Authors: Rebecca West
“The people were not in my class and I led a solitary life….” The British Embassy in Moscow is housed in a vast palace built in the time of the Tsars by a sugar king. The ground floor is used for offices, and in the great rooms above, the Ambassador and his family live and entertain, and some senior members of his staff have their own quarters. Apartments in the city are found for some married members. All round the garden of the palace are stables, laundries, cottages, storerooms, and the like, which have been turned into comfortable accommodations for the rest of the staff; and it was here that Marshall lived. This is an unusually large Embassy; with wives, the community numbers just under a hundred. Of these only a small number were diplomats, and the rest were clerical and technical employees, stenographers, cipher clerks, radio operators, pilots, and the like. Today in Britain it is not easy to say how strong class feeling runs and what divisions it sets up for itself. But it would be safe to say that people who have been to the same sort of school feel comfortable together. The diplomats would probably have gone to public schools, and of the others, the clerical and technical employees, some from needy homes might have got there on scholarships. They would for the most part be the products of secondary schools. This means that Marshall was one of quite a large group with which he could have felt on equal terms.
Quite certainly he did not lead a solitary life. That he was not allowed to do, any more than a patient who is known to have taken an overdose of a sedative is allowed to fall asleep. He was reckoned to be in a certain danger for which company was an antidote, and so he was forced to have company, just as the drugged patient is forced to drink cup after cup of black coffee and walk up and down. The trouble about the British Embassy in Moscow is that people there are apt to feel as if they were in a mousetrap. In the garden there are tennis courts and a swimming pool is shared with the Finns, but the summers are short, and at other seasons of the year there flows into the vacuum of unusable leisure the same malaise which afflicted the Allied armies of occupation in Germany in the first years after the war. But all the constraining elements which operated in Germany pinch more tightly here; all the compensations diminish to vanishing point. There is a worse climate, no playgrounds in the forest or in the mountains, and an unlearnable language. When you cannot go home, when home is a long way off, when the times do not ask you to work hard enough to exhaust yourself, when you do not understand the people of the country and it can be seen from the way they look back at you that they do not understand you, then you may feel that you are a mouse in a trap. It is said that this claustrophobic fancy is increased in some because the British Embassy stands on a little island with a canal at its back and the river Moskva in front. In winter all this water is frozen two feet deep.
There is a risk that people who give way to this fancy of being in a mousetrap may find themselves inside a real one. Not many have turned their backs on their own people and gone over to the service of the Soviet government, but enough have done it to prove that this is something which can happen to people who are in no way exceptional, except in the degree of their temporary misery. The cause may have little enough to do with respect for the Marxist theory or Soviet administrative performance, which alone could justify such conversion. An obsessional hatred of the other members of the staff, such as sometimes inflames a sailor against his shipmates during a long voyage, may spread until it includes all the hater’s countrymen and his country itself. Or the evident mass and might of Russia, stretching away in all directions from the British pinpoint on the artificial island, may make a timid soul feel that the next war is as good as lost and he may as well go over to the victors in good time. There was a hysterical refinement in this local danger. There were a certain number of British people in Moscow who were not at the Embassy and had nothing to do with the Embassy, though some of them had once been familiars of the Embassy. Three of them lived together in an apartment; one was Ralph Parker, formerly correspondent of the London
Times,
now working for the Soviet government. These people were terrifying to contemplate for a simple and primitive reason which had nothing to do with Marxism. If you had begun to want to go home and knew you could not go home until the end of a fixed period, then the sight of these men filled you with a sense of claustrophobia; for they would never be able to go home. And there are those who, having heard of others suffering an ugly fate, even the fate which they most fear, have to contrive it for themselves. Hating heights, they hear of a man throwing himself from Beachy Head or Brooklyn Bridge, and after brooding on the news, go to that place and go again, until one day they are drawn down into the depths. A mousetrap can also exercise this perverse charm.
Great efforts are made to avert the melancholy and distress which are apt to afflict many members of the Embassy staff, if only for a few days. So there is much encouragement of sociability, which is supervised with great efficiency by a welfare officer who is by all accounts not merely genial by profession. She is remembered by many as a kind and gay person, who has a genuine preference that people should be happy. Marshall was able to go to a great number of parties and club meetings when he was in Moscow, a good many of them given in conjunction with the American Embassy; and at them he was often an object of a special solicitude. It was said quite often, “There is young Marshall, looking very miserable, we must try and get something going for him.” Nobody else evoked quite such a sense of pity. This was partly because his appearance suggested that he was in bad health. He was so tall and narrow-chested, and he was very pale, with a chalky pallor intensified by the darkness of his hair, which he wore long and sleeked close to his oval head. Actually his pallor meant nothing. It was a family characteristic, shared by his mother and his brother, who were notably robust and energetic, but any stranger must mistake it for the result of severe illness or shock. As for looking miserable, he was, and always had been, miserable. He was miserable as a child, when he was evacuated from London during the blitz; he had hated it in the country when the cold came, having known till then only the mitigated winter of the city. He had been miserable in the army, in the unmitigated summer of Egypt. He was now writing home to Wandsworth that he was miserable in Moscow.
It is now remembered that Marshall’s air of ill-being caused the British Ambassador and his wife to make inquiries about him more than once. Sir David and Lady Kelly were in all respects unlike the diplomats and their wives seen by the British public in their vision of the shaming of Marshall at the ambassadorial table. They would be unlikely to notice if Marshall or anybody else had used the wrong fork, for they were absorbed in livelier interests. Both are aristocrats who are forcing the unwilling age to give them as entertaining lives as their forebears enjoyed, through the use of their remarkable talents. Sir David’s mother was a member of the Irish branch of the great Rhineland family of Ahrenberg, as old as any in Europe, which was deprived of its estates and titles by Napoleon and then scattered over many lands; and his father was a brilliant Irish professor of classics who died young when he was teaching in an Australian university. Sir David went through St. Paul’s School and got a scholarship at Magdalen College, Oxford, and after doing well in the First World War went into the Foreign Office. There he advanced in a formidable fashion, always giving the impression that he knew what he was doing, and after he left Moscow and retired from the service wrote an autobiography which showed that that impression was correct. His wife was a Belgian aristocrat, a direct descendant of St. Jeanne de Chantal, the founder of the charitable order of the Visitation, and kin to Corneille and Madame de Sévigné; her sister is a leading ear, nose, and throat specialist in Brussels; she herself is a topographical photographer of high professional standing, and writes travel books which bring the story back complete with its tail feathers. It is significant that it was in her book on Turkey that there was first told to the general reader in England the horrifying tale of what happened to the treasures Schliemann dug out of the ruins of Troy and gave to the Berlin Museum. At the outbreak of war they were packed in crates and hidden. Some are still lost; but the pottery served the need of some German peasants in the season of privation who were finding it hard to observe a local custom of breaking cups and plates at a local wedding. Lady Kelly found this terrible postscript to the
Iliad
in an article in the
Turkish Automobile Club Bulletin.
People like this are very busy. To save themselves time they sieve reality and the petty falls through and they worry no more about it. They did in fact notice Marshall. They would be too able, too impeccable, too energetic, were it not that both their faces were clouded, not by weakness or indecision but by imagination. They turned their clouded faces on young Marshall and asked whether he were ill, whether he was usually as he looked. They were told that he seemed to be in normal health; when he was in the army he had had a bad attack of pleurisy, but it had left no aftereffects. As for being miserable, he had no real troubles, so far as could be seen, but was one of the worrying sort. Of all the Embassy employees, those who made the best adaptation to Moscow life were the retired petty officers of the army and navy and air force, who did all the stewards’ work. They were drawn to this difficult post because the special allowances were high and they wanted to provide generously for their families, and they found the exile not such an ordeal after the years they had spent at sea and in foreign stations. These men kept a kindly eye on their younger and less hardy colleagues, and one of them reported of Marshall that there was no harm in the lad at all, and his main trouble was the very reverse of a fault. He fell over backwards trying not to be a sponger. It was noticeable over his smoking. If anybody gave him a cigarette he could not rest until he had repaid the loan; and should this be impossible for any reason, had his friend suddenly gone home on leave, he would fuss and fret. He was also inordinately distressed when the authorities inadvertently overpaid him by five pounds. Well, it was to be hoped that the lad would never learn the meaning of real trouble.
The Ambassador and his wife, it is remembered, smiled and agreed. Soon afterwards Sir David’s sixtieth birthday brought him to the retiring age, and he and his wife went back to England, two or three months before Marshall was due to return. Nobody then suspected that Marshall was about to meet trouble, for he seemed too simple to invite it.
It could easily be imagined that he might be completely happy in his parents’ little house in Wandsworth. He enjoyed coming home in the evening and playing his gramophone records of light music; he had two hundred of them, very neatly kept in a cabinet, with a catalogue written out in his spidery, feminine handwriting. He also enjoyed making silk mats. At some period of his adolescence, whether at the nautical college or when he was ill in the army, he had been taught this handicraft and had practised it ever since. It is fairly simple; on a cardboard framework one makes a warp and woof of fine threads, then uses another thread and a crochet hook to form them into a network. He took out to Moscow quite an amount of material for making such mats. There is an accumulation of them in his home, all extremely fragile and made of some sort of rayon with a high iridescent sheen, in colours which would be chosen by someone who liked opals and mother of pearl. His parents have begun to be a little anxious about this hobby of their son’s, in case it should give an impression that he is effeminate, and they say he is not that at all; and indeed one does not often meet women who have a passion for making silk mats.
The hobby did not seem so strange when it was realized that his parents spent a great deal of time making things with their hands. In the little garden in front of their house they had broken up the flower beds with elaborate concrete borders which have the charm of a child’s sandcastle. They did all their house-decorating themselves. They lined their sitting room with romantic wallpaper, on which a group of forest trees are green against a mysterious blue night. The paint they applied to the woodwork is prodigally laid on, with a skilful, creamy finish. Everything is ritually clean, the paint, the brass fire irons, the linoleum, and gives back the light. On the floors are rugs they have made, deep in pile and strong, even violent in colour. They love embroidery, they prize immensely a small framed panel of Indian needlework, representing butterflies, sewn in blue silk and outlined with gold thread. There is a great deal of furniture in the house. It is a truism to say that a poor home can produce a greater effect of abundance than a rich one, but the reference is usually to spiritual wealth. Yet it is also true that there are people who have little money but attract to themselves a plenitude of material goods, by some process much more magical and effective than mere good management.
Mr. Marshall, a small, quick, talkative man of fifty or so, was a bus-driver until a V-l wrecked him and his bus in the last year of the war, and since then he has drawn a disability pension, and done odd jobs at home, though an injury to his back recently put an end to that; his wife had a part-time job taking charge of a news-agent’s shop in the afternoons. They let one of their upstairs rooms to a maiden lady. The household income could not be large, yet there was no sign of want, nor even of anxious thrift.
This was partly because of the exquisite state of repair in which every object in the house has been kept, but there is more to it than that. Mrs. Marshall was a Ceres-like figure. She was pale like her son, but she was full-bodied, and moved with a slow, matronly grace. Her hair was dark like her son’s, but it had turned white at the ends, so that the curls she wore about her temples and ears and the nape of her neck looked like a Greek headdress. She had a pleasant unhurried voice. The greengrocer would instinctively give her the largest and reddest tomatoes; and she would choose in any shop what was most luscious and durable, and if she had to save to pay for it, would do so serenely, trusting in the bounty of life. Things would come to her; and her husband would talk things towards himself.