Red Stefan (10 page)

Stephen's carving was now quite a recognizable bear. He looked up from putting in the eye to say,

“What story is that, little grandmother?”

“One you won't hear to-night,” said Akulina.

She withdrew the cakes from the oven, set them on the table, and poked up Yuri, who had fallen into a doze.

Elizabeth ate her cake and wondered what it was made of. Rye, grit, chaff were all possible ingredients. But it was crisp and hot. Very dry, though. It was like an echo to her thoughts when Stephen said,

“Come, little grandmother, give us some cheese. This is too dry alone.”

“Cheese!” said Akulina in a scandalized tone. “Are we to eat roubles? Or do you wish it to be talked of in the village, so that people may say we are kulaks and throw us out to starve? Cheese indeed!”

“Oh, I'm Red enough to be able to eat a bit of cheese without getting into trouble,” said Stephen, laughing. “Besides, who's to know?”

Akulina tossed her head. Her black eyes snapped.

“That you may well ask! There is an eye at every chink and an ear at every crack in these bad days. Who was there to say that Nikita had grain hidden under the floor of his barn? Did I know it, or any honest person in the village? Yet someone tells
Them
. Nikita is turned out and his house pulled down—yes, the very timbers are taken, and he and his wife and their four children are driven away, God knows where. Without a doubt they have all perished. What hearts of stone
They
must have to do such things! There was that poor Anna with a baby at her breast and another that could only just walk, and two older children, and all of them screaming and wailing and begging for mercy. Your fine friend Irina went by and heard them. For once she was silent and had nothing to say. We were all there, weeping with Anna and trying to console her—but what can you say to one who is being driven out to perish with her children? All at once Anna screamed out, ‘It is you who have brought this on us!' and she pointed with her finger at Irina. ‘Why do you come here to destroy us? One day you will be punished for this—yes, one day you too will be unhappy!'”

“Was it Irina who told?” asked Elizabeth in a tone of horror.

“How should I know?” said Akulina crossly. “Someone told, and therefore six persons must perish. Even the worst of the old landlords didn't do such a thing as that. And it was his own grain, that he had sweated for, ploughing, sowing, reaping, storing. And for what? That he and his family might perish! Why should we grow grain any more or make a little cheese? Perhaps it will be our turn next. Perhaps you yourself, who are so Red, will go to
Them
and say, ‘Yuri and Akulina have cheeses stored in the thatch of their house.'”

Stephen burst out laughing.

“Let us at least eat one of the cheeses now before all these things happen,” he said.

Akulina went away grumbling, but she brought out a cheese, and a bottle of the forbidden home-brew.

“Since you have had a wedding without a feast, you may have a feast without a wedding,” she said.

Yuri drank most of the liquor, which had a strong and horrible smell. When he had emptied two bottles of it, he told them the whole story of how the village President had cheated him thirty years before. It was over a black and white cow, and he had never got his own back. He went on telling the story until he fell asleep.

When she had cleared away, Akulina filled the lamp in front of the ikon and lighted it. “After such talk of witches and were-mice, I'll run no risks for this night,” she said. She crossed herself and genuflected before the ikon.

When the other lamp was extinguished and all in the house was dark, the red light burned with a steady glow. Elizabeth found it comforting. She watched it until she fell asleep.

CHAPTER IX

She awoke with a start. For a moment she was back in the room which she had had to share with Petroff's mother, rousing, as she had been roused a dozen times in every night, to go here, to go there, to fetch this or that, to trim a lamp or light a fire, to prepare food, and all the time to be called every foul name. Then she was on her straw bed in Yuri's house, very warm and safe, with the red lamp shining before the ikon in the corner and Stephen saying her name:

“Elizabeth—are you awake?”

At first she could not tell where she was. There was a faint crimson twilight round the lamp, but the rest of the room was quite dark. Then he spoke again, and she heard him move. He was quite close to her. He said,

“Are you awake?” and after a pause he repeated her name—“Elizabeth.”

She raised herself then and asked,

“What is it?”

“May I talk to you?” said Stephen. His voice sounded very near indeed, but she couldn't see him. “It's a most awful shame to wake you up, but it's so much the safest time to talk. It would take a bomb going off right under them to wake either Yuri or Akulina. Do you mind terribly?”

Elizabeth said, “No.”

It gave her the pleasantest sense of intimacy to be talking with Stephen like this in the night. She tried to remember her pride and anger of the night before, but sleep had flowed over it and washed it away. It is very difficult to feel proud and sleepy at the same moment. A safe, friendly feeling filled the room. The strong rhythmic snoring of Yuri and Akulina did not disturb it in the least.

“You see,” said Stephen, “I went up and had a talk with Irina, and she told me one or two rather disturbing things. She's just got back from Moscow and she's well in with the Party there. Things are going to be tightened up in the passport line. That's one reason for getting you away as soon as possible. Another is the weather. Then there's this business of Nicolas Radin's aluminium process—I wanted to ask you about that. Does Petroff definitely know you've got it by heart?”

A cold shiver went over Elizabeth. Why must they talk about Petroff? She said falteringly,

“No—I don't know—I'm not sure—he thinks—”

“That means he's not sure. And he thinks—what does he think?”

“I don't know. He thinks—I know—something—”

Stephen was silent for a minute. She thought he was sitting on a stool drawn up close to her bed. His voice came from a little above her when he spoke.

“Well, it all comes to this—how keen is he? Will he just cut his losses and get on with his job, or will he go on trying to find you?”

“If he doesn't think I'm dead, he'll try and find me.”

“What makes you think that?”

“I don't want to think it,” said Elizabeth with a flutter in her voice.

Stephen's voice came warm and kind.

“Don't be frightened. Try and tell me why. It's important.”

She drove herself to speak of what she hated to recall.

“When they shot Nicolas, they shot the other men who were in with him. He couldn't have made his experiments alone. They shot them all. Petroff wasn't there. He came next day, and he was very angry. He said they'd bungled badly. He said the process would be very valuable. You know how they think the whole world is plotting to attack them—he talked a lot about that. He said if they had these strong, light aeroplanes, they could attack first.”

“How did he know so much?”

“They had a spy among the men. The spy didn't know what the process was, but he knew what it would do.”

“So you think Petroff is really keen?”

Elizabeth said, “Yes.”

“Then we ought to get off as soon as we can—next time Yuri goes to market, I should think, if you're strong enough.”

“I'm quite well.”

“You're better. You did very well this afternoon. You acted very well. Irina didn't suspect anything.”

“Are you sure?”

Elizabeth had not been sure. It had seemed to her as if those bright dark eyes had looked her through and through.

“Oh yes, I'm sure. She thinks you're just a very low type of peasant—a barbarian.” He laughed a little. “That's what Varvara means, you know. It sounds pretty, but it means a barbarian—the same as Barbara. I don't know why I hit on it for you, for I can't get my tongue round it.”

“Can't you?”

“You know I can't. I just don't call you anything.”

“You called me Elizabeth just now,” said Elizabeth to herself.

There was a pause. Now that her eyes were more accustomed to the darkness, she could just see him as a dense shadow in the dark room. The little red light shone like a star above his shoulder. Elizabeth was glad that Akulina had lighted it to-night. She said, to break the silence,

“Akulina puts a red light under her ikon, and the Communists put a red star over Lenin's picture. It's funny—isn't it?”

Stephen looked over his shoulder and then back again.

“Akulina frightened herself with her own stories. She was like a child, afraid to go to sleep in the dark. She knows dozens of stories and she loves telling them. She likes frightening herself, I think. Do you know what you reminded me of the first time I saw you?”

This was abrupt, even for Stephen. If Elizabeth had not so very much wished to know what it was that she reminded him of, she could easily have gone on talking about Akulina. Instead there was one of those pauses. To Stephen it was not a pause at all, because his thoughts were on that first picture of Elizabeth and the inner vision it had given him. To Elizabeth it was a hush of suspense.

Stephen looked at his picture.

A cold street and a lowering sky, and a long line of people waiting for the scanty bread of the Revolution, a great many of them old, because if you had a relation past work, she had to pay her way by standing in the bread queue while the able bodied attended to their jobs. All looked hungry, cold, and pinched. Elizabeth stood far down the line. She would have a long time to wait before she got her ration. He saw her most vividly—the set of her head, the line of cheek and chin, the arch of the brow, the frozen patience in which she stood. Something kindled in him at the very first look. It was like the lamp which Akulina burned before her ikon. But it never went out.

When Stephen had finished looking at the picture in his mind, he said,

“Three or four years ago I was waiting at the edge of a lake. I had to meet a man, and he was late. It was very cold. There was a lot of cloud in the sky, and a wind, and it had begun to freeze hard. I was looking at the water, and all of a sudden I saw a star in it. The wind had moved the clouds and the star came through—I could see it in the water. It wasn't bright like a star ought to be on a frosty night. It looked as if it were drowned. That's the word that came into my head about it, you know—drowned. Just for a moment I couldn't think why it looked like that. And then, of course, I realized that it was because the lake was skinning over. The star was drowned under the ice. When I saw you the first time, you were standing in a bread queue in that beastly thin dress of yours with the wind cutting like a knife. As soon as I saw you, I thought about that drowned star, because that's what you looked like—as if the ice were freezing over you.”

Elizabeth felt most oddly touched and embarrassed. There was not the slightest emotion in Stephen's voice. It was exactly the same voice in which he would have made a remark about the weather. It did not change in the least when he said without any pause,

“You're sure you'll be strong enough to travel in a day or two? I don't want you to be ill again.”

“I shan't be ill again. I feel—different.”

She had been starving for more than bread. Stephen had fed her—comforted, protected, shielded her—given her kindness. What sort of ungrateful stone had she got for a heart, to be proud and angry because he had another friend? Perhaps he had been friends with Irina for years. And why not? The heart which she accused did not really feel at all like a stone. There was a new warmth about it. It shrank and trembled in a most unstonelike way.

“It's a funny thing about revolutions,” said Stephen cheerfully—“they always seem to lead to bread queues. They had them in the French Revolution, you know. The Soviets have a lot in common with the French Revolution people—bread queues, and a currency that's so depreciated that outsiders won't look at it, and laws to prevent people getting out of the earthly paradise they've made. They had paper francs in Paris—
assignats
they called them—and if you emigrated, or tried to emigrate, you went to the guillotine. Here they walk you down into a cellar and shoot the back of your head off. I like non-revolutionary countries best. It'll be jolly to get out of this—won't it?”

Elizabeth did not answer for a moment. Then she said in a voice he could hardly hear,

“Shall we—get—out?”

“Of course we shall. What do you think?”

“You're sure?”

“Of course I'm sure.” He felt for her shoulder in the dark and patted it. “Go to sleep and don't worry.”

She heard him climb back to his place again and lie down. In less than a minute his breathing told her that he was asleep.

She lay in the dark and felt safe. Presently she would sleep, but not yet. It was so long since she had felt safe like this. The image of Irina had ceased to trouble her. She drifted into a dream of flowery meadows where she walked knee-deep and listened to the singing of larks. It was a very pleasant dream.

CHAPTER X

Stephen was in the barn next day, when Irina walked in. She stood and looked about her for a moment before she spoke.

“What a waste all this sort of thing is! A barn like this half empty—these little foolish strips of cultivation, divided and redivided so that it would be impossible to use machines upon them!” She made a gesture with her hands as if she were throwing something away. “What can one do? I am so disheartened that I could cry. I felt I must talk with you or I could not have enough courage to go on.”