Читать книгу Five Silver Daughters - Louis Golding - Страница 7

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Polednik came in late that night. He looked tired. The tip of his thin nose was paler than usual. But there was an almost friendly sparkle in his eyes. “Good evening, everybody!” he said, not, of course, expecting a reply. But such amiability in Polednik was so unusual, that “Good evening! Good evening!” came back at him from the sofa, the chairs, the overflow assembly in the scullery.

“Well, Emmanuel, and how are you?” asked Polednik.

Mr. Emmanuel switched round. “Splendid!” he said. “Everything’s going to be splendid!” He was organising a great meeting at Unity Hall, a meeting at which he intended quite finally to set up the reign of Love in Longton, and more particularly in Magnolia Street, where he lived.

“Everything’s going all right except the chairman!” said Silver. “He can’t get no chairman!”

“I’ll be your chairman!” said Polednik buoyantly.

“Boris!” said Susan Silver quietly, making room for Polednik to squeeze in beside her on the sofa. “You did good work to-day, did you? How fine you’re looking!”

“Yes!” he said. “Fine!” But already something had happened. It was as if he had already divined the existence of something that made the fine work less savoursome.

“You’ve got new letters?” asked Susan.

“No!” said Polednik. He shook his head like someone who thinks to get rid of a headache that way, at its first setting in. “A magazine! They’ve started a new revolutionary magazine in ...” He stopped. The words dwindled on his lips.

“Don’t you worry!” Mr. Emmanuel was saying volubly. “I need no Poledniks to be my chairman at my meeting. Do you know who I’ve got?”

“The Pope of Rome!” some cynic suggested.

Mr. Emmanuel ignored the suggestion. “The High Master!” he said grandly. “From Doomington School!”

“No evil eye befall him!” murmured Mrs. Silver, attacking a lemon.

“You have a promise definite?” asked Silver.

“If I should say definite——” temporised Mr. Emmanuel.

“Hush-a-by, baby, on the tree-top!” sang Sarah Silver over her borrowed baby.

“What’s the matter, Boris? Where did you say they’ve started a new magazine?” Susan insisted. “A factory magazine in St. Petersburg?”

She shook him by the shoulder. “You hear what I’m saying, Boris?”

Polednik made an effort to collect his wits. “The magazine? Oh, yes! No, not in St. Petersburg! In Geneva! I got a whole batch to-day!”

“Who from? Who’s writing in it? Why don’t you answer?”

But something odd had happened to Polednik’s eyes. The light had gone out of them. The lids came down, as if those disks could see nothing. He bent his head back upon his neck, and projected his thin nose into the air, like a dog’s nose, sniffing.

“What’s wrong with Polednik?” someone asked.

“What’s wrong?” Susan repeated tartly. “Nothing!”

Then Polednik brought his head down again. He swivelled it towards that corner of the room where Smirnof sat, ensconced in the small space beyond the sofa. He moved his body forward as if the better to smell what might be lurking there between Silver’s chair and the arm of the sofa. Even Mr. Emmanuel stopped talking, so odd seemed Polednik’s face, like a somnambulist’s. His eyes stared straight upon Smirnof, the round indefinite head muffed by its vague hair. It seemed for several seconds that to Polednik’s eyes nothing existed in the corner behind the sofa, nothing impinged upon his vision. Then, in one moment, the blue-green eyes were flooded with an awareness of what they beheld. They were like a heap of bone-dry thorns that crackle into flame. He had flung the table aside with a galvanic thrust of both hands, sending the tumblers, the teapot, the sugar-basin flying. He charged between the knees and laps that interposed between him and the sofa-head. Silver and his chair went crashing back upon the steps. The hands of Polednik were fastened round Smirnof’s throat.

“You!” he shrieked. “You again! You!”

Mrs. Silver set up a shrill helpless wailing. Her husband picked himself up and caught at Polednik’s wrists, seeking to disengage them from the strange man’s throat. Mr. Emmanuel tottered like a schoolboy’s top nearing the end of its revolutions. One or two of the anarchists cried “Time!” facetiously, then stopped at the sight of the purple veins that came out criss-cross on Smirnof’s cheeks. Susan cried out, “Boris! Boris!” sharply, but Polednik was deaf to her. One young man and another strove to put himself between Smirnof and Polednik, but the fingers did not relax their hold, nor the flames in the eyes suspend their whistling.

It was Sarah Silver who put a closure upon the desperate event. “Take it!” she said to May, her youngest sister, thrusting the borrowed baby into her arms. She strode up to Polednik, dug all her fingers into his hair, and pulled the head sharply back, till it seemed the neck must break on the vertebræ. His hands relaxed out of the folds of Smirnof’s pale neck. In that same moment Sarah’s hands unstiffened from his hair. He crumpled up with Susan’s arms round him, like some pathetic ape in a cage. He took the breath into his lungs in short spasms, like a child whose sobbing has no more voice in it.

“I’ve never heard ...” said Susan. “What on earth ...” She usually finished what she had to say in brief sharp sentences. But something had happened to-night outside the scope of her reason. “Never in all my life ...”

But Sarah was not talking so to the victim of the outrage. She had him seated beside her on the sofa, his body lying back against the sofa-arm. His lips were quivering slightly. A tiny froth seethed against the corners of his mouth. The veins on his temple stood out. His lips quivered very slightly, like a leaf. “Hush, now, hush!” she was saying. “Hush, now! It’s all right now!” It was as if he were some baby picked up from an Oleander Street doorstep whom none but herself could soothe. With deft fingers she was removing his tie and collar.

“A sponge!” she bade. “With cold water!” Mrs. Silver wrung her hands helplessly. “There isn’t such a thing!” she moaned. May went into the scullery and held a facecloth under the tap. “Throw water at him!” bade Sarah. “There now, hush, hush! Isn’t that better?” She soothed the side of his temples with the cloth. “A little brandy, with water in it!” she requested again. May went into the parlour and brought out the decanter that was kept for high holidays.

“There now, mister! That’ll do you good!” said Sarah. Smirnof’s eyes were settling back again out of their dreadful protuberance.

“I’m all right now,” he said. “Perfectly all right!” It was the first time his voice had been heard that evening. “An angel, that’s what you are!”

They smiled into each other’s eyes. “Comfortable, yes? But no!” she decided. Shamelessly, before all those eyes, she transferred the stranger’s weight from the sofa-arm to her own large soft bosom. “That’s better, isn’t it?”

Smirnof smiled and nodded. The normal colour of his cheeks, though it was hardly colour at all, came back into them. He fell suddenly into a profound sleep, lulled against the charity of those large breasts.

Immediately a storm of inquiries and protests broke out from among the assembled anarchists.

“Whoever heard from such a thing?”

“A Kossack, that’s what I call him—a Tartar!”

“Yes, but who is he, anyhow? Who brought him?”

“Isn’t his name Smirnof?”

“Who said?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps he said himself.”

“I didn’t hear him speak, not once!”

“Not me, either!”

“You might think he was the Tsar Nicholas!”

“Or Stolypin, his big Minister!”

“Such a year should take him!”

“I was told only last week Stolypin isn’t going to last much longer!”

“But he’s not Stolypin,” said Silver, a trifle crossly. He didn’t mind much what happened in his kitchen, but when it came to homicidal assault things were going a little too far. “On my honest word, Polednik,” he said, looking round for him. He did not know how he could refrain from administering a word of rebuke.

“They’re in the sitting-room,” May informed him. Yes, they were. He saw the line of light start up under the sitting-room door as Susan, presumably, lit the gas.

“Have some more tea!” said Mrs. Silver, smiling through her tears. “Yes,” she proclaimed eagerly, “we’ll brew a fresh pot!” As if that would explain and settle everything.

At that moment Smirnof opened his eyes. “I would much like some more tea!” he said. But he did not move his head from Sarah’s bosom for twenty minutes or more. Once or twice, watchfully, he slewed his eyes round, lest someone again suddenly launch his fingers round his throat like a noose. And each time Sarah pressed him closer to her, like a mother comforting her child against shadows.

“It’s all right now; don’t worry now. There, there. You will take another lump of sugar, yes?”

Mr. Silver was in great trouble. “I should live so! I don’t know what to say, Mr.—er—Mr.——”

“Smirnof,” said Mr. Smirnof.

“That it should happen in my house. But, poor fellow, sometimes he gets that way. Not so bad like that. I can’t explain it. You met before somewhere?”

“I have never set eyes on him in my life before!” said Smirnof slowly.

“Well, I never!”

“A madness got hold of him!”

“If it’s true that your Susan is going to marry him, all I say is——”

“Be quiet now,” Sarah bade. “It is no good exciting him. It didn’t happen. Nothing happened at all.”

Nothing happened at all. It was, in fact, the only way to deal with the situation. A beefy young anarchist did, in fact, suggest he would follow Polednik into the sitting-room and slug him in the lug. The idea evoked shrill cries of distress from Mrs. Silver.

“Let be! Let be!” ordered Mr. Silver. “You hear what she said? Nothing has happened! It was a mistake!” The others applauded. They disliked violent action nearer than the Nevsky Prospekt. “You have got the entertainments for your great meeting at Unity Hall? Is that not true, Mr. Emmanuel? I have heard so much from those entertainments!”

It was true. Mr. Emmanuel had arranged the most distinguished entertainments for his meeting. They were to be provided by both local and national talent. He immediately plunged into a dithyramb regarding each and all of his entertainers. The talk in Silver’s kitchen seethed and hissed again like the kettle up against the fire. Mrs. Silver went busily about filling tumblers and slicing lemons.

“I have just had a new poem printed in the Phonograph,” twittered Pontrevitch the poet. “Shall I read my new poem at the meeting?”

“I’ve joost got statistics of noomber of hours worked per di-em by children under twelve on milk-vans in t’ Doomington area,” cried Dan Jamieson, the Socialist candidate. “That’s joost t’ chance I’ve been looking for!”

Mr. Emmanuel smiled down his nose. “It is going to be an entertainment, not politics. We’ve got the famous Boy Nightingale from Longton, and from Poyser’s grocery-shop, Becky, the daughter. She will play on the piano.”

Nothing had happened. It was a mistake. Smirnof, in Sarah’s arms, seemed as if that had always been his resting-place. He reached for something, towards the place where he had been sitting. She would not let him exert himself.

“What is it?” she asked.

“My book,” he said. “It is music.”

Somebody stooped and lifted a large thin volume and put it on the table before him. He turned the pages till he came to the opening passages of the second movement in Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony. And then he read steadily, passage to passage. Now and again he lifted one hand as if it were a melody calling. Then he lifted the other hand, as if it were a melody calling back again.