Red Stefan (3 page)

“What did I say?”

He patted the shoulder reassuringly.

“Nothing at all—just rubbish. But it won't do for the others to think there's been a miracle in the night. You've got to go on being dumb, you know. Now look here, I'm sorry I had to wake you, but it isn't worth while your going to sleep again. We're pushing off before dawn. There's a sort of wash-place along the passage. I'll light a candle for you as soon as we're outside. Don't be longer than you can help.”

In the passage he lighted an inch of candle which he produced from an inner pocket, showed her the way to the wash-place, and then went back into the room. When she returned, he beckoned her behind the sack and produced with pride a bowl of coffee-substitute, some black bread, and, wonder of wonders, a boiled egg. The coffee was scalding hot, and the egg tasted better than anything Elizabeth had ever eaten. She had seen eggs in the last year, but she had not tasted one. The old Petroff woman had occasionally had an egg. When she had gobbled it up she would throw the shell at Elizabeth and tell her to fatten herself on that.

Elizabeth ate the egg and the black bread and drank the steaming coffee, and then sat on her straw bed and waited. Everyone in the room beyond seemed still to be asleep. They snored as noisily as animals. Elizabeth wondered how she had slept through such a chorus.

Stephen was away for a little time. When he came back he held her coat for her, and then, taking down the sacking, he rolled up the straw bed in it, tied it deftly with the string of the line, and signed to her to take up the candle and precede him.

At the street door he leaned his bundle against the wall and, taking the candle-end from her hand, blew it out, and after allowing a moment for the tallow to harden put it away in his pocket. Then the bundle was on his shoulder, and next moment they were out in the dark street.

To Elizabeth the darkness was absolute, but Stephen seemed to have no difficulty in finding his way. He took her by the arm and marched her up the lane at a good brisk pace, and presently she could see where the houses ended and the sky began. The houses were black, but the sky was only a very, very dark grey. There was no light in any window, and no star in the strip of sky.

They turned to the right and then to the left again. They were now out on the broad road which ran through the town. Elizabeth heard the sound of a horse shaking its head and the jingle of harness, and then they stopped just in time, as it seemed to her, to avoid running into a cart which was standing in the middle of the road. Someone moved in the dark and an old cracked voice grumbled.

“A nice time you've kept me waiting! If your wife don't get up any earlier than this, you'd better take a stick to her! Idle hussies, that's what the girls are nowadays! I tell you I'd have taken the stick to your grandmother for a lazy slut if she'd kept me about like this! And snow coming, as I told you yesterday!”

Stephen made no answer. He was loading his bundle into the cart, and presently when he lifted Elizabeth in she found she had a warm nest in the hay, with the sacking over all to keep the wind out. The grumbling voice went on for a while and then stopped. The harness rang, and with a jerk they were off.

It was bitterly cold, but not as cold as it might have been in November. There had been no deep snow yet, only a light fall, which had frozen, leaving the road hard. They went along at a good jogging pace. The houses fell behind. The snowy fields on either side seemed to give out more light than the heavy lowering sky. Elizabeth could just make out the driver's figure against the snow. Stephen looked back along their road and laughed.

“Now we can talk,” he said cheerfully. “Old Yuri's as deaf as a post. If I were to let off a bomb just behind his back, he wouldn't hear it, so you needn't go on being dumb. Are you warm—comfortable?”

Elizabeth said, “Yes.” Her voice was so low that Stephen laughed again.

“You needn't be afraid—he really can't hear you. Now don't you want to know who he is, and who I am, and where we're going? Because if I were you, I should be fairly bursting with curiosity by now.”

Elizabeth smiled in the dark. It was rather a tragic smile. She could imagine Red Stefan's impatience with anything he could not understand. For herself, it mattered so little where she went or what she did. And then it came to her with the suddenness of a stinging blow that it did matter. Twelve hours ago she had asked no more of fate than a quiet corner to die in. Now, it seemed, she wasn't going to be allowed to die. Stephen hadn't the slightest intention of letting her die; she could see that. She was going to be made to live. Old deaf Yuri and his horses were carrying her to meet a new, troublesome, eventful, unescapable day. Perhaps it was a pity that Stephen had found her on the bridge. She might have been dead by now and all her troubles over. Something in her stirred a little scornfully. “How do you know they would have been over?” And right on that came Stephen's voice, saying.

“Wouldn't you like to hear the story of my life?”

Mere politeness would have compelled her to say yes. There was something eager and boyish in his tone. There was even a little of the same pride with which he had offered her the egg. It touched the springs of tears and laughter, and she said in a hurrying voice.

“Are you sure you want to tell it to a stranger?”

He said at once in a different tone,

“You are not a stranger.”

“And at this time yesterday I didn't know that you existed,” said Elizabeth. She could not see him, but at every jolt of the cart her shoulder touched his through the hay.

“What's that got to do with it?” he said. “I lived for six years in a man's house once, and we were strangers to each other all the time—always quite polite, you know. He was my guardian. Now I don't think I should ever be polite to you.”

“Are you always rude to your friends?” said Elizabeth gravely.

He laughed.

“Well, you know what I mean. People are either your sort or else they're not. If they are, you can just be yourself, but if they're not, you keep on dropping bricks and having to pick them up again.”

“And I'm not a stranger?”

“Did you think you were? Why, I told you my name straight away. I've never done that to anyone before—not when I was on a job, I mean.”

“But why did you tell me your name?”

“Because I knew I could trust you, and I wanted you to trust me.”

They jolted along for a minute or two after that, and neither spoke. Then Stephen said.

“I'd like to tell you what I'm doing here. It's quite interesting. We've got a long way to go, so we may as well talk. I'll tell you the story of my life, and then you can tell me the story of yours—that is, if you'd like to. And when we've finished both our stories, we can decide what we're going to do next.”

CHAPTER IV

Elizabeth felt a little startled. He had seemed so calm and purposeful that she had made sure he had everything planned.

“Don't you know?” she asked.

“Not yet. But it'll be all right—something will turn up. We're out of that beastly hole of a town anyhow. Well now—shall I begin, or will you?” He sounded a little like the child who offers a ride on the rocking-horse which he is yearning to bestride himself.

She made haste to say, “You, please,” and immediately he was in the saddle.

She was aware of him sitting up beside her in the straw, hugging his knees. His voice came from only a few inches away. When the cart went over a rut or a pot-hole, they were thrown together and then jolted apart again. He talked eagerly and as if it was a pleasure to him to be speaking English.

“I'm quite English, you know, on both sides. My father was killed in the Boer War. He was really an engineer, but he went out with a battalion of Mounted Infantry. When I was two my mother married a member of the Darensky family and took me with her to Russia. Paul Darensky had a big country place which he only visited once or twice a year. My mother was pretty and young and gay, and they both liked society, so they lived in Petrograd and entertained a great deal, and I ran wild on the estate with the peasants' children.”

Elizabeth said almost involuntarily.

“Oh, poor little boy!”

“Why?” said Stephen. “I had a very good time. I was much fonder of my nurse than I was of my mother. She had a married brother on the estate, and his wife Katinka had about twenty children. I was friends with them all.”

“I shouldn't have thought you'd have learned any English.”

“I didn't. And then my mother suddenly got shocked at my being a little savage, and she went to the other extreme and got me an English tutor and a French governess.” He laughed. “They amused each other at any rate—and I did learn French and English.”

“Nothing else?”

“Oh, the usual things. Grant was quite an efficient fellow. He didn't bother me out of lesson hours, so we got on all right. Then when I was twelve, my mother died and I was packed off to my guardian in England. He was a cousin of my father's, and he had a big estate on the Devon-Somerset border. His name was Robert Carey, and we never stopped being total strangers, like I told you.”

“Didn't you go to school?”

“Yes,
rather
. I'd have blown up if I'd had to stay there with old Carey. He sent me to Marlborough.”

“How did you get on there?”

“Oh, I always get on. I had to knock one or two people down for calling me a foreigner, and then we were all right. I didn't have to see too much of old Carey, because I spent a good part of the holidays in Russia with Paul Darensky. He didn't take any notice of me, but he liked having me there. He'd been awfully in love with my mother and couldn't get over her death—just moped about on the estate and gave up all his friends. Well, when I was fourteen, the war started and I didn't go to Russia any more. My Lord—how fed up I got with old Carey!” He paused. “Now that's all very dull stuff. I hope you haven't gone to sleep. It gets more interesting as it goes on—at least I hope you'll think so. I wanted to enlist in '17, but old Carey swore he'd dig me out of any battalion I got into. And then the Revolution broke out over here. Kerensky had his shot at making a government, and in November the Reds got the upper hand and there was the devil to pay. The Army broke up, the men murdered their officers, the country estates were looted, and there was a ghastly mess all round. Paul Darensky was murdered on his own estate, and the house was wrecked. I was very glad my mother was dead. I didn't really know her very well, but she was too gay and pretty to be mixed up in that sort of thing, if you know what I mean.”

Elizabeth said, “Yes, I know.” She had a picture of a gay-winged butterfly blown away over the tree-tops before the forest was swept by a torrent of flame.

“Well,” said Stephen, “that's all about that. In January 1918 old Carey had me into his study. There were two other men there, an old boy from the Foreign Office and a Russian. They said how-do-you-do to me, and then the Russian began to talk to me in Russian. I hadn't talked much for four years, but I got on all right. I don't forget things. After about five minutes he switched on to the Foreign Office bloke and said in English, ‘That was all right—he could pass me as an educated Russian.'”

The cart jolted, flung them together, and flung them apart again. Stephen laughed and hugged his knees.

“The moment he said that, of course I saw what the game was, and I said, ‘I can pass as a peasant too. Wouldn't that be useful?' The Foreign Office man came down like a cart-load of bricks on old Carey. ‘What have you been telling him? You were not authorized to tell him anything at all!' Carey went as stiff as a ramrod and said he hadn't told me anything. I said, ‘That's right, sir—I couldn't help guessing you were going to send me to Russia.' How could I, when he said I could pass, like that? What else could it have meant? They all had a good stare at me, and the Foreign Office man said, ‘You're not slow in the uptake anyway. Can you talk Scotch as well as Russian?' I said I couldn't, and he laughed and said to the Russian ‘Go ahead—try him with the peasants' talk.' I wondered how he was going to do it. I give him marks, for he really did it awfully well. He began by saying. ‘Now, you're a groom, and I think you've been neglecting my horses.' And then he gave me a tongue-lashing, and I made the proper answers, excusing myself and swearing I'd done this, that and the other, just as I'd heard Paul's grooms do ever since I was a baby. Then he began to ask questions about the farm work—sowing, ploughing, reaping, cows, hens, pigs—the whole lot of it. I warmed up to it rather, and I did half a dozen different people—the fat pig man, and the very old man who knew more about cows than they knew about themselves, and so on. I did their proper voices. When I'd finished, the Russian kissed me on both cheeks and said—but if I tell you what he said, you'll think I'm boasting.”

He heard Elizabeth's laugh for the first time, very soft and faint. He immediately wanted to pick her up and kiss her. And it would be so easy. No, not easy—impossible.

“Do you never boast?” she said, and the laughter was still in her voice.

“Oh, nearly always. A Russian peasant is a very boastful fellow, and I'm a Russian peasant about half my time. If I don't blow my own trumpet, people won't believe I've got one.”

Elizabeth said, “I see—” She spoke quite gravely, but he thought she was still smiling. He hoped so, because he had an idea that she had forgotten how to smile. If he could make her laugh, she might think him as boastful as she pleased. He plunged back into his story.

“Well, after that they sent me to Russia. I was to be one of Katinka's twenty odd children, and I was to go to her father, old Yuri, who's driving us now. It was my own idea. Katinka used to talk about her father, but she hadn't seen him since she married, and I knew he wouldn't have the slightest idea how many children she had. I don't think she knew herself—she just went on having them. So, when I turned up in Yuri's village and said I was his grandson Stefan, neither he nor anyone else had the least doubt about me. I wasn't eighteen, and I looked younger, though I was so big, because my skin was very fair in those days. I used to have to keep it well smudged with dirt till it darkened a bit.”