Читать книгу Five Silver Daughters - Louis Golding - Страница 6

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Because Alexander Smirnof was there that night a good deal of what follows happened. How or why he presented himself at the Silver house was never decided, though it is possible it had something to do with Sarah Silver, for he married her three years later, one year before the Great War broke out.

It was not that people were expected to present some sort of credentials on their first appearance. Strangers often dropped in quite without ceremony—even a detective once or twice. And that matter of knocking on the door once-twice, once-twice again, was not really obligatory. The habitués liked doing it, that was all.

Yet as a rule, when a stranger appeared, somebody knew something about him, or he said something about himself. It was not like that with Smirnof. When the girls talked the Smirnof-Polednik incident over later, none of them remembered having opened the door to him. He merely happened. And the odd thing was that even after that supernally strange minute achieved itself and Polednik staggered out of the kitchen with Susan at his heels—the odd thing was that Smirnof resumed the nebulous remoteness out of which Polednik had pitchforked him.

There was room for one chair between the sofa and the wall. The chair was hemmed in by the three steps which descended out of the lobby. Silver usually sat on the chair at the head of the table. But he chose that chair not because he felt himself a sort of Arthur of a Table Square, but because he was a good host. He got whatever draughts were going, both from the yard-door on his right hand and the front-door some distance behind him up the lobby.

So whatever of Smirnof was not hidden by the arm of the sofa was hidden behind Silver. A good deal of this story is summed up in the picture of the large Smirnof hidden behind the small Silver. The arm of the sofa did not go far up Smirnof’s waistcoat. His vague size overlapped Silver by half a head and both shoulders. Yet, sitting there behind Silver, he was invisible. It looked as if he had chosen the position with something of the intuitive aptness which was to distinguish all his operations, small or colossal. It looked like that because it was quite an awkward chair to get yourself seated in, even if you were smaller than Smirnof. And no one noticed him getting in, no one for a long time noticed him sitting there—not till Polednik came in, rather later than usual. No one might have noticed his going, even, excepting Sarah Silver. She did not forget him, though more than two years elapsed before he came to Oleander Street again.

There, then, behind Silver, sat Alexander Smirnof. And not many feet away, under the window, sat Sarah, Silver’s second daughter, and Smirnof’s wife to be. She was twenty. She was nursing a baby. Athwart the talk of terror and dynamite, the sound of her crooning was like the feel of a small woodmouse in the hand. She not merely rocked the baby to and fro in her arms. Her whole body rocked with it, a little like the old Jews rocking in the synagogue, so that there was a ritual air about Susan rocking the baby, and her crooning was like the old Jews praying in the twilight under their breath.

She worked in a cardboard-box factory. When she was not in the factory, she was nursing a baby, or two babies, when they were forthcoming. In Oleander Street they usually were. She, like her elder sister, Esther, survived her own babyhood only by a miracle, for Mrs. Silver was as inconsequent a mother as she was a political philosopher or a philanthropist. She forgot for long hours at a stretch that she had recently given birth to a baby; and that was not because she was not fond of babies. On the contrary, the first funds she supported with a weekly penny were two funds for babies of two different colours. When she remembered she had a baby, it was, if anything, even more fatal. It did not occur to her that a green apple or a solid wedge of baked macaroni pudding were unsuitable foods for the infant stomach. Esther, the manager, was Sarah’s senior by only two years, so that Esther had never been quite old enough during Sarah’s infancy to make her the victim of one of those tornadoes of management during which on several occasions she nearly annihilated each of her succeeding sisters.

Susan appeared on the scene when Sarah was only a year old. It is incredible that Sarah started her career as a proxy mother at quite so early an age, but it is certain that she was already cuddling babies while her contemporaries were cuddling the unsavoury blobs of rag they called dolls. So Susan, too, survived. So, in their day, did the two later and final daughters, Elsie and May. When May got too old to cuddle and croon over, Sarah went out into Oleander Street and picked babies from the doorsteps or the gutters, as one might pick gooseberries. She picked them as by right. No one disputed it with her. Oleander Street mothers had far less difficulty in going out of an evening than their Longton neighbours. There was always Sarah Silver, at number eleven, to take the babies off their hands.

She was a little untidy, she had large arms, but there was a certain sweet, almost fat, serenity in her face. Her eyes were mild and dark as plums. Her hair was like the warm deep hummocky gloom of an armchair. She was, if any female in Oleander Street was, a mother-woman. It needed none of the profound ratiocinations of later medico-literary minds to ferret out the blinding truth that what Sarah Silver needed was a baby of her own. One or two anarchists were anarchists because they were ready, even passionately anxious, to provide her with any number. She was a woman to rest in, like a great warm bath. After a hard day’s work, her voice slid along the back of the neck like gentle fingers on an instrument.

But she remained indifferent to those anarchists. Some of them stayed on in the Silver kitchen, miserably hoping. Others angrily became Conservatives, and voted for Mr. Joynson-Hicks at the by-election. It seemed that though Sarah loved babies, she was indifferent to men. She was the mother-woman incarnate, but she seemed no use at all as a wife-woman.

Then Alexander Smirnof turned up out of the void—the Crimea, Austria, Barcelona, wherever it was. He made her aware of him, hidden as he was from all other eyes behind the lesser bulk of Silver. To some women, perhaps even to all women, no man is wholly lovable, however arrogantly malely possessive he is, unless he is to some extent, great or small, to her if to no other man or woman, a baby. Certainly no other man or woman would have detected a vestige of the baby in Alexander Smirnof, in his grey adult self-effacing eyes, his intellectual dome of forehead. But Sarah Silver did. So, in course of time, when he came back again and asked her to, she married him. “My baby!” she crooned over him, over that dim mass of Smirnof. “My baby! Sleep, sleep, my baby!” And when not even violins could soothe him to sleep, after the abstract ardours of his day, Sarah could, pillowing his head upon her breasts, smoothing the wrinkles out of his brow, or endeavouring vainly to annul those furrows on both sides of the bridge of his nose into which it seemed to relapse more hopelessly as the fantastic years danced on.