Red Stefan (8 page)

He shook his head.

“Oh no. Have you?”

Irina dropped her voice.

“Yes—and there is much to tell you. There are great developments coming.” Her eyes glowed as she spoke. “But we can't speak of that here. We must meet and talk.”

As she spoke, the schoolmaster came nervously up. At close quarters he was astonishingly like an ant. His hands moved continually like antennae. His long bony neck would have looked better in a collar. He had with him a female ant, whom Elizabeth immediately guessed to be his wife. They wore the same large convex glasses and cut their hair in exactly the same way, but the eyes behind the female glasses were less worried and more watchful. They shook hands with Stephen, and next moment Elizabeth was being presented as Varvara Ivanovna and his wife. Behind his fatuous smile of the new-made husband, Stephen watched her with apprehension. Would she pass? Or would there be something which would set Irina's keen wits to work—guessing?

He looked, and saw a pale mask with vacant eyes and a mouth that dropped at the corners. When the schoolmaster and his wife spoke to her, she fingered her skirts and looked down.

Stephen nudged her.

“Where are your manners? You should say how-do-you-do to my good friends Anton Ilyitch and Anna Stefanovna.” Then, over her head, he explained, “She has never seen so much company before.”

Through her down-dropped eyelids Elizabeth was aware of Irina's scrutiny. She smiled a faint, empty smile, hung her head, and twined her fingers in her skirt. It would be as well not to show more of her hands than she could help. They were roughened by work, but they were too small and fine for a peasant. She did not like Irina's silence. She was more aware of it than of the conversation between Stephen and the others.

Irina broke it at last.

“Are your parents alive?”

Elizabeth shook her head. Strangely and suddenly the question touched a hidden spring of pain. Her parents had died in the same year ten years ago when she was only fourteen. Such an old wound to hurt again in this keen way. No acting could have served her like the tears which came stinging to her eyes. Some of them brimmed over and rolled down her cheeks. She lifted a fold of her skirt and wiped them away.

“They are dead?” said Irina. “It is very foolish of you to cry. Old people are a burden to the State. It is we who are young who have to fight in the battle of World Revolution.” She turned to Stephen. “I am going now, and you can walk back with me. Anton and Anna will not be home just yet, so we can talk undisturbed.”

“Look at that!” said old Masha in a scandalized whisper. “Not a week married, and she carries him off as bold as you please, and his wife stands there as limp as a bit of potato-peeling and lets her do it! Why, I'd have had my two hands full of her hair if it had been me! What's the matter with her? Isn't she right in the head?”

Akulina shrugged her shoulders.

“She's a poor creature, and the Lord knows why Stefan picked her. But that's a man all over—so long as the girl's his own picking, she's all right for him.”

Elizabeth sat down on the end of the bench. Under the twisted folds of her skirt her hands were clenched. Her anger surprised her. She tried to argue it down, but it remained. If she were really Stephen's wife, she could not be angrier. It was a self-evident absurdity that she should be angry at all. She had no longer the slightest inclination to weep. Her eyes were dry and hot. She made her face as blank as possible and stared sullenly down into her lap.

Stephen walked over the frozen snow with Irina. She lodged in the schoolmaster's house, an arrangement which was the source of much watchful suspicion on the part of the schoolmaster's wife, and of a mixture of self-conscious terror and vanity in the schoolmaster himself. That so beautiful a person as Irina, and one who was said to have the ear of influential Comrades in Moscow, should have her name linked with his, that Anna should make him jealous scenes about her, was both flattering and alarming.

Irina began to talk about him at once.

“Anton is becoming quite intolerable. Because I discuss things with him he seems to think that I am in love with him. And as for Anna, she's so jealous that I should not be surprised if she became insane.”

Stephen wondered if she was as cold-blooded as she sounded.

“Perhaps it would be better not to make her jealous.”

“Jealousy is madness,” said Irina calmly. “I am not responsible for Anna's fancies. I am glad that you are back, so that I may have someone rational to talk to.”

“I do not think I shall be here for long,” said Stephen.

“You move about too much. Soon it will not be so easy to do that. There is to be an internal passport system. That is to get rid of the remnants of the proscribed classes, who have swarmed like parasites into the towns. Everyone will have to have papers, and it will not be so easy to get about.”

“Yes, I have heard that. It will be a very good thing,” said Stephen indifferently.

Did she mean anything? Was it a warning? An internal passport system was going to make his work about a hundred times more difficult and dangerous than it was already. It was going to make getting Elizabeth out of the country something very near an impossibility. The answer to that was, “Hurry, hurry, hurry! Get a move on! Get her away and over the border before they can get their passports going.”

Irina said, “You are very silent.”

That wouldn't do. No, by gum, it wouldn't. He said the first thing that came into his head.

“Sometimes one doesn't want to talk.”

“When one is with a friend—yes, I have felt that too. In a true friendship like ours, where there is a common ideology, words are not necessary, yet sometimes they give one pleasure. You do not imagine—” She broke off without finishing her sentence.

“What were you going to say?”

“It was about Anton. I do not wish you to think that I have a particular friendship for him. Physically, he repels me.”

Stephen was not surprised to hear it, but he found the trend of the conversation a little alarming.

“Whereas you,” said Irina in a clear ringing tone which she did not attempt to lower—“you, of course, have always attracted me.”

This being one of those remarks to which it is difficult to think of a suitable answer, Stephen made no answer at all. If Irina meant to make love to him, it was going to be a damned difficult situation to handle—difficult, but neither so difficult nor so dangerous as an inquisition upon Elizabeth.

Irina's clear voice flowed on.

“I would not accept a marriage relationship which was founded on physical attraction alone—you must not think that of me. There must be community of ideas and a common devotion to Soviet Socialist ideals. I should consider a union of these three elements necessary for happiness in marriage. In fact, they constitute love as I understand it.”

“That is very well put,” said Stephen.

“Yes,” said Irina. “We have that community of ideas—I have often noticed it. Why did you marry this girl Varvara, with whom you have not an idea in common? I do not mind telling you that it has lowered you very much in my esteem.”

They had arrived at the schoolmaster's house. Irina opened the door, walked in, and began to light the lamp. When the wick flared it threw her shadow upon the opposite wall. It hung there, very tall and black, like something that menaced them both. She slipped the chimney over the flame, straightened herself, and went on as calmly as if there had been no interruption.

“Is your marriage a registered one?”

Stephen shook his head. Lies were awkward things and apt to trip one up. He told no more of them than he could help. The fact that his marriage was unregistered would shock no one except a few of the older people in the village.

“Perhaps we shall register it—I don't know.”

“Why do you not come in and shut the door? Whether you register your marriage or not is nothing to me—you must understand that.”

“How could it be?”

Irina looked at him with contempt.

“Now you are not being honest. When two people are friends, the bad conduct of one must concern the other.”

“I am sorry you should think my conduct bad,” said Stephen in his most matter-of-fact voice. He did not wish to have a scene with Irina, but he could see that she was heading that way. Perhaps it would be better to have it out with her and get it over.

Her eyes flashed dark fire.

“You make a low animal marriage like that, and you do not expect me to think your conduct bad?”

“A man must marry some time.”

Irina lifted her head. The shadow moved behind her on the wall.

“And you choose this Varvara for your life-companion. What a companion!”

“I had better go,” said Stephen.

He turned to the door, but she was there before him. She leaned against it with outspread arms and barred his way.

“Irina—let me go!”

Her arms fell. She said,

“You have gone already.”

As this, unfortunately, was not the literal truth, he was obliged to wait until she chose to let him pass.

“Our marriage would have been a true companionship.” There was no flush upon the even whiteness of her skin, but her eyes blazed. “Did you not know that I would have been your wife?”

“Come, Irina!” said Stephen. “What is the good of all this? Since I have a wife, we cannot be married.”

“A wife!” said Irina bitterly. “A half-witted creature whom you picked up no one knows where!”

“Come, come,” he said—“she is my wife. There is no use in this.”

The fire went out of Irina's eyes.

“Why did you do it?” she said.

Stephen shrugged his big shoulders.

“How can I tell you that?”

There was a moment of silence. She stepped away from the door and stood at the table with her shoulder turned to Stephen. In a lower voice than he had ever heard her use she said,

“The wife of a kulak said to me last year, ‘It is my turn to-day, but it will be yours to-morrow.' They were turning her out of her house. She said to me, ‘You'll be unhappy some day.'”

For the first time Stephen felt moved. He said,

“I'm sorry, Irina.”

She went on speaking as if she had not heard him.

“Another person's conduct should not be able to make one unhappy. That is a weakness.” She looked suddenly over her shoulder and said, “Do you love me?”

Stephen said, “No.”

“Why?”

“How can I say? I don't know why.”

She beat with the flat of her hand on the table.

“Do you love—her?”

He made a gesture with his hands.

“Irina, what is the good of asking such questions? You are hurting yourself, and you are hurting me. Let us be good comrades as we were before.”

“No—that is impossible.”

“Why should it be impossible?”

She turned away from him and looked down at her own hands. Then quite suddenly she faced him again.

“Divorce her!” she said.

Stephen turned on his heel and went out.

CHAPTER VIII

Akulina was grumbling when Stephen came home.

“Click-clack and waste of time—that's what I call your meeting! And wanton behaviour on the top of that! Idleness breeds mischief! I've no patience with it. These winter evenings when the beasts are bedded, young women ought to be weaving, not standing up on a platform making eyes at the men. And as for you, Stefan, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. You'll be in trouble if you don't mind what you're doing, and you won't be the first—no, nor the last either. And her to come in here and tell me to take down the blessed ikon! As if it wasn't enough that we don't light the lamp in front of it any more—and I hope Those above don't hold it up against us! And as if that wasn't enough, in she comes and says, ‘You ought to take it down and have a picture like mine.' And I can well believe that there are doings in any room of hers which she wouldn't want a blessed saint to be looking at! But praise God that's not the case in this house, and never will be whilst I'm in it!”

Akulina tossed her head and began to clatter about the stove. She opened the narrow door and a red glow shone from it. Stephen brought wood without speaking and stoked the fire. Akulina banged the door again.

“Superstition!”
she said. “Oh, that's a great word with them—isn't it? Superstition, superstition, superstition—everything's superstition you can't see with your two eyes every day of the week and twice on Sundays! Cackling geese! I could tell them a few things—yes, that I could! Why, there was what happened to my own father, and my mother never let him hear the last of it, though it happened before they were married.”

“You can't tell
them
, but you can tell us,” said Stephen.

Akulina was mixing something in a bowl. She stirred vigorously and tossed her head.

“You may believe it, or you may not, but this is what happened.”

The lamplight was yellow in the small room. Yuri lay on the upper tier of the stove, smoking. The smell of the rank tobacco and the faint blue of the smoke hung overhead. Stephen sat up to the table. He had a piece of hard wood in one hand and a knife in the other. Elizabeth, from the edge of her bed, wondered what he was going to do with the wood.

Akulina went on stirring and talking.

“It happened when my father was quite young. His father was a serf on the Darensky estate, and his mother had been foster-mother to the young prince, so they were foster-brothers and of the same age, and when the young prince went to and fro to his estates in the north he used to take my father with him as his body-servant. It was a very fine place for shooting and hunting. They used to be there every summer. Well, one day when my father was about two or three and twenty years old, he was riding alone in the forest with the prince. They were a long way from the house—perhaps half a day's journey, perhaps more—and they were in the deep forest, just the prince and my father and no one with them. So then they came to a clearing where there were wild raspberries growing, and in amongst the raspberries there was a young girl, and she was picking them into a basket of fresh green leaves. She didn't look up for the horses, but went on picking. The prince called out to her, but she took no notice. She went on picking the raspberries into her basket. My father said she was the prettiest girl he had ever seen—yes, and stuck to it too in spite of my mother's tongue. He said her cheeks were as red as the raspberries, and her mouth like fresh raspberry juice, only redder still. Well, the prince was angry because she took no notice of him, so he told my father to go and fetch her. In those days if a young prince had a fancy to a girl he took her, so my father left his horse standing and began to push his way through the raspberry brake. The prince sat there and watched him, and this is what he saw. As soon as my father got within catching distance, the girl ran behind a bush. My father went after her, and there was the prince sitting on his horse, waiting. Presently he called, and no one answered him and no one came. He took my father's horse by the bridle and rode round to the other side of the clearing in a great anger. He rode, and called, and shouted for an hour, but there was neither hair, hide nor hoof of my father nor of the girl, so he said ‘Devil take them both!' and rode away home.” She turned to the stove and arranged her mixture in four flat cakes to bake.