Red Stefan (16 page)

“He carried you as easily as if you were a baby,” said Anna—“and took off your coat and cap and laid you down on the bed. There was a dark man with him—a Commissar. I have seen him before. His name is Petroff. He took hold of your wrist and felt it, and said, ‘Is she all right?' And the big man took hold of your other wrist. There they were, one on either side of you, like two dogs with a bone. Then the big man said, ‘So you don't want her to die, Comrade?' And that Petroff said, ‘Not just yet.' ‘Oh, you needn't be afraid—she won't die,' says the big man, and with that he laughs and lets go of your wrist. Is he your lover?”

“I have no lover,” said Elizabeth.

Anna bit a thumb-nail which was already down to the quick.

“Well, I wouldn't have a red-haired one—you can't trust them.”

Elizabeth sat and stared at the wall, and thought how she had trusted Stephen. She had given him her trust and her friendship. She had been ready to give him her love—if he had wanted it. She wondered whether it would hurt more to think that he had not wanted it at all, or that he had wanted it lightly for the pleasure of a passing moment. As the thought shaped itself, she knew the answer. She could bear the thought of his indifference.
She knew very well that he had not been indifferent
. The pain of her wound was the pain of knowing that he had wanted her, and, wanting her, had held her cheaply—a mere pawn, to be sacrificed without compunction the moment the game or his safety demanded the surrender of a piece. She would do him the justice to suppose that it was the game to which she had been sacrificed. She would try and believe that. Her wound would ache a little less bitterly if she could imagine some motive not altogether ignoble.

Then, sharply and suddenly, she remembered that she had given him the formula.

CHAPTER XVII

There followed a night of moments lengthening slowly into hours. The moments were so long that time had no measure left by which to mete the hours. Yet in the end a slow, cold daylight broke upon the ward. The walls changed imperceptibly from black, through all the shades of grey, to a clear, staring white.

There was water to wash in. Elizabeth washed. There was her bed to make. She made it. Then she sat down again and stared at the wall, whilst Anna told her long stories about her relations, her friends, her acquaintances, and their friends, relations, and acquaintances.

Elizabeth did not listen, but every now and then a sentence reached her mind:

“So then he took a knife and stabbed him.…

“It was a neighbour's child and it ran away into the forest.…

“After that Nadashda had three more husbands, but she wasn't happy with any of them.…”

It did not matter to Anna that Elizabeth was not listening. She talked on with great enjoyment.

It was about four in the afternoon that the summons came.

Elizabeth had lost count of time. There had been two meals. She had eaten, but she could not have said what it was that she had eaten. Anna had talked incessantly. And then the door was unlocked and a wardress told her to put on her coat and cap.

“Are they going to shoot you?” said Anna, with an interested stare. “You're a
bourzhui
, aren't you, and a counter-revolutionary? It's a pity to put on a good coat to be shot in. Blood never really comes out.”

In the corridor there were three men in police uniform. They closed round her, one going in front and two behind, and so down a flight of steps and out into the street. She wondered if they were going to shoot her without a trial, or whether some travesty of justice would come first and the shooting afterwards. She had given Stephen the formula; there was therefore no further reason for keeping her alive. She had heard of so many summary executions that she did not doubt she was going to her death.

She felt a curious indifference. It was growing dark. The wind blew out of the north. Now and again a tiny stinging point of snow touched her face. Her feet were cold and so heavy that she could hardly lift them. She wondered whether they had far to go, and whether they would shoot her in the open or drive her down some cellar stair. She felt a sick horror at the thought of the cellar.

She had not been noticing the way they took. When they stopped before a door, her heart turned over. Now it would come—now, in the next few moments.

The door opened. One of the men went in, and she followed him. There were two steps down, which she took instinctively, because in the old house where Petroff had his flat there were two steps down as you come in. Her feet had grown accustomed to them. She drove her nails into the palms of her hands. This time she must not faint. It was just the waiting that was dreadful. She would probably not feel the shot.

And then all at once she was walking, not downstairs, but up, and she knew why she had found the steps familiar. This was the house in which she had lived for a year. Even in the heavy dusk she would have recognized it if her thoughts had not taken her so near death as to make all other impressions meaningless. The fear of death slipped away and another fear took its place. Her foot stumbled and she was thrown against the man on her right. He took hold of her roughly and pushed her on. They continued to mount the stairs.

In the middle room of the flat above Petroff was drinking scalding tea well laced with vodka. A large samovar steamed pleasantly upon a side-table. Petroff sat in his writing-chair, his tumbler of tea all mixed up with a froth of papers. On the opposite side of the table Stephen bestrode a wooden chair. He had a smoking glass in his hand. He drank from it and set it down.

“Of course it's all the same to me what you do with her, and whether I go or stay.”

“You've said that before,” said Petroff.

“Of course I've said it before—and I shall go on saying it. You can't say a true thing too often, can you? Hi, Comrade, how many of these little glasses does it take to make you drunk—fifty or a hundred?”

Petroff shrugged his shoulders.

“Help yourself,” he said. “I'm not here to get drunk—I'm here to find out what this woman knows.”

“Well then, but have you thought of this, Comrade? She's a cunning one—as cunning as they make them, I should say. Suppose she only
pretends
to tell you what you want to know. Have you thought of that? She might do it, if she thought it would save her skin. And that, Comrade, is where I come in. You bring her in here, and you tell her, ‘There's your husband who heard you talk in your sleep, and if you alter so much as a single word he'll know it, and then it'll be no good pleading and asking for mercy, because you won't get any.'”

Petroff frowned at his steaming drink.

“That is not badly thought of,” he said.

“I have these ideas,” said Stephen. “Sometimes they come to me when I'm drunk, and sometimes when I'm sober. Just now I'm not as drunk as I'd like to be. That's the worst of having a head like mine—it costs such a lot to get drunk. This vodka isn't as good as the stuff I had in Magnitogorsk.”

“Oh, be quiet!” said Petroff, and with that there came a thumping on the door. Stephen swung round and watched it open. The man who had knocked came into the room, and behind him two others with Elizabeth between them. One of them held her by the arm. There were blue marks like bruises under her eyes, and her face was quite white. The eyes themselves had a frozen look of fear. All her movements were slow and stiff.

“Leave her and wait downstairs!” said Petroff sharply.

Stephen leaned over the table and began to whisper.

“Do you really want them to wait? I shouldn't have said you did. It may take some time to make her speak, and they're an interfering lot. Why not say you'll ring them up when you've finished with her? They'll be glad enough not to wait about in the cold.”

“Hold your tongue!” said Petroff, pushing back his chair.

He went over and spoke to the men at the door.

“It will not be necessary for you to wait. It may take me some time to interrogate this person. I will telephone for an escort when I have finished with her.”

The man he addressed looked sulky.

“We have orders to wait.”

“Very well then, wait!” said Petroff with a shrug of his shoulders.

The man hesitated.

“If you take the responsibility—” he said.

“I do not care whether you wait or not!” said Petroff, and slammed the door.

Elizabeth heard their feet go clattering down the stair, and then Petroff's hand was on her shoulder.

“Well now, my girl—are you going to be sensible?” he said.

Stephen got up and pushed his chair towards her.

“Let her sit down—let her sit down, or she'll be fainting again. She's got a most cursed aggravating way of fainting just when it's inconvenient. Do you hear that, Varvara? None of your fainting tricks here—they won't do you any good. Have a drink and brace up! And if you tell Comrade Petroff what he wants to know and ask him nicely, perhaps he'll let you off without a firing-party this time, and you can go and look for that brother of yours in the Red Army that you told me about.” He laughed heartily at his own joke and, still laughing, filled up his glass at the samovar and pushed it into Elizabeth's hand.

The smell of the spirit sickened her, and she set it down on the table. She had sunk down upon the wooden chair and sat there looking at Petroff, who had resumed his seat and was facing her across the littered table. He leaned back as if to show how much at ease he was and addressed her in a judicial tone.

“What Stefan says is to some extent true. If you are going to be sensible, I daresay I can do something for you.”

Elizabeth stretched out her hand for the glass she had refused. At the sound of Stephen's voice a kind of inward shivering had come upon her. It was the cold, she told herself, it was the cold.… But if she was to answer Petroff, she must get the better of it. She lifted the glass to her lips and drank. The tea was scalding hot. There was not so much vodka in it as she had supposed. She steadied herself and, with her cold hands clasped about the warmth of the glass, said,

“What do you want?”

Petroff's lip lifted in a sneer.

“What innocence! You know very well what I want, and I can assure you that I mean to have it. I know that you have Nicolas Radin's formula, and you'll save us both a lot of trouble if you'll hand it over quickly.”

So Stephen had not given him the formula. The knowledge put a little heart into Elizabeth. She could still fight if there was something to fight for. She lifted her head with a touch of pride and said,

“What do you mean?”

Petroff flung himself forward and banged on the table.

“What do I mean? You have the nerve to ask me that! Do you suppose you're going to get away with that sort of bluff? No, no, my dear, it's not good enough. You shouldn't have let yourself talk in your sleep. First my mother hears you, and then your husband. Being a good Communist, he comes and tells me. So now you know where we are. Come now—you ought to be grateful to me instead of sulking. You'd have been in a filthy political cell if it hadn't been for me. I've got a special authority from Moscow to deal with your case, and I don't mind telling you why.
They want that process of Radin's
. I'm going to tell you just how badly they want it—badly enough to stretch a point and let you go if you'll give it to me, and badly enough to break me if I don't get it out of you. There—you can't say I haven't been frank with you. And if you think for about half a minute, you'll see how much chance you've got of keeping a secret which means life and death to me. I'm bound to have it—
bound
—and I'll stick at nothing to get it.”

His narrowing eyes held hers. His voice became a mere rasp. He threw back his head and laughed a little.

“There are ways of making people speak, you know.”

There was a silence. Stephen stood at the corner of the table, his eyes going from one to the other, like a man watching a game.

When the silence had lasted for a little while, he leaned forward, picked up the vodka bottle and tipped it up over Petroff's glass. The colourless liquid gurgled out, and Petroff said,

“Hi—that's my glass!”

Stephen picked it up, laughing.

“I'll put a drop of hot tea in it. You'll be dry enough before you're through with Varvara, I can tell you. One of those quiet obstinate ones—that's what she is—the sort that wears a man down and makes his throat as dry as a lime-kiln. Next time I shall pick a talker—a good lively girl who'll say what she's got to say and get it off her chest. I've had enough of these sulky ones.” He was at the samovar as he spoke.

“Don't drown the vodka,” said Petroff without taking his eyes off Elizabeth.

She sat looking past him at the curtained windows. She would do anything rather than look at Stephen. And then she
was
looking at him, because he had come round behind the table with the drink in his hand. He leaned over Petroff's shoulder and set it down. And then, as he drew back, his fist shot out and struck the Commissar behind the ear. It happened so quickly that it left Elizabeth dazed. She had no time to cry out. One moment Petroff was staring at her out of his narrow, slanting eyes, and the next he was face down amongst the litter of his own papers, his body sprawling and his arms shot limply out across the table.

She found herself on her feet without knowing how she had got there. Stephen was picking Petroff up and laying him down on the floor. He said in his natural voice,

“Lock the door, will you.”

And all at once the nightmare was over. Warmth and courage came back to her. She ran to the door, locked it, and then came back again.

Stephen had been tying Petroff up in a quiet, methodical manner. There was already a gag of cotton waste in the Commissar's mouth and a good wide bandage to keep it there. These things had emerged from a capacious inner pocket, which further provided a length of good stout cord. This went to the binding of Petroff's hands and the securing of his ankles.