The Goose Girl and Other Stories (44 page)

The three prisoners stood sullen and silent, hearing unmoved the evidence which, repeated later in the proper court, would certainly hang them. They made no answer, at first, when the coroner asked them if they had anything to say. He repeated the question somewhat testily.

Daud Khan fidgeted with his manacled hands, pulling at his richly embroidered waistcoat, and said nothing. But Mahomed Khan, clearing his throat, said in a hard voice, ‘He who begs from men their wealth in order to increase his own, asks only for live coals.'

There was a burst of laughter and a little noise of applause in court as the words of the Prophet were heard and their dubious application to Sikander Shah immediately recognised. Daud Khan said boldly, ‘Prison walls have holes,' and again there was laughter. The coroner commanded silence, and looked at Shamsi Mia Syed.

‘For the third time,' he said, ‘I ask you if you have anything to say?'

Cheered by laughter and their friends' applause, the Pathans were swaggering now. They stood jaunty and defiant, reckless of what would happen. Shamsi Mia Syed dipped his hands into a pocket and pulled out half a dozen walnuts. He threw up his head and
cried loudly, ‘All I ask is this, that I get leave to live till I have eaten these walnuts.'

‘You will probably have time for that,' said the coroner drily.

‘God is merciful,' said Shamsi Mia Syed, and with a quick movement tossed the nuts far and wide into the crowded court.

The New Moscow Repertory Company that came to London in June, 1914, was doubly unfortunate. Its endeavour to entertain the English with the work of dramatists so little known as Brusov, Blok, Gorky, and Sologub would have been courageous at any season, and in summer it was simply foolish-forlorn heroism. But as though holidays and hot weather were not enough to kill the venture, on August 4th Great Britain went to war, and in the enthralling days that followed even the scanty audiences who had previously found pleasure in watching the Moscow players were no longer attracted by the work of Gorky, Sologub, Brusov, and Blok; and after presenting
The Poor House
to an audience of twenty-six people and the programme-girls, the theatre closed its doors with a shudder and with relief.

On the following morning, a little after daybreak—for none had slept that night—the whole company, with the exception of Irina Markovna Olenina, their leading lady, went clamorous or tearful or jubilant to the Russian Embassy to demand the means of instant repatriation. When all the nations were at war they could find no peace in a foreign land—so it seemed, to simple minds, in the richness of their first excitement—but whether for good or ill they must stand on their own soil and feel about them the comfort of their own people. And presently they had their wish, and returned, by devious routes and ever-hesitant trains, to their native country, where most of them lived long enough to learn that the nearness of their own people was not always comforting.

But Olenina stayed in London till the first Christmas of the War.

It was her genius and her reputation that had kept their repertoire alive for six weeks. She was a remarkable actress and a woman of exceptional beauty. At the age of thirty or thirty-one she had nearly twenty-five years' experience of the stage, for she had made her début at the age of six, playing Cosette in a German version of
Les Misérables
at a small theatre in Vienna. She called herself a Russian, and certainly that was the nationality of her mother—a cabaret-singer for some part of her life—but that her father had also been Russian was not so well established.

Olenina had made herself reasonably at home in several countries. As well as on the Russian stage she had acted in France, Germany, Austria, and even, despite the conservatism of its theatre, in Italy. Nor was her experience confined to dramatic art, for as she said herself, in her more ingenuous moments, ‘I am a great actress, but as a lover I am greater still.' It was her second husband, an Italian journalist who had seen her playing Camille in Vienna, and hailed her enthusiastically as
trovata di rose,
who had brought her to Milan and arranged her brief and solitary season there. It was not a success, and she left him within six months. ‘Il était beau mais il était bête,' she said. Her experiences in love were seldom happy, for she never learnt by experience, but embarked on each new adventure with the passionate conviction that she had found contentment at last. It was said of her, indeed, that though she did not always go to church before going to bed, she never went to bed without meaning to go to church as well.

In London she had fallen violently in love with an officer in the Brigade of Guards, a Major Paignton-Boys, whose duty, for the moment, was not with his regiment but with the War Office. He combined ambition in his profession with a reputation for gay living, he was well-off and extremely handsome. He estalished Olenina in a flat in Upper Berkeley Street, and it was at his insistence as much as by her own uneasy inclination that she remained in England after the rest of her company had returned to Russia.

She was not happy for long. Her lover was absorbed in his duties at the War Office, but though the War interested Olenina also—to the exclusion of nearly everything else—he refused, blandly but resolutely, to discuss its progress with her. Because Russia was fighting on England's side she was fanatically pro-English, and praised the valour of England, its nobility of spirit and devotion to high ideals, with every extravagance of language and the whole range of her deep golden voice. But Major Paignton-Boys would not, overtly at least, share her enthusiasm. With boredom in his voice he said that the Allies were sure to win, and that there was nothing to fear from the strategy of the German High Command. ‘We'll give them enough rope and they'll hang themselves,' he declared, and bade Olenina talk of something else.

This lack of
brio
on the part of one whose whole duty was the prosecution of the war—even though his duties were not in the field—depressed and puzzled Olenina, and her feelings were seriously hurt when he insisted on removing a large Union Jack that she had nailed to the outer ledge of her drawing-room window. His displeasure, and
her disappointment, were even greater when one evening he went to her bedroom and discovered, beneath the ikon above her bed, an ingenious trophy made of the Allied flags and a photograph of Lord Kitchener.

He tore down the coloured silk and the well-moustached portrait. ‘Good God!' he said. ‘You can't do this sort of thing. You're not a shop-girl and I'm not a bank clerk. Try, for heaven's sake, to be reasonable and decent in your emotions.'

‘But we are at war!' she cried.

‘That is no excuse,' he said stiffly, ‘for not behaving in essentially the same sort of way as we have always behaved.'

‘Do your people, your English people, always crowd in the streets and cheer when soldiers go by?' she cried again. ‘Are they always making long queues to join the Army, and singing when they go away to camp?'

‘I wasn't referring to civilians,' said Major Paignton-Boys. ‘War is a matter for the Army to deal with, and the less that civilians interfere the better it will be for everybody.'

But Olenina could not understand so stupid and cold a view, and because her lover would tell her nothing of the war she bought every day ten or a dozen newspapers, and read for hours their varying accounts of von Kluck's advance, and the advance into East Prussia, of French armies and Austrian armies, of the
Goeben
and the
Breslau,
and always, and whenever she could find them, stories of the multitudinous cohorts of the Tsar.

One afternoon Paignton-Boys came in and found her sitting on the floor, her back to the wall and a little afternoon tea-tray poised on her knees. But she was not drinking her tea; her cup was empty and unsoiled, the plates untouched; and Olenina, her face all wet and twisted, wept without thought of anything but tears and that which had prompted them to flow.

‘My dear girl,' he said, ‘what on earth is the matter?'

‘I have been reading about the Russian soldiers who are coming to fight for you in France,' she sobbed. ‘They are coming through England, and there will be a hundred thousand of them. Some came last night—my own people, my own Russian soldiers, they have been in London and I did not see them! They came down from Scotland in trains, and there will be more coming, every night, till a hundred thousand of them have come, and then the war will quickly be over, because Russia and Russian soldiers will always win!'

‘Nonsense,' said Paignton-Boys. ‘No Russian troops have passed through England, and none are going to.'

‘But it says so in the paper!' cried Olenina. ‘Look, it says so!'

‘It quotes a rumour,' said Paignton-Boys. ‘That means nothing.'

‘Ah! You never tell me anything, so how can I hope that you will tell me now about this, about my Russians who are coming to London tonight and tomorrow night? But it is true, because the paper says so, and the papers know everything, everything!'

Refusing to believe Paignton-Boys's denials of the story, Olenina went every night for a week to King's Cross or Euston to see the late trains from Scotland come in, and to watch for the passing of her beloved countrymen. She saw no Russian troops, but plenty of English and Scottish soldiers, and in the company of the crowds who always thronged the station-entrances she found no little comfort: for their emotions were nearly as quick as hers, they were excited as she was, and, as she did, they showed their feelings in loud cheering and ready reception of the wildest rumours.

One evening, at King's Cross, she fell into conversation with a lean, somewhat shabby, somewhat unshaved young man who stood beside her in the crowd. A detachment of Highland troops were marching from the station, and as the crowd surged after them a short black cape that Olenina wore was half torn from her shoulders. ‘Ah!' she cried, ‘my
talmotchka!'

The young man looked round.
‘Talmotchka!'
he said, laughing.

‘Why do you laugh?' said Olenina.

‘Your
talmotchka!'
he repeated.

‘You also are Russian?' she demanded with sudden excitement.

‘How else should I know what
talmotchka
means?' he answered in her own language.

Olenina thrust her hand under his arm. ‘Oh, come!' she cried. ‘Let us talk together, let us talk Russian. I am tired of English, it is hard and flat and heavy. You came to the station to look for our own soldiers who are going to fight on this side, on the Western Front? It is true they are coming, isn't it? Someone Dunyasha knows—Dunyasha, my maid—said her brother had seen them. Perhaps you have seen them? Have you, oh, have you?'

Still talking eagerly, scarcely giving the young man time to answer, Olenina led him into a nearby public-house, a small and dingy place, and without noticing the curious glances they attracted, ordered two bottles of beer. She talked more and more.

Such was her joy in finding a fellow-countryman, so warm a feeling was engendered by this contact with her native land—here in London, on soil that still was foreign, however friendly it protested itself—that she was ready to weep, to dissolve in tears of love and piety, to behold
in this shabby young man a personification of the spirit, the heart, and the strength of all Russia.

He was not ill-looking. He had fine brown eyes and thick dark hair. His teeth were white, his features animated. He was a waiter, he said, in the Imperial Hotel in Russell Square. His name was Glinka, and he had lived in London for eight years.

‘But now you will be going home, to join the Army, to fight in the Carpathians, with the Grand Duke in East Prussia, perhaps on the Western Front? Soon you will be a soldier, not a waiter?' said Olenina.

Glinka had no such intention. He was, on the contrary, devoutly glad to be in a comfortable place like London, safe and far from the Carpathians and the Prussian marshes, and every night he contemplated with satisfaction his flat feet and varicose veins that would always exempt him from military service. But he was a shrewd fellow, and perceiving that this beautiful and wealthy and somewhat foolish lady had given her heart to the soldiers, he quickly pretended to be as fiercely patriotic as she was.

He was going home next week, he said. There was a ship sailing from Tilbury, from Newcastle—he was a little vague about this—but there would be many Russians aboard who, like himself, wished one thing only, which was to fight for their beloved land in this great and holy war.

He, Glinka, had been the first of these volunteers to enrol his name. He had gone to the Embassy and said, ‘I want to go home, now, this week, to join the Army. I am a Russian and it is my duty to fight with my comrades in the Carpathians, in the Prussian marshes, anywhere you like to send me.'

Olenina was enraptured by this declaration. In a romantic vision she saw Glinka with his fellow-soldiers charging the enemy, head bent, bayonet out-thrust, those brown eyes shining. Through a mist she beheld him dead on the field of honour, a pledge of love, a sacrifice to Russia, and, emulous on the instant, eager to give with a generosity comparable to his, burning to offer her body freely as the soldiers offered theirs, she determined, in an ecstasy of self-sacrifice, to take him home with her—Glinka, the Russian soldier—and give him, the personification of Russia, before he died for Russia, such joy as she could.

In a voice trembling with excitement she bade Glinka wait for her. There was a telephone box in the public-house, in a sour-smelling narrow corner.

Paignton-Boys would be at his club. She asked for its number, and
waited. When she heard his voice she said, ‘Listen, Jack. I do not want you to come tonight. I have a
migraine.
I am going to bed. Yes, I am tired and not well. Perhaps it is a fever. Tomorrow, if you like, but not tonight—I am ugly tonight and very tired. Goodbye, Jack. Yes, good-bye!'