrevitch? How could you induce Emmanuel to stop talking for the half-minute necessary to assert that Karl Marx, Communist, and Bakunin, anarchist, had as much kinship with each other as an Atlantic liner and a derelict raft?

So they went on prating till the tears brimmed over into their tumblers; and this one wagged his jaw and shook his pince-nez till it seemed that both arm and jaw must fall off; and this other roared as if the tumbledown Silver sofa were a soap-box; and Mrs. Silver in a dim dream went about filling the emptied tumblers. So long these things went on, month in, month out, that suddenly the futility of it would rise like bile in Polednik’s throat. A pin-point of hard light flared up in the centre of his eyes. His heart thumped, thumped, like a savage thumping on a drum. The praters and roarers no longer had separable faces. They were pale shields of flesh, with a hole in each for a mouth. He ached to have some sort of a gun, a thing he would swivel round upon its base, and launch from it bullet upon bullet into hole upon hole.

None of them noticed the ineffable malevolence of those moments, excepting the girl Susan. She was a lanky creature, devoid of graces. But when these moments came she would hurry over to him with speed and gentleness like a cat, and, with finger-tips normally as rough as sacking, stroke his high damp forehead like a nodding flower. No other softness passed between them at any other time, though they were lovers. The thumping slackened in Polednik’s heart, the pin-points of light guttered down in his eyes. He sank down upon his chair. Some minutes later, they would both rise and leave the kitchen, and go along the dark lobby into the sitting-room, even though it was winter. Then they would open their books and read of insurrections and barricades in cities. Or he would bring out from his waistcoat-pocket a phial of secret ink, and inscribe his invisible reports between the harmless visible lines of some matter-of-fact letter destined for the mysterious people he called “contacts,” who taught in Russian universities or turned lathes in Russian factories: those people who, whoever they were, year in, year out, wrote letters like these, read letters like these, sometimes were caught writing or reading them; yet, wherever they were, whether working still undiscovered at their jobs or eating out their hearts in Siberian log-huts, knew that a day would come to them which would be night to their enemies.

Frankly, in the Silver kitchen, they preferred it when Polednik and Susan got up and went into the sitting-room to their books and papers, like a couple of school-children. They all preferred it; excepting Mr. Emmanuel, who really didn’t know who was there and who wasn’t, he was so busy striding up and down and talking. So then Mrs. Silver made more tea-with-lemon. The kettle was boiling on the hob most hours of the day and night; and in the course of years Mrs. Silver had become very expert at boiling water and pouring it on to tea and cutting lemons into slices. It was very nearly her only accomplishment as a housewife, and it was fortunate the anarchists never expected her to serve anything else. By that time practically everybody had had enough intellect and anarchy for one night. So Mr. Silver took out the cards and they played “Pishy-pashy.” Mr. Emmanuel left when the cards came out, for he felt that it was not quite fitting for the clerk to the Jewish Board of Guardians to play games of chance. The others felt, too, he was best out of the way when the cards came on, for he talked so much. “Pishy-pashy” they called their game, which has been interpreted as a variant of the words “Peace and Patience.” Peacefully and patiently they played for hours and hours. They played for money, too. And the fact is they were, after all, a set of gamblers and anarchists. And one wondered why an evil name did not attach itself to Mr. Silver’s house, their headquarters. But it did not, somehow. For the most part they looked, and were, such kind people. It was impossible to think ill of them.