Читать книгу Five Silver Daughters - Louis Golding - Страница 5

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It was the appearance of Alexander Smirnof that makes that Saturday night in the early autumn of nineteen hundred and ten a proper starting-point for this tale of the Silver daughters. Alexander Smirnof was present and Joe Tishler was not. The second fact certainly was, and the first fact may have been, bound up with one and another of Silver’s daughters; which is a further corroboration of the sentiment that prevailed in Oleander Street that the daughters had quite as much to do with the anarchists mobilising at number eleven as their abstract passion for social righteousness.

In the flesh there wasn’t much room for the daughters in that kitchen, which was often so crowded that if the fire had not been protected by a metal grid, one or two anarchists must have been roasted alive, particularly on Saturday nights. But even in the absence of all five daughters there was a sense of their presence throughout the whole house, an emanation from their femaleness, a composite ghost made up out of the swish of skirts, the toe of a shoe protruding under a sofa, the sight of a dropped hair-slide, the smell of violet powder, the creak of corsets, the black wink of a hatpin, a glimpse of white shoulder. It was a ghost of such a quality that it might have lured all the Jacobites in Doomington to make their headquarters in the Silver kitchen, if the anarchists had not got there first.

There often was a daughter or two about, even at the most crowded séances. May, the youngest, who was fourteen years old at this time, hardly ever moved from her metal stool on the right-hand side of the fender. Her eyes were wide and grey. Her hair was soft and had a queer grey sheen in it in certain lights. Her eyes were so wide that sometimes she seemed to be hearing all they said and to be marvelling at it all, the wisdom of it or the folly of it. At other times her eyes merely seemed opaque, like curtains drawn to hide the windows of a room in which she lived a secret life, not to be guessed at. But whether at any given moment she seemed to be in the very centre of these people or withdrawn unapproachably beyond their circumference, she would be almost more with her body than with her mind aware of her father, of any need at all that might befall him.

So in a sense it was not just to say that May loved her father, any more than it can be said that the finger-tips love the fretted skin when the brain commands them to minister to it. She would be aware her father wanted his slippers the moment his ankles gave a blind twist, before he himself knew that his shoes were cramping him. It fell to her to make his meals, though she had as much as she could do to keep her end up at her High School, for she was not good at books. He would have eaten little food other than tea-with-lemon if not for her, for that was the only dish that his wife could always bring to a triumphant conclusion. The other girls looked after themselves. They had to, nowadays.

It was four months since May had taken over this duty of feeding her father. Before then, Esther, the eldest daughter, had looked after things. Then she went and married Joe Tishler, the anarchist and cabinet-maker. May did not mind very much that Esther was managing her own house now, and not theirs. It gave the child an opportunity of doing so much more for her father—unobtrusively, as always. Mrs. Silver, too, on the whole, was not displeased that Esther had gone. Mrs. Silver was vaguely aware that meals and cleanings and other household tasks that used to get themselves done in the old days of Esther got themselves done more rarely now.

But Esther was such a manager. That was how her mother always thought of her. A manager. She didn’t manage quietly and consistently, so that you weren’t aware she was managing things. There was a good deal of the sporadic and spectacular about her managing. She would suddenly get up on her hind legs and manage a Friday evening dinner, as if they were a household of rabbis and not a family so lax in Jewish observance that you might as well call them Plymouth Brethren as Jews. She would bring out a linen tablecloth from where it had lain for weeks in a bath-tub and get it washed white as foam. She would get the floors scrubbed till they shone like apples. The brass candlesticks and the trays and the samovar were like a shop-window full of looking-glasses. She got a meal produced that was rather like the Lord Mayor marrying off his eldest daughter, so many dishes were involved, banked round with seasonings so exotic.

She didn’t do these things herself. She managed them into getting done. She would sometimes get a little help from May, who would polish a brass tray for an hour or so, crooning softly to herself in the heart of the vortex, as if she were sitting quite alone at the edge of a mountain pool, combing her hair. She didn’t get much help from the other three girls, least of all from Elsie. So really, in some miraculous way, it all actually got done by Mrs. Silver. And seeing that Mrs. Silver in her own right could not boil an egg satisfactorily, miraculous was quite the word. Esther conveyed a demon into her, which gave her all sorts of potencies entirely foreign to her. But she would pay for it for days and days after, so twisted she would be with aches and pains, and her hair falling all over the place, and not able to keep her food down properly, it was sometimes so bad as that.

That was why Mrs. Silver was not very sorry to see Esther go under the canopy to get herself married, however unmotherly the sentiment might be. But, then, she never thought of herself as a mother, though she had five daughters. She sometimes looked at them all in amazement. Where had they come from? She must have given birth to them one time or another. She found it very puzzling.

Not that she wasn’t, in a wide humane sense, a mother. She really had a feeling about trodden-upon working-men and, for that matter, unhappy children, so long as they were not her own children. She spent quite a lot of money each week, chiefly in pennies, on this cause or that. The payments were recorded on hanging cards, divided into a lot of little squares. One of the scullery walls was half covered with these philanthropic records, fly-blown and grease-spattered for the most part, but touching testimonies of her charity, all of them. Some of the causes seemed less relevant to her peace of mind than others. She supported, for instance, a Presbyterian mission to Chinese peasants. She did not quite know how that card had got there, but a gentleman with a frock-coat and a blue chin called, among the other collectors, every Monday, and got his penny, too, whenever there were pennies going.

No wonder that Mrs. Silver sighed happily that Saturday night at the sudden recollection that Esther was safely married, and it was unlikely that she would come swooping down on Oleander Street to do a little managing. She had, as a matter of fact, swooped down a few times since her wedding, just to keep her hand in, but the tornadoes had not lasted so long, and they were getting rarer.

But Joe Tishler, her husband, had not been in once since his marriage, which indicated that he preferred being a husband to being an anarchist. As a lover, too, he had been no bomb-thrower. He had never missed a single Saturday night since he had first met Esther three years ago, and it now seemed pretty sure that Esther rather than Kropotkin was the attraction. At one o’clock in the morning Esther would get up from the sofa, and Joe Tishler immediately got up, too. They went along the lobby, skirting the sitting-room, where Polednik and Susan by that time would be deeply immersed in their pamphlets and secret letters. They went into the parlour, lit the gas, sat down on the pink plush sofa, and held hands for about an hour. It was all quite formal. There in the parlour Esther was still managing the situation. She had managed it from the beginning. She had met Joe Tishler at a social, and determined that this was the man she was going to marry. She then introduced him into the Silver circle, where she could keep an eye on him.

Yes. There in the parlour she was still managing the situation, but not in the dynamic way she got the banquets prepared between periods of semi-starvation. It was all rather correct there. They didn’t have much to say to each other; they just held hands. They wouldn’t even have done so much as that if they hadn’t been engaged. And after being engaged for three years, a thoroughly proper period, they went and got married. There might be subversive ideas afloat in the Silver circle regarding the structure of society, but Esther Silver and Joe Tishler knew what was proper and what improper.

So did Elsie Silver, the second youngest daughter, who was seventeen. She, too, knew what was proper and what improper. It might even be said that the trouble was that there had been no trouble about it, apart from the trouble Esther had made. Elsie preferred impropriety, and nobody excepting Esther ever lifted a finger in the matter.

Elsie, like Esther, was present in the kitchen that October night when Smirnof turned up. But neither of them was resident in Oleander Street. Esther was married and kept house a few streets away. Elsie was not by any means married. She was a variety artiste, and toured the Gleb Meyer circuit, a number of halls situated chiefly in the North Country.

Between engagements Elsie had a room in the Oxford Road area, a good centre for the Doomington music-halls. It was more convenient living away from home, for various reasons, of which the chief was Esther. Or perhaps it was May. Or they were one and the same reason. She was not frightened of Esther. She turned on her the same sultry insouciance with which she faced uncouth audiences in Bacup or Widnes when they were getting restive. But whereas her effrontery as often as not won over the most hard-headed mill-hand, Esther was as impervious to her as she to Esther.

A certain night, about two months before Esther got married, Elsie had not returned home. Next morning she realised very vividly how much more convenient it was not to return home. She knew a number of girls in the profession, one or two not as old as she was, who managed to look after themselves quite nicely. She had the utmost belief in her ability to do the same thing. She was extremely fond of May, but she thought it would be nice to have a room of her own where she could keep herself to herself when she felt like it. She thought May would like it, too, even though she sometimes seemed solitary even in that kitchen of theirs, when the herded anarchists left hardly a square inch of footroom on the floor.

Anyhow, one thing was certain. If she kept away from home, she would to a large extent free May’s ears from the volleying thunder of Esther’s eloquence, which rumbled all over the house from scullery to garret. She herself took as little notice of it as of the thud and rumble of the tram beyond the corner. Usually, too, May seemed unperturbed by it; she did not lift her head from her book till long after the thunder died away. But when she lifted her head, it was only Elsie who noticed that the lips were slightly drawn and the eyeballs slightly dilated.

Elsie had little feeling for the other members of the family. She had rather a contemptuous liking for her father, and she found, to her surprise, that there was a certain magnificence about Esther which she could not help admiring. She had very little interest in her mother and her sisters Sarah and Susan. But for May she cared as she cared for no other living creature, and she had a comforting sense that May was remotely, chastely unaware of it. She liked that. She did not like to be tangled up with people. She accepted the fact of her affection for May, and did not propose to quarrel with it. But she was pleased that May, for her part, did not have to reckon with it. It left May surrounded by her own coolness, as a nereid in the waters of her cave.

Two or three months before Elsie stayed out all night, it was reported that she had been walking along Oxford Road, that a young man had spoken to her, that she had gone into a café with that young man and eaten chocolate éclairs with him. It was only to be expected that Esther should have one of her major calls to management. She realised what a reproach it would be to her family—a respectable Jewish family, after all, however picturesque its politics were—if Elsie were not managed out of the primrose path. She was determined she would force from her an account of what had happened between her and her young man when they had stopped eating chocolate éclairs.

But she got nowhere, despite all her storming. Silver behaved as if Elsie were the daughter of a dealer in Turkish delight in Smyrna rather than a child fathered by himself. Mrs. Silver made one or two timid and entirely unintelligible noises, and went up to bed with toothache. Esther feared, and several of the anarchists hoped for, the worst. But in a sense what actually happened was worse than that. If Esther had found it out, it is possible that the truth would have dismayed her more than the categorical proclamation that, after finishing the chocolate éclairs, Elsie and the young man had gone off and spent an hour together behind the locked door of the young man’s bed-sitting-room.

But she had not done that. She had accepted the chocolate éclairs not so much because she liked them as because she liked men. She ate one after another indifferently; she hardly said a word to the young man who was paying for, and could ill afford, all those éclairs. He got more and more uncomfortable. He became aware of those hot dark eyes coolly regarding him, how the lids closed upon them till nothing was left but a pair of slits like the small gratings in the doors of prisons or convents, whence eyes, themselves unseen, intently look out. He became damp under the collar. His throat got drier and drier though he emptied down it cup after cup of tea. It was as if in that public place those eyes divested him of coat, trousers, shirt. He sat there naked. He became aware how meagre his chest was and how ugly the birthmark that lay on his hip like a toad. He could have sobbed for joy when she rose and left him. She said not a word. Only her nostrils twitched a little contemptuously.

The neighbours said, “What could you expect?” They did not approve of Elsie’s goings on, nor the way Mr. and Mrs. Silver did nothing about it. But they attributed the goings on to the theatre, and to that they resigned themselves as to a force of nature.

The theatre was too grand a name for it. Elsie could dance rather deftly, rather oddly, and she had a somewhat husky voice which from time to time twanged, or even snapped, like a string. She dressed up as a boy about town with some success, smiting her hip with a cane, pulling her top-hat down over the right eye, nearer to the debonair tradition of Vesta Tilley than to the more hearty mode of her rival, Hetty King. But she was not so affable as either. She was, in fact, a decade or more before her time. Her technique approximated to that of a Beatrice Lillie; she in some measure anticipated Bankhead and Dietrich. It is not to be wondered at that her elbows stuck outside the pattern of her time. Sometimes she glowered with real malevolence at the hulking louts and blousy women in the pit and gallery. The audiences never knew what to make of her. Sometimes they whistled and cat-called at the very sight of her. Sometimes they brought her back again and again, gaped and goggled at her, as if they would eat her piecemeal, they loved her so much.

Mr. Gleb Meyer—or his manager, at least—found her a puzzling proposition. He might have given her a year or a two-year contract. But he never signed her up for more than a few months’ tour. That was why she was sometimes left high-and-dry for a few weeks, or even a few months at a time. That was why the younger anarchists in the Silver kitchen turned up grimly week by week, for you never knew when Elsie might come up out of the nether darkness of Runcorn or Huddersfield, to send the heart tossing uneasily with a glance of those dark eyes and the pout of those vivid lips. But she could not bear to be long away from the smoky public air, the lights, the male faces, silk-smooth and bark-tough, enchanted or hostile. She would go and get a night’s engagement at one of the free-and-easies, as the entertainments were called, which enterprising publicans put on in the public-houses on the other side of the town. She would sing and dance and slap her thigh, the piano would thud and thump, a girl would go round for coppers with a cap, the ivory handles at the bar would swoop and rise. There would be certain young anarchists from Oleander Street among the beer-swillers, but she was indifferent to their fidelity. Her eyes moved from face to face, watchful, biding their time. It was as if she would recognise what she sought in one white moment of apocalypse, when at length the moment broke on her, how many years or lands distant there was no foretelling.

To sing in a music-hall was, of course, a little shocking, yet there was something grand about it, too. But it was highly discreditable for a Jewish girl to get up and sing in a public-house, among the spittoons and in a smell of beer. Esther fumed. She had tried to stop it, but failed. The fact was, however, though she never admitted it, that it was all her fault, in a way. It was she who had first spotted the child’s talent, how she liked to dress herself as a boy and strut up and down the parlour, singing, swinging her cane. It was she who first induced her to get over her shyness and sing in public; and, though the public was only the Silver kitchen, it was a little upsetting to Esther to find that Elsie had no shyness to overcome. Before long Elsie was singing in the concerts they held for charity in Unity Hall, a few streets away; that was before her twelfth birthday. Esther still remembered that she had been as proud as Elsie, perhaps prouder, the first time Elsie’s name had appeared on a printed bill—Elsie Silver, Juvenile Male Impersonator. She had stuck the bill up in the parlour window and brought half Oleander Street over to see it. Elsie herself had done nothing so blatant. She merely stood and stared at the bill for long minutes at a stretch, and said not a word. It was impossible to divine the emotion behind those absorbed, coal-black eyes.

Then came her first professional engagement. Esther had nothing to do with that. Elsie showed very speedily that she could take the initiative into her own hands in the matter of her career. Esther and Sarah had taken the two youngsters, Elsie and May, to a performance of Floradora at the Queen’s Theatre. Susan was not with them, for she thought that was a frivolous way of spending an evening. May was delighted. She clapped her hands and talked a good deal more than was her habit. But Elsie said nothing till the show was over. Then she remarked, not to anyone in particular: “I like that man.” That man was probably the juvenile lead, but she was neither asked for nor gave an explanation. Probably she did not know what she hoped to get from him; but she knew, even then, that she wanted more than an autographed picture post-card.

So Elsie Silver went to the stage door of the Queen’s Theatre, and walked straight past the doorkeeper as if she were the daughter of the general manager. She did not meet the light comedy star, for he was on the stage at that moment. But she met the fat gentleman with a cigar who had come to Doomington to arrange the forthcoming pantomime. He enlisted the first member of the chorus there and then, without trial. He assured Miss Silver that the light comedy star would have a leading part in Cinderella. She realised in a week or two he had enlisted her under false pretences, but she found she could transfer her interest to the assistant stage-carpenter, who was good-looking. When the fat gentleman invited her to his room, something happened which displeased her, for when he was next seen in public he had quite a nasty scratch down his cheek. She herself did not appear at the next, or any subsequent, performance. Instead she called at an agency, the name and ways of which she had learned from her colleagues in the chorus. She had already started her career as a travelling vaudeville artiste within a month or two of leaving school.

Esther disapproved strongly, but she was less vocal about this disapproval than about others, partly because she was as much to blame as anybody that Elsie was in the profession, partly because Elsie had a way about her which caused eloquence to crumble on the lips like a dried lather. But when Elsie failed to return one night, and came along coolly the next night to announce she had come to collect her things, for she wasn’t going to live at home any more, then Esther reached for her armour and her stoutest lance and prepared herself for battle. But, though Elsie was clad in much flimsier material, there was no point at which Esther’s lance could force an entrance. Elsie had never been, in the toughest barn of a small-town vaudeville theatre, so bewitching, so insolent, so unassailable. The young anarchists present went watery at the knees with love of her.

Esther remembered wildly that she was going to be married in a month or two. Joe’s family was troubled enough that Joe was going to marry into a family of anarchists. What would they say when they learned of daughters of seventeen who stayed out all night, who proposed to go and live on their own off Oxford Road?

Esther’s voice soared and swooped like a swing. Then suddenly, when it had attained a crest higher than it had yet achieved, its moorings broke. It dithered a moment high in air, then crashed in ruin. It lay in splinters around her. Her face—and no one had ever seen it so before, nor was anyone but her father ever to see it so again—was steamy with tears.

“Mother! Mother!” she gasped hoarsely. “Do something! Say something!”

Mrs. Silver tried desperately to do something, say something. But her voice was as impotent as Esther’s. Her hands shut and opened miserably. She formed a syllable or two in her throat, and they stuck there. They stuck there as the thing she had done long, long ago in the deep grass by the Dnieper had stuck in her throat all those years. Though, God knows, she had loved Sam, her husband, then, as she loved him now, and would love him always. But Sam had not yet become her husband, that time long ago. So how can you go about being a pillar of chastity, and glaring on daughters that stay out overnight, if you too, long, long ago in the deep grass by the Dnieper ... The words were stifled in her throat. She went into the scullery and started peeling a basinful of potatoes that had already been peeled.

Then, like a person drowning who thrusts an arm out desperately towards an overhanging bough, Esther grabbed at her father, sitting at the head of the table with his head between his hands.

“Father, she mustn’t go. You know what people are already saying. It’s bad enough when she goes travelling about, but in Doomington, when she has a father and a mother and a family and a home ... Say she mustn’t go and live on her own. She must be older first.”

Sam Silver did not lift his head.

“Father, don’t you hear me?”

“I hear you, Esther.”

“Why don’t you speak to her?”

“Did I ask to be born?” he asked her strangely.

“But what——”

“I did not. And she did not ask to be born.”

“Yes, yes, but——”

“She must look after what she does with herself. No one’s got no right to interfere with what people do.”

“You’re her father,” she whispered. There was horror in her eyes.

He lifted his head. On his eyes there was a sort of glaze. There was a sing-song note in what he said, as if he uttered a formula, something he did not himself quite clearly understand.

“Oi, a father, a father! Less than anybody else, a father!”

Esther’s head ached so much that she felt the top of her skull would come clean away if she stayed in the kitchen any longer. She gathered together the pieces of herself and carried them off to bed.

“Good night, Esther!” said Elsie softly, without triumph. Esther was not the sort of triumph Elsie meditated.

Elsie by no means cut off relations with Oleander Street when she went off to live on her own. In between engagements, she would come in to see May and who the new anarchists might be, for they were always men. The knowledge conveyed itself by some odd magic to the younger anarchists. Elsie was in Oleander Street that night; Elsie was sitting on the sofa with her slim legs showing well above the ankle; Elsie tracing the line of her lips with a rouge pencil. Young men who were only anarchists, as far as it could be discovered, when Elsie was at home, turned up and drank quarts of tea-with-lemon. On such nights the political debate was more inconsequent than usual. Earlier than usual Polednik rose and carried Susan and Karl Marx away dourly into the sitting-room.