Читать книгу Behind the Curtain - Philip Gibbs - Страница 5

Table of Contents

It was when they were at Kazan on the Volga, during the time of the great hunger, that the boy asked his mother, by ceaseless questioning, about her English life and relations. It opened up a new realm of imagination, just like a fairy-tale in real life, or like the bits in David Copperfield and Nicholas Nickleby which she read out to him, or which at eight years old he could read himself.

“Tell me about when you were a little girl, Mother. It must have been a long time ago.”

She laughed at this small fair-haired son, so English-looking, who thought she must be very, very old. Sometimes she felt very, very old in this Russia after revolution and civil war, but she was not more than thirty then, and sometimes when she caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror she thought she did not look as old as that, in spite of living for several years with fear as her bed-fellow.

“I lived in a place near London called Clapham. It has a good common—a big open field with nice houses round it. I used to play on the common with my brothers and sisters. There was a pond at one end of it, and in the winter it used to get frozen over and we went skating and sliding. But once, when the ice was melting, I went through, and was wet to the skin in ice-cold water. I screamed like Billy o, and my brother Dick—the eldest, you know—rushed and dragged me out. He thought it a great joke, but I might have caught my death of cold.”

“I don’t see why he should have laughed at you,” said the boy. “That was cruel of him.”

“Oh no, he couldn’t be cruel. He was the dearest and kindest boy. I told you that he was killed in the war, on the Somme. I wept my heart out for him.”

There were tears in her eyes now when she thought of that dead brother.

“I suppose I shall be killed in another war,” said the boy carelessly. “When boys grow up they have to be killed, fighting for their country. Or else they get killed in a civil war.”

“Don’t talk such nonsense!” cried his mother. “Oh, David my dear, what terrible things you say sometimes!”

“It’s what happens, isn’t it? But go on telling me about when you were a little girl, Mother.”

She told him about her own father and mother. Her father was a clergyman and rather strict. They weren’t allowed to play games on Sunday except on the sly. They had to go to church twice on that day, and when she was a little girl she used to fall asleep during his sermon with her head on one of her brother’s shoulders.

“Your father must have been a very stupid and unpleasant man,” said Vladimir after some further stories about his English grandfather’s strictness. “He reminds me of Mr. Murdstone in David Copperfield.”

“Oh, not such an old brute as that!” cried his mother, laughing. “He was narrow-minded, but not cruel. Even my mother was a little afraid of him, poor dear. She was a saint, and I can’t think how she brought us all up. She was always sewing and mending because we didn’t have much money. But she played the piano and sang like an angel.”

“Not as well as you do, I bet!” said Vladimir loyally. “But tell me about Uncle George. I like to hear about him. He is very amusing.”

“Yes,” said his mother with a laugh. “He could imitate almost any bird or animal and he made funny faces which kept one laughing. When he did his codfish face I used to scream with laughter. He was wonderful at a children’s party, and could do all sorts of conjuring tricks. One day he went to a children’s party and told the maid not to announce him before opening the door to the room where the guests were assembled. Then he did a catherine-wheel into the room. But unfortunately he had gone to the wrong house and inside the room was a party of old ladies and gentlemen listening to an address by a Bishop. It must have been funny!”

Vladimir laughed very much at this story of Uncle George who was a lawyer and a Conservative member of Parliament so his mother had told him, though he could not understand what those words meant, except something very important in England.

“England must be a very funny country,” remarked the small boy. “It must be full of funny people. It can’t be a bit like Russia. Sometimes I wonder if it’s one of your fairy-tales, Mother. Like Cinderella and Puss in Boots. Word of honour, is it all true?”

“Word of honour!” said his mother, laughing at him.

“Do you mean to say there is never any famine in England?”

“Good gracious, no! Everybody has enough to eat. Even the poorest of the poor. No one is allowed to die of starvation.”

“Don’t people get shot if they say things against the Government?”

“They can say what they like against the Government, David. In Parliament there are two parties. One is the Government and the other criticizes the Government. They’re called His Majesty’s Opposition. It’s their duty to criticize.”

“I can’t understand that,” said Vladimir who tried to understand. “But it’s not very interesting. Tell me about the waxworks at Madame Tussaud’s, and the toys in Gamages, and the motor-cars in Piccadilly. But don’t tell me any lies, Mummy. I mean, do keep it away from fairy-tales.”

He had found out some time before then that his mother had come to Russia as a governess like Miss Smith. She had just turned twenty, and had suddenly been seized by a desire to escape like a bird from a narrow cage. Her father still treated her as a child. He ordered her about and expected her to obey. He was grumpy if she went out to dances like other girls, and one night there had been a family row when she arrived home at two in the morning with her brother Richard. They had been to a theatre and a night club with some young friends, and Richard had drunk too much and clung to her arm, laughing in a silly way because his legs did the wrong things when he walked. They had to get in through a window which unfortunately was their father’s study, and Richard overturned a table with an inkpot on it, spilling the ink on the carpet. It went down with an awful crash.

“Oh, my goodness!” cried Lucy—that was the name of Vladimir’s mother. “What shall we do about that, Dick?”

“That’s perfectly all right,” said Dick. “Everything is perfectly all right. We had a wonderful time. I feel very jolly with myself.”

He sat down heavily in one of his father’s arm-chairs, stretched out his legs and laughed. But the laugh left his face, and he didn’t feel so jolly when the door opened and his father came into the room. He was wearing a dressing-gown over his pyjamas, and had forgotten to put in his false teeth, so that he spoke in a funny way.

But he didn’t say funny things. He was a Man of Wrath.

Lucy could never decide whether the ink on the carpet or Richard’s state of intoxication made him more wrathful, but he said very harsh things.

“Oh, he was very waxy, David!”

“Tell me everything he said, Mummy,” implored young Vladimir, listening to this story with excitement.

“He threatened to turn us both out of the house. He said we had behaved disgracefully. As a clergyman of the Church of England he was deeply shocked by this abominable conduct of his own son and daughter. Richard began to argue with him, and that made matters worse because he could not pronounce his words properly.”

“Why not?” asked Vladimir.

“When a man drinks too much wine,” said Lucy, “he finds it hard to pronounce difficult words. He makes them sound all silly.”

“Oh!” said Vladimir. “It’s the first time I’ve heard of that. But go on, Mother. Don’t stop.”

“ ‘You’re drunk Richard,’ said Father. ‘You’re in a disgusting condition.’ ‘Sir,’ said Richard, ‘I feel very jolly and I don’t care a damn.’ That’s a dreadful word to use before a clergyman, David!”

“What happened then?”

“Then I became angry and told Father we were sick of being treated like babies. We were old enough to have a little liberty. That put all the fat in the fire, my little one.”

“How do you mean, Mother? Is that a proverb, or did someone really throw fat on the fire?”

“It means that Father became furious. ‘If you want liberty,’ he cried, ‘leave my house and do not expect me to keep you in idleness and luxury.’ That put the lid on.”

“What lid? Put it on what?”

“I mean it made my blood boil. I said, ‘I’ll keep myself, thank you, Father.’ And I meant it, though I was sorry for mother. I searched the newspaper advertisements in the Public Library. I found one advertising for a governess to go to Russia with a German Baron and his wife and two little girls. I answered the advertisement, and the German Baroness asked me to take charge of the two little girls. So that’s how I came to Russia as an English governess.”

“Not like Miss Smith,” said Vladimir called David. “You were too pretty to be a governess, Mother.”

She smiled at that compliment and put her fingers through his fair hair—her long thin fingers.

“I thought I was going for a year. But the war came in 1914, and my German Baron and Baroness fled with their children, leaving me behind.”

“Then you married Papa.”

“Yes, then I married Papa. He was fighting on the same side as England under the Czar. His mother was very kind to me when the Baron and Baroness left me behind. Your father thought I was pretty.”

“Now he’s a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Red Army,” said Vladimir with pride.

“Yes,” said his mother. “Now he’s a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Red Army, I never thought that would happen.”

“It’s a very great honour,” said Vladimir. “It’s higher than a Lieutenant or a Captain. It’s higher even than a Major. The next step is to be a General. Because my father is a Lieutenant-Colonel we get more food, Mother, when others are hungry. That’s excellent! But I’m sorry that you don’t love Papa because he’s a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Red Army.”

He saw the look of fear creep into his mother’s eyes—that look that he knew so well even as a boy of seven or eight.

“I’ve been talking too much,” she said in a low voice. “I tell you too much about England, David. If you tell anyone else——”

“Don’t be afraid, little mother,” he told her. “I won’t let anybody kill you. The Cheka will never get me to tell them the secret talks we have. Honour bright!”

She repeated his words “the Cheka” in a whisper, and put her hand up to her throat. Her face had gone dead white.

“David!” she said in that whispering voice. “Don’t speak that word. Oh, what a fool I am to talk like this before a child! But I can’t help it. You are half English, David, and I’m your English mother, and all my English life is in my heart.”

“I won’t tell, Mother,” he said sturdily.

But perhaps that was the beginning of a conflict within himself, a conflict of divided loyalties. He was half English, but also half Russian, and Russia was his fatherland. He was proud of being the son of a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Soviet Army.