Christmas Holiday (23 page)

“Oh, I’m tired,” she said. “I’ve brought a few things with me. I’ll just have a wash and then we’ll go out to dinner.”

“Haven’t you dined? I have.”

“Have you?”

She seemed surprised.

“It’s past eleven.”

She laughed.

“How English you are! Must you always dine at the same hour?”

“I was hungry,” he answered rather stiffly.

It seemed to him that she really might express some regret for having kept him waiting so long. It was plain, however, that nothing was farther from her thoughts.

“Oh, well, it doesn’t matter, I don’t want any dinner. What a day I’ve had! Alexey was drunk; he had a row with Paul this morning, because he didn’t come home last night, and Paul knocked him down. Evgenia was crying, and she kept on saying: ‘God has punished us for our sins. I have lived to see my son strike his father. What is going to happen to us all?’ Alexey was crying too. ‘It is the end of everything,’ he said. ‘Children no longer respect their parents. Oh, Russia, Russia!’ ”

Charley felt inclined to giggle, but he saw that Lydia was taking the scene in all seriousness.

“And did you cry too?”

“Naturally,” she answered, with a certain coldness.

She had changed her dress and now wore one of black silk. It was plain enough but well cut. It suited her. It made her clear skin more delicate and deepened the colour of her blue eyes. She wore a black hat, rather
saucy in shape, with a feather in it, and much more becoming than the old black felt. The smarter clothes had had an effect on her; she wore them more elegantly and carried herself with a graceful assurance. She no longer looked like a shop-girl, but like a young woman of some distinction, and prettier than Charley had ever seen her, but she gave you less than ever the impression that there was anything doing, as the phrase goes; if she had given before the effect of a respectable workgirl who knew how to take care of herself, she gave now that of a modish young woman perfectly capable of putting a too enterprising young man in his place.

“You’ve got a different frock on,” said Charley, who was already beginning to get over his ill humour.

“Yes, it’s the only nice one I’ve got. I thought it was too humiliating for you to have to be seen with such a little drab as I was looking. After all, the least a handsome young man in beautiful clothes can ask is that when he goes into a restaurant with a woman people shouldn’t say: how can he go about with a slut who looks as though she were wearing the cast-off clothes of a maid of all work? I must at least try to be a credit to you.”

Charley laughed. There was really something rather likeable about her.

“Well, we’d better go out and get you something to eat. I’ll sit with you. If I know anything about your appetite you could eat a horse.”

They started off in high spirits. He drank a whiskey and soda and smoked his pipe while Lydia ate a dozen
oysters, a beefsteak and some fried potatoes. She told him at greater length of her visit to her Russian friends. She was greatly concerned at their situation. There was no money except the little the children earned. One of these days Paul would get sick of doing his share and would disappear into that equivocal night life of Paris, to end up, if he was lucky, when he had lost his youth and looks, as a waiter in a disreputable hotel. Alexey was growing more and more of a soak and even if by chance he got a job would never be able to hold it. Evgenia had no longer the courage to withstand the difficulties that beset her; she had lost heart. There was no hope for any of them.

“You see, it’s twenty years since they left Russia. For a long time they thought there’d be a change there and they’d go back, but now they know there’s no chance. It’s been hard on people like that, the revolution; they’ve got nothing to do now, they and all their generation, but to die.”

But it occurred to Lydia that Charley could not be much interested in people whom he had not even seen. She could not know that while she was talking to him about her friends he was telling himself uneasily that, if he guessed aright what was in Simon’s mind, it was just such a fate that he was preparing for him, for his father, mother and sister, and for their friends. Lydia changed the subject.

“And what have you been doing with yourself this afternoon? Did you go and see any pictures?”

“No. I went to see Simon.”

Lydia was looking at him with an expression of indulgent interest, but when he answered her question, she frowned.

“I don’t like your friend Simon,” she said. “What is it that you see in him?”

“I’ve known him since I was a kid. We were at school together and at Cambridge. He’s been my friend always. Why don’t you like him?”

“He’s cold, calculating and inhuman.”

“I think you’re wrong there. No one knows better than I do that he’s capable of great affection. He’s a lonely creature. I think he hankers for a love that he can never arouse.”

Lydia’s eyes shone with mockery, but, as ever, there was in it a rueful note.

“You’re very sentimental. How can anyone expect to arouse love who isn’t prepared to give himself? In spite of all the years you’ve known him I wonder if you know him as well as I do. He comes a lot to the Sérail; he doesn’t often go up with a girl and then not from desire, but from curiosity. Madame makes him welcome, partly because he’s a journalist and she likes to keep in with the press, and partly because he sometimes brings foreigners who drink a lot of champagne. He likes to talk to us and it never enters his head that we find him repulsive.”

“Remember that if he knew that he wouldn’t be offended. He’d only be curious to know why. He has no vanity.”

Lydia went on as though Charley had said nothing.

“He hardly looks upon us as human beings, he
despises us and yet he seeks our company. He’s at ease with us. I think he feels that our degradation is so great, he can be himself, whereas in the outside world he must always wear a mask. He’s strangely insensitive. He thinks he can permit himself anything with us and he asks us questions that put us to shame and never sees how bitterly he wounds us.”

Charley was silent. He knew well enough how Simon, with his insatiable curiosity, could cause people profound embarrassment and was only surprised and scornful when he found that they resented his inquiries. He was willing enough to display the nakedness of his soul and it never occurred to him that the reserves of others could be due, not to stupidity as he thought, but to modesty. Lydia continued:

“Yet he’s capable of doing things that you’d never expect of him. One of our girls was suddenly taken ill. The doctor said she must be operated on at once, and Simon took her to a nursing home himself so that she shouldn’t have to go to the hospital, and paid for the operation; and when she got better he paid her expenses to go away to a convalescent home. And he’d never even slept with her.”

“I’m not surprised. He attaches no importance to money. Anyhow it shows you that he’s capable of a disinterested action.”

“Or do you think he wanted to examine in himself what the emotion of goodness exactly was?”

Charley laughed.

“It’s obvious that you haven’t got much use for poor Simon.”

“He’s talked to me a great deal. He wanted to find out all I could tell him about the Russian Revolution, and he wanted me to take him to see Alexey and Evgenia so that he could ask them. You know he reported Robert’s trial. He tried to make me tell him all sorts of things that he wanted to know. He went to bed with me because he thought he could get me to tell him more. He wrote an article about it. All that pain, all that horror and disgrace, were no more to him than an occasion to string clever, flippant words together; and he gave it me to read to see how I would take it. I shall never forgive him that. Never.”

Charley sighed. He knew that Simon, with his amazing insensitiveness to other people’s feelings, had shown her that cruel essay with no intention of hurting, but from a perfectly honest desire to see how she reacted to it and to discover how far her intimate knowledge would confirm his fanciful theory.

“He’s a strange creature,” said Charley. “I daresay he has a lot of traits which one would rather he hadn’t, but he has great qualities. There’s one thing at all events that you can say about him: if he doesn’t spare others, he doesn’t spare himself. After not seeing him for two years, and he’s changed a lot in that time, I can’t help finding his personality rather impressive.”

“Frightening, I should have said.”

Charley moved uneasily on his plush seat, for that also, somewhat to his dismay, was what he had found it.

“He lives an extraordinary life, you know. He works sixteen hours a day. The squalor and discomfort of his
surroundings are indescribable. He’s trained himself to cat only one meal a day.”

“What is the object of that?”

“He wants to strengthen and deepen his character. He wants to make himself independent of circumstances. He wants to prepare himself for the role he expects one day to be called upon to play.”

“And has he told you what that role is?”

“Not precisely.”

“Have you ever heard of Dzerjinsky?”

“No.”

“Simon has talked to me about him a great deal. Alexey was a lawyer in the old days, a clever one with liberal principles, and he defended Dzerjinsky at one of his trials. That didn’t prevent Dzerjinsky from having Alexey arrested as a counter-revolutionary and sending him for three years to Alexandrovsk. That was one of the reasons why Simon wanted me so much to take him to see Alexey. And when I wouldn’t, because I couldn’t bear that he should see to what depths that poor, broken-down man had sunk, he charged me with questions to put to him.”

“But who was Dzerjinsky?” asked Charley.

“He was the head of the Cheka. He was the real master of Russia. He had an unlimited power over the life and death of the whole population. He was monstrously cruel; he imprisoned, tortured and killed thousands upon thousands of people. At first I thought it strange that Simon should be so interested in that abominable man, he seemed to be fascinated by him, and then I guessed the reason. That is the role he
means to play when the revolution he’s working for takes place. He knows that the man who is master of the police is master of the country.”

Charley’s eyes twinkled.

“You make my flesh creep, dear. But you know, England isn’t like Russia; I think Simon will have to wait a hell of a long time before he’s dictator of England.”

But this was a matter upon which Lydia could brook no flippancy. She gave him a dark look.

“He’s prepared to wait. Didn’t Lenin wait? Do you still think the English are made of different clay from other men? Do you think the proletariat, which is growing increasingly conscious of its power, is going to leave the class you belong to indefinitely in possession of its privileges? Do you think that a war, whether it results in your defeat or your victory, is going to result in anything but a great social upheaval?”

Charley was not interested in politics. Though, like his father, of liberal views, with mildly socialistic tendencies so long as they were not carried beyond the limits of prudence, by which, though he didn’t know it, he meant so long as they didn’t interfere with his comfort and his income, he was quite prepared to leave the affairs of the country to those whose business it was to deal with them; but he could not let these provocative questions of Lydia’s go without an answer.

“You talk as though we did nothing for the working classes. You don’t seem to know that in the last fifty years their condition has changed out of all recognition. They work fewer hours than they did and get higher
wages for what they do. They have better houses to live in. Why, on our own estate we’re doing away with slums as quickly as it’s economically possible. We’ve given them old age pensions and we provide them with enough to live on when they’re out of work. They get free schooling, free hospitals, and now we’re beginning to give them holidays with pay. I really don’t think the British working man has much to complain of.”

“You must remember that the views of a benefactor and the views of a beneficiary on the value of a benefaction are apt to differ. Do you really expect the working man to be grateful to you for the advantages he’s extracted from you at the point of a pistol? Do you think he doesn’t know that he owes the favours you’ve conferred on him to your fear rather than to your generosity?”

Charley was not going to let himself be drawn into a political discussion if he could help it, but there was one more thing he couldn’t refrain from saying.

“I shouldn’t have thought that the condition in which you and your Russian friends now find yourselves would lead you to believe that mob-rule was a great success.”

“That is the bitterest part of our tragedy. However much we may deny it, we know in our hearts that whatever has happened to us, we’ve deserved it.”

Lydia said this with a tragic intensity that somewhat disconcerted Charley. She was a difficult woman; she could take nothing lightly. She was the sort of woman who couldn’t even ask you to pass the salt without giving you the impression that it was no laughing matter. Charley sighed; he supposed he must make allowances,
for she had had a rotten deal, poor thing; but was the future really so black?

“Tell me about Dzerjinsky,” he said, stumbling a little over the pronunciation of the difficult name.

“I can only tell you what Alexey has told me. He says the most remarkable thing about him was the power of his eyes; he had a curious gift, he was able to fix them upon you for an immensely long time, and the glassy stare of them, with their dilated pupils, was simply terrifying. He was extremely thin, he’d contracted tuberculosis in prison, and he was tall; not bad-looking, with good features. He was absolutely single-minded, that was the secret of his power, he had a cold, arid temperament; I don’t suppose he’d ever given himself up with a whole heart to a moment’s pleasure. The only thing he cared about was his work; he worked day and night. At the height of his career he lived in one small room with nothing in it but a desk and an old screen, and behind the screen a narrow iron bed. They say that in the year of famine, when they brought him decent food instead of horseflesh, he sent it away, demanding the same rations as were given to the other workers in the Cheka. He lived for the Cheka and nothing else. There was no humanity in him, neither pity nor love, only fanaticism and hatred. He was terrible and implacable.”