by David Miller
“I don’t remember. Something like:
“Look – through the darkening pine trees
A fire is arising …”
“What fire?”
“The rising moon, of course. There’s a certain autumnal, rustic charm in those lines: ‘Put on your bonnet and shawl.’ That’s our grandfathers’ and grandmothers’ time … Oh, my God, my God!”
“What is it?”
“Nothing, dearest love. But I do feel sad. Sad, but contented. I love you very, very much …”
We put our coats on, went through the dining-room out onto the balcony and then down into the garden. At first it was so dark I held onto his sleeve. Then the black boughs which were sprinkled with metallically brilliant stars began to stand out against the lightening sky. Stopping for a moment, he turned to face the house:
“Look how the windows are shining in a special autumn way. I shall remember this evening as long as I live.”
I looked at the windows, and he embraced me in my Swiss cloak. I brushed my mohair scarf away from my face and tilted my head back slightly so he could kiss me. When he’d kissed me he looked into my face.
“How your eyes sparkle,” he said. “Aren’t you cold? The air’s quite wintry. If I’m killed, you won’t forget me straightaway?”
I found myself thinking: “Suppose he really is killed? Surely there won’t come a time when I’ll forget him – though in the end we do forget everything …”
And frightened by my own thought, I answered hurriedly:
“Don’t talk like that. I wouldn’t survive your death.”
After a short pause he pronounced slowly:
“Anyway, if I am killed, I’ll wait for you over there. You live, be happy for a while in the world, and then come to me.”
I burst into tears …
In the morning he set off. Round his neck Mama hung that fateful little bag she’d been sewing the previous evening – it contained a small golden icon which had been carried to war by both her father and her grandfather – and we made the sign of the cross over him with nervously jerky despair. Watching him go, we stood on the porch in that state of stupefaction always experienced when saying farewell to someone before a long separation, and all we felt was the astonishing incongruity between ourselves and the joyful, sunny morning around us with its hoar-frost sparkling on the grass. We stood there for a while and then went back into the house. I walked through the rooms with my hands behind my back, not knowing what to do with myself, whether I should sob or sing at the top of my voice …
He was killed – what a strange word! – a month later, in Galicia. And since then a whole thirty years have passed. And I’ve experienced so much through those years which seem so long when you consider them carefully and go over in your memory all that magical, incomprehensible thing called the past which neither the mind nor the heart can grasp. In the spring of 1918, by which time my father and mother were both dead, I was living in Moscow, in the cellar of a house belonging to a woman trading in the Smolensk market who regularly mocked me with her “Well, your excellency, how are your circumstances?” I engaged in trade myself and, like many others at that time, I sold to soldiers in Caucasian fur caps and unbuttoned greatcoats some of the things I still had – a ring, a little cross, a moth-eaten fur collar – and then one day while trading on the corner of the Arbat and the Smolensk market I met a man with a rare beautiful soul, an elderly retired soldier; we soon got married and in April I went off with him to Yekaterinodar. It took almost two weeks to get there with him and his nephew, a boy of seventeen who was trying to make his way to the Volunteers – I disguised as a peasant-woman in bast shoes, he in a worn Cossack coat and with a newly-grown black and silver beard – and then we spent over two years on the Don and in the Kuban. In the winter, during a hurricane, we set sail from Novorossiysk for Turkey with a huge crowd of other refugees, and on the way, at sea, my husband died of typhus. After that, of all my nearest and dearest only three remained in the whole world – my husband’s nephew, the latter’s wife and their little girl, a child of seven months. But soon after this the nephew sailed off with his wife for the Crimea to join up with Wrangel, leaving the child on my hands. There they too disappeared without trace. And then I lived for a long time in Constantinople, earning a living for myself and the child by back-breaking manual labour. Then, like so many others, I wandered the world with her – Bulgaria, Serbia, Bohemia, Belgium, Paris, Nice … The little girl grew up long ago; she stayed in Paris and became a model Frenchwoman, very pretty and completely indifferent to me; she used to work in a confectioner’s near the Madeleine, using her manicured hands with their silver fingernails to wrap up boxes in satin paper and gold string; and I lived, and am still living in Nice on what God provides … I saw Nice for the first time in 1912 – and could never have imagined in those happy days what the city would one day become for me!
So I did survive his death, even though I once impetuously said I wouldn’t. But when I recall everything I’ve experienced since that time, I always ask myself: “What, when all is said and done, has there been in my life?” And I answer: “Only that cold autumn evening.” Did it ever exist? Yes, it did. And that is all there’s been in my life. All the rest has been a useless dream. But I believe, I do ardently believe that somewhere over there he is waiting for me – with the same love and the same youthfulness as on that evening. “You live, be happy for a while in the world, and then come to me …” I have lived, I have been happy for a while, and now, quite soon, I’ll come.
SREDNI VASHTAR
Saki
Saki was the pen name of H.H. Munro (1870–1916). Born in Burma, he published mostly short stories before fighting with the Royal Fusiliers in the First World War. His last words, said towards the end of the Battle of Ancre before being shot by a sniper, were “Put that bloody cigarette out!”
Conradin was ten years old, and the doctor had pronounced his professional opinion that the boy would not live another five years. The doctor was silky and effete, and counted for little, but his opinion was endorsed by Mrs. De Ropp, who counted for nearly everything. Mrs. De Ropp was Conradin’s cousin and guardian, and in his eyes she represented those three-fifths of the world that are necessary and disagreeable and real; the other two-fifths, in perpetual antagonism to the foregoing, were summed up in himself and his imagination. One of these days Conradin supposed he would succumb to the mastering pressure of wearisome necessary things – such as illnesses and coddling restrictions and drawn-out dulness. Without his imagination, which was rampant under the spur of loneliness, he would have succumbed long ago.
Mrs. De Ropp would never, in her honestest moments, have confessed to herself that she disliked Conradin, though she might have been dimly aware that thwarting him “for his good” was a duty which she did not find particularly irksome. Conradin hated her with a desperate sincerity which he was perfectly able to mask. Such few pleasures as he could contrive for himself gained an added relish from the likelihood that they would be displeasing to his guardian, and from the realm of his imagination she was locked out – an unclean thing, which should find no entrance.
In the dull, cheerless garden, overlooked by so many windows that were ready to open with a message not to do this or that, or a reminder that medicines were due, he found little attraction. The few fruit-trees that it contained were set jealously apart from his plucking, as though they were rare specimens of their kind blooming in an arid waste; it would probably have been difficult to find a market-gardener who would have offered ten shillings for their entire yearly produce. In a forgotten corner, however, almost hidden behind a dismal shrubbery, was a disused tool-shed of respectable proportions, and within its walls Conradin found a haven, something that took on the varying aspects of a playroom and a cathedral. He had peopled it with a legion of familiar phantoms, evoked partly from fragments of history and partly from his own brain, but it also boasted two inmates of flesh and blood. In one corner lived a ragged-plumag
ed Houdan hen, on which the boy lavished an affection that had scarcely another outlet. Further back in the gloom stood a large hutch, divided into two compartments, one of which was fronted with close iron bars. This was the abode of a large polecat-ferret, which a friendly butcher-boy had once smuggled, cage and all, into its present quarters, in exchange for a long-secreted hoard of small silver. Conradin was dreadfully afraid of the lithe, sharp-fanged beast, but it was his most treasured possession. Its very presence in the tool-shed was a secret and fearful joy, to be kept scrupulously from the knowledge of the Woman, as he privately dubbed his cousin. And one day, out of Heaven knows what material, he spun the beast a wonderful name, and from that moment it grew into a god and a religion. The Woman indulged in religion once a week at a church near by, and took Conradin with her, but to him the church service was an alien rite in the House of Rimmon. Every Thursday, in the dim and musty silence of the tool-shed, he worshipped with mystic and elaborate ceremonial before the wooden hutch where dwelt Sredni Vashtar, the great ferret. Red flowers in their season and scarlet berries in the winter-time were offered at his shrine, for he was a god who laid some special stress on the fierce impatient side of things, as opposed to the Woman’s religion, which, as far as Conradin could observe, went to great lengths in the contrary direction. And on great festivals powdered nutmeg was strewn in front of his hutch, an important feature of the offering being that the nutmeg had to be stolen. These festivals were of irregular occurrence, and were chiefly appointed to celebrate some passing event. On one occasion, when Mrs. De Ropp suffered from acute toothache for three days, Conradin kept up the festival during the entire three days, and almost succeeded in persuading himself that Sredni Vashtar was personally responsible for the toothache. If the malady had lasted for another day the supply of nutmeg would have given out.
The Houdan hen was never drawn into the cult of Sredni Vashtar. Conradin had long ago settled that she was an Anabaptist. He did not pretend to have the remotest knowledge as to what an Anabaptist was, but he privately hoped that it was dashing and not very respectable. Mrs. De Ropp was the ground plan on which he based and detested all respectability.
After a while Conradin’s absorption in the tool-shed began to attract the notice of his guardian. “It is not good for him to be pottering down there in all weathers,” she promptly decided, and at breakfast one morning she announced that the Houdan hen had been sold and taken away overnight. With her short-sighted eyes she peered at Conradin, waiting for an outbreak of rage and sorrow, which she was ready to rebuke with a flow of excellent precepts and reasoning. But Conradin said nothing: there was nothing to be said. Something perhaps in his white set face gave her a momentary qualm, for at tea that afternoon there was toast on the table, a delicacy which she usually banned on the ground that it was bad for him; also because the making of it “gave trouble,” a deadly offence in the middle-class feminine eye.
“I thought you liked toast,” she exclaimed, with an injured air, observing that he did not touch it.
“Sometimes,” said Conradin.
In the shed that evening there was an innovation in the worship of the hutch-god. Conradin had been wont to chant his praises, tonight be asked a boon.
“Do one thing for me, Sredni Vashtar.”
The thing was not specified. As Sredni Vashtar was a god he must be supposed to know. And choking back a sob as he looked at that other empty comer, Conradin went back to the world he so hated.
And every night, in the welcome darkness of his bedroom, and every evening in the dusk of the tool-shed, Conradin’s bitter litany went up: “Do one thing for me, Sredni Vashtar.”
Mrs. De Ropp noticed that the visits to the shed did not cease, and one day she made a further journey of inspection.
“What are you keeping in that locked hutch?” she asked. “I believe it’s guinea-pigs. I’ll have them all cleared away.”
Conradin shut his lips tight, but the Woman ransacked his bedroom till she found the carefully hidden key, and forthwith marched down to the shed to complete her discovery. It was a cold afternoon, and Conradin had been bidden to keep to the house. From the furthest window of the dining-room the door of the shed could just be seen beyond the corner of the shrubbery, and there Conradin stationed himself. He saw the Woman enter, and then be imagined her opening the door of the sacred hutch and peering down with her short-sighted eyes into the thick straw bed where his god lay hidden. Perhaps she would prod at the straw in her clumsy impatience. And Conradin fervently breathed his prayer for the last time. But he knew as he prayed that he did not believe. He knew that the Woman would come out presently with that pursed smile he loathed so well on her face, and that in an hour or two the gardener would carry away his wonderful god, a god no longer, but a simple brown ferret in a hutch. And he knew that the Woman would triumph always as she triumphed now, and that he would grow ever more sickly under her pestering and domineering and superior wisdom, till one day nothing would matter much more with him, and the doctor would be proved right. And in the sting and misery of his defeat, he began to chant loudly and defiantly the hymn of his threatened idol:
Sredni Vashtar went forth,
His thoughts were red thoughts and his teeth were white.
His enemies called for peace, but he brought them death.
Sredni Vashtar the Beautiful.
And then of a sudden he stopped his chanting and drew closer to the window-pane. The door of the shed still stood ajar as it had been left, and the minutes were slipping by. They were long minutes, but they slipped by nevertheless. He watched the starlings running and flying in little parties across the lawn; he counted them over and over again, with one eye always on that swinging door. A sour-faced maid came in to lay the table for tea, and still Conradin stood and waited and watched. Hope had crept by inches into his heart, and now a look of triumph began to blaze in his eyes that had only known the wistful patience of defeat. Under his breath, with a furtive exultation, he began once again the pæan of victory and devastation. And presently his eyes were rewarded: out through that doorway came a long, low, yellow-and-brown beast, with eyes a-blink at the waning daylight, and dark wet stains around the fur of jaws and throat. Conradin dropped on his knees. The great polecat-ferret made its way down to a small brook at the foot of the garden, drank for a moment, then crossed a little plank bridge and was lost to sight in the bushes. Such was the passing of Sredni Vashtar.
“Tea is ready,” said the sour-faced maid; “where is the mistress?” “She went down to the shed some time ago,” said Conradin. And while the maid went to summon her mistress to tea, Conradin fished a toasting-fork out of the sideboard drawer and proceeded to toast himself a piece of bread. And during the toasting of it and the buttering of it with much butter and the slow enjoyment of eating it, Conradin listened to the noises and silences which fell in quick spasms beyond the dining-room door. The loud foolish screaming of the maid, the answering chorus of wondering ejaculations from the kitchen region, the scuttering footsteps and hurried embassies for outside help, and then, after a lull, the scared sobbings and the shuffling tread of those who bore a heavy burden into the house.
“Whoever will break it to the poor child? I couldn’t for the life of me!” exclaimed a shrill voice. And while they debated the matter among themselves, Conradin made himself another piece of toast.
CONSEQUENCES
Willa Cather
Willa Cather (1873–1947) was an American author who wrote highly praised novels depicting frontier life on the Great Plains. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for her novel One of Ours. Cather received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1944, an award given once a decade for an author’s complete body of work. She once observed “Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen”, which is either inspiring, or depressing – and probably true.
Henry Eastman, a lawyer, aged forty, was standing beside the Flatiron Buil
ding in a driving November rainstorm, signaling frantically for a taxi. It was six-thirty, and everything on wheels was engaged. The streets were in confusion about him, the sky was in turmoil above him, and the Flatiron Building, which seemed about to blow down, threw water like a mill-shoot. Suddenly, out of the brutal struggle of men and cars and machines and people tilting at each other with umbrellas, a quiet, well-mannered limousine paused before him, at the curb, and an agreeable, ruddy countenance confronted him through the open window of the car.
“Don’t you want me to pick you up, Mr. Eastman? I’m running directly home now.”
Eastman recognized Kier Cavenaugh, a young man of pleasure, who lived in the house on Central Park South, where he himself had an apartment.
“Don’t I?” he exclaimed, bolting into the car. “I’ll risk getting your cushions wet without compunction. I came up in a taxi, but I didn’t hold it. Bad economy. I thought I saw your car down on Fourteenth Street about half an hour ago.”
The owner of the car smiled. He had a pleasant, round face and round eyes, and a fringe of smooth, yellow hair showed under the brim of his soft felt hat. “With a lot of little broilers fluttering into it? You did. I know some girls who work in the cheap shops down there. I happened to be downtown and I stopped and took a load of them home. I do sometimes. Saves their poor little clothes, you know. Their shoes are never any good.”
Eastman looked at his rescuer. “Aren’t they notoriously afraid of cars and smooth young men?” he inquired.
Cavenaugh shook his head. “They know which cars are safe and which are chancy. They put each other wise. You have to take a bunch at a time, of course. The Italian girls can never come along; their men shoot. The girls understand, all right; but their fathers don’t. One gets to see queer places, sometimes, taking them home.”