Читать книгу Five Silver Daughters - Louis Golding - Страница 8

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Susan Silver closed the sitting-room door with one hand and with the other kept a tight grip on Polednik’s arm to prevent him from falling. Then she felt about for a chair, and, finding one, sat him down in it.

“Are you all right?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Just one moment. I’ll light the gas.”

She lit it. She saw his cheek-bones stand out against his skin. A slight moisture rimmed his forehead.

“I’ll get you something,” she said.

“Please not,” he insisted.

She did nothing more about it. Those two made no dalliance out of their sicknesses, their own or each other’s.

His head fell forward on his breast. She moved the table forward. “Rest your elbows,” she said, in a voice empty of emotion. “It will be more comfortable that way.” He let his head lie on his elbows for some minutes. She did nothing. She stared into Count Tolstoi’s eyes in the cheap oleograph on the wall before her. Once and again, very infrequently, she tapped the table with the middle finger of her left hand.

He raised his head at length, but not his eyes. They remained blue-green, cold, remote.

“Well?” she asked, after five more minutes had gone by.

“I have seen him before,” he said. Still his eyes gave no sense of the proximity of any person at all speaking to him. It was as if he were replying to a voice within his own brain that spoke, or a voice a long way off, out of his boyhood, a voice in the cold plains that advance under cold moons to the Dnieper’s edge.

“Where?” she asked.

His voice was quite toneless as he spoke. “At the edge of the clearing in the pine-wood. I have spoken to you of it.”

“Near the Slobodka, away beyond Kiev?”

“Yes. In the pine-wood where we gathered, the revolutionaries.”

“What was he doing there?”

He seemed not to have heard her question. He seemed to be rehearsing a dire tale he knew well.

“We gathered there to read the forbidden newspapers and proclamations from our leaders. They would distribute appeals from the workers and to the workers. I was not sixteen years old then. The police did not know of that meeting-place. We came down on it by a dozen paths, or by no path at all. We had markings on the trees to guide us.”

He was silent for some time. He lifted his eyes to her suddenly. “I have spoken to you of Vladimir Stepanovitch?”

She made no answer.

He repeated his question. “I have spoken to you of Vladimir Stepanovitch?”

“Not often. Once or twice.”

“I did not wish to speak of him.”

“I knew. So I did not ask you.”

“I must speak of him now.”

“Speak, then.”

“He was the son of the doctor from our town, Tanyev. He was studying in the University at Odessa. I have never loved, and shall never love, any human being as I loved him. I shall never love any human being again.”

“That is as it should be, Boris.”

“You, of course, Susan ... that is not the same thing.”

“It is the same thing. We must love not ourselves, not each other, not any one person. The mass, the toiling millions ...”

“Yes,” he sighed. “But it was not so then. When I was an ugly little Jew boy and we went bathing in the creek, ‘Stork’ they called me, ‘Aïsst,’ because of my thin nose. The Christian boys threw cow-droppings at me, and when the Jew boys saw them do it they threw twice as much. In the long hot days, when my master let me put aside my needle and thread, I would steal down to the river, hoping that none of them would notice me. But they found me out always. They used to hold my face under the water till I was more than half dead. Vladimir Stepanovitch found them at it one day. He was on his vacation. He smashed all their faces in, till their eyes were swollen and blue as beetroots.

“They did not often attack me after that—down by the river, at least. They expected he’d crash out on them any moment from among the willows. And besides, I was sly. I soon found out he had to pass by our house on the way down to his bathing. I would not go down unless he had gone before me. Then I went too. He spotted me, dumb with shyness, fifty metres behind him.

“ ‘Come!’ he’d call. ‘Come, little brother! Why do you hang back there?’

“So I came up to him, but my tongue was stuck to the back of my throat like a spar of metal, I was so shy, and I worshipped him so. For he was big and handsome and had a forehead like ... like a lump of marble. Sometimes, on a free day, I stood up against the window hour after hour, waiting for him to go by, and he would not. I could not eat or drink. My eyes would not shut all night long.

“Sometimes he came. We went down to the river and bathed, and lay in the sun, drying ourselves on a small tongue of sand. A whole summer passed by, and he said not a word of the things which possessed his whole mind. You had to walk warily in those days. You had to guard your tongue even in the presence of an ugly small Jew boy who adored you. Then, in the second summer, slowly he began to let me look into his heart. He spoke to me of the poor folk, peasants on the land, workers in the factories, of their bodies cast aside like offal when the blood had been drained out of them. He spoke to me of rich folk, factory-owners swilling their soup out of golden soup-plates, fat priests rolling with their women on beds of swansdown. He talked to me of the coming Revolution. He made me ... he made me what I am.

“When he finished his studies, he went into practice at Kiev. I was fifteen then, and I ran away from Tanyev. I knew I could be of help to him up there. I got work easily enough at my trade. But it was not only with scissors I worked, sitting cross-legged on the floor. I was small and could slip about easily, without attracting much notice. I ran errands with documents, leaflets, summonses to meetings. I hid them among the folds of cloth I carried from the store or in the pockets of new suits to be delivered to customers. I helped Vladimir set up a secret press in a stable in the Podolskaya, down in the Jew slums by the river. We carried most of the type single-handed. I knew it could not last for ever. I thought, being a boy, that the Revolution might come to-morrow or the day after. If it did not—I knew that the morrow or the day after they would get us. That did not disturb me. I had a fancy in my mind of Vladimir and myself—no one else at all—standing up against a wall, in the open air, with the first wind of dawn blowing on our foreheads. It blew cool on our chests, too. Our shirts were opened. They offered us handkerchiefs to bind our eyes, but we refused. In one and the same moment ... in one and the same moment ...”

He stopped. His throat seemed blocked. Words could not force their way through to his lips. She said not a word.

“Ah!” he cried, and sprang to his feet. “The bullets! Hot and sweet and friendly! In one and the same moment they hit his heart and mine. His blood and mine mingled in one pool on the grey asphalt of the yard! The red flower of the Revolution springing from the rich ooze!”

He stood there, his hands raised before him, his eyes shining, as if he were still a small boy, and still, the next day or the day after, the Fates might yield him his lovely death, him and his friend. Then the light went out of him. His hands fell limply. “No!” he muttered. She could hardly hear what he said. “It was not to be like that!” He sank down into the chair again, and took up his tale listlessly.

“Some months later I saw that man!” She started forward. She was almost shocked by the casual way in which at length the tale twisted round to confront the man from whom it had set forth on this journey into long ago and far away.

“Or did I see him?” Bitterly he struck the palm of his right hand with his left fist again and again. “Did I see him?”

This time she was shocked indeed. “What?” she cried. “You don’t even know that you saw him? And yet you——”

“Oh!” he shouted, he almost screamed, at her. “Don’t you see? Did you see that face? It is no face at all! It goes into nothing at the edges, like a shadow! Of course I saw him! I saw him twice, I tell you! The first time was the last meeting but one we held in the Slobodka pine-wood. He was there amongst us, the revolutionaries. Vladimir pointed him out to me. Vladimir had eyes as keen as blades. ‘Who brought him?’ he whispered. ‘How did he get here? Do you know who brought him?’ I looked, and looked again, and then I saw. A pale face like—like a peeled bulb in a cellar. A body like a mist. It was the man I saw in the kitchen just now. I saw him eight years ago, in the pine-wood. I went forward to find out how he came, did he know the password. He was not there.

“We met again in the wood a fortnight later. How shall I tell you? I was uneasy. There was a smell about. I sniffed it in the air. I spoke to Vladimir, but he laughed at me. His eyes were keener than mine, but I could smell, with my long thin nose, like a dog. The meeting went on. There was much to discuss. Then I saw him; floating, he seemed, between the tree-trunks.

“ ‘There he is! There!’ I said.

“ ‘You are dreaming, boy!’ said Vladimir.

“But I was not dreaming. The police were all about us in two minutes more. They chained us man to man and took us away. I’ll not tell you of the prison. I have spoken of it already. But this I did not tell you—of Vladimir two cells away from me, at the end of the corridor. Of the rope swishing through the air on Vladimir’s naked body. I heard and felt the strokes as if it were my own body they were beating. They wanted to get names from him, where the press was, where he had got the type for it, the names of our people in other towns—Moscow, Odessa. They did not bring a word to his lips. Oh, it was dreadful; it was dreadful, I tell you! Should I speak? Perhaps, if I spoke, it would stay their hands. But I knew he relied on me to keep my tongue. They stopped beating him at length. No, he had not spoken. A prison fever got hold of him. He died there, in the dirt and the darkness. They carted him away on a wheelbarrow, like a load of muck....

“It was that man who broke his body with a rope’s end, that man who killed him—that man in the pine-wood. That man. To-night I smelled the dirt in the air again. To-night! Here! In your house! I tell you ... I tell you ...”

The words petered out on his lips. He suddenly fell sideways, rigidly. She was too late to prevent his head striking the floor. She ran swiftly to the door and called, “May! Come at once!” May came. “Run for a doctor!” she bade.

But he had come to before the doctor appeared. He was intensely ashamed of himself. “Let me go!” he said. “Let me go!” Susan tried to hold him back, but he would not have it. “I’ll come with you!” she said. “I say no! I say no!” he insisted shrilly.

“Good night, Susan!” he said. “Tell your father ... tell him I’m a fool. I’m sorry! Good night!”

“Good night!”

He was summoned to do some work on the German-Russian frontier some days later, and did not return to Doomington for several months.