Red Stefan

by Patricia Wentworth

  He hunched an impatient shoulder and said half angrily,

  “Akulina will be back in a minute.”

  “Yes?” said Elizabeth.

  “And I’m wasting time.”

  “Yes?”

  “The fact is I want to talk to you, and I don’t know how to begin.”

  Elizabeth looked at him in surprise. It was getting dark and she could not see his features very well. Was it possible that he was shy? She decided that it was not possible.

  “The fact is,” he burst out, “I’ve got to ask you some questions, and I’m afraid of upsetting you.”

  “Questions?” said Elizabeth slowly.

  “Yes. You won’t be upset, will you? I shall hate it if you are. I ought really to have asked you this morning, but then I thought, ‘Suppose she faints again,’ so I didn’t do it. But I ought to have done it.”

  Elizabeth wondered what was coming. She shrank from these unknown questions, but in spite of the shrinking her mind was tinged with amusement. There was something boyish about his clumsy delicacy. And how like a man to be afraid that she would faint. She said,

  “Please ask what you want to. I shan’t faint.”

  He nodded.

  “No—you’re stronger.” Then, with a blunt directness, “I want to know all about this Petroff affair.”

  Elizabeth started. The tinge of amusement faded. A tremor took its place. What he called the Petroff affair belonged to the nightmare region out of which he had carried her. To speak of it was to bring it back.

  Stephen reached forward and took her hand.

  “I’ve got to know,” he said. “I can’t keep you safe unless I know. I must know what to look out for. You see that, don’t you?”

  Elizabeth bent her head. He pressed her hand very hard indeed, and then let go of it rather suddenly.

  “Well now, let’s get it over,” he said cheerfully. “To begin with, what’s all this about a formula?”

  She said the words after him with an involuntary shudder, whilst her hands went to her breast and pressed down upon it painfully.

  “A formula?”

  “Yes,” said Stephen gently. “You said something about it in your sleep that first night in Tronsk, and last night you talked about it when you woke up.”

  “Did I?” The tremor was shaking her so much that the words shook too.

  Stephen went down on his knees before her and took both her hands in his.

  “Don’t shake like that. Don’t be frightened. I won’t let anything hurt you—I won’t really. Petroff shan’t touch you. Is that what you’re afraid of?”

  She made a great effort and steadied herself.

  “I’ll tell you.”

  He had to wait after that, but he showed no impatience, only knelt there, holding her hands, not looking at her. She felt as if she were being held in a strong grasp on the edge of an abyss. She was to look over and tell what she saw there. She was just able to do this while he held her. If he were to let go, she would fall. She began to speak in a low faltering voice without any tone in it.

  “We came out eighteen months ago. It was at the beginning of the summer. Nicolas had not lived in Russia since he was a boy. His father was Russian and his mother American. He went to college in America and took an American engineering degree. I met him out there. I was on a visit to the only relations I’ve got in the world. I’d been ill and couldn’t work. They asked me on a long visit. I met Nicolas—” Her voice died away.

  Stephen held her hands. After a moment she went on again.

  “He had a friend in Russia—they were boys together. Alexis was an engineer too. He got Nicolas the offer of a job at Volkhov. We were both wild to go. Nicolas was very enthusiastic about the Five Year Plan and everything. But when we got there I began to be afraid. You see, he had the American outlook, the American point of view, but he hadn’t the protection of being an American. He was a Russian subject. I used to tell him—but he wouldn’t listen. He thought he was going to be able to make money. He’d got a new process—a new aluminium alloy. I don’t understand these things, but it was going to make a lot of difference in making aeroplanes—they would be stronger and lighter. A man who died gave him the first idea, and he worked it out. There must have been other men in it too, but I don’t know who they were. He used to talk to me about it and say what a lot of money we should have when we got back to America. He was going to make some excuse and throw up his job. He didn’t seem to understand what a frightful risk he was running. And then all of a sudden something must have leaked out. They sent for him. They asked him if he had a new process. He said no. They let him go that day. He came in and told me he was going to try and get away in the night. He said he couldn’t take me—I should be safer where I was. But before he went he made me learn the formula of his process. He said if he didn’t get away and I did, I could sell it and it would provide for me. He made me swear that whatever happened I wouldn’t give it to Them. I learnt the formula by heart. He didn’t dare put it on paper. He told me to say it over every day so as not to forget anything. I think I could say it in my sleep.”

  “You did,” said Stephen.

  He felt her shudder.

  “I know.”

  “Go on.”

  She shuddered again.

  “Nicolas went away. It was night. I never saw him again. He was taken—and—shot.”

  Stephen looked up for a moment. His eyes were wild and bright, but when he spoke his voice was very gentle.

  “Did you love him very much?”

  Elizabeth looked down into the abyss. Her own personal tragedy had been swallowed up there. She had not loved Nicolas Radin, but she had mourned for him. She had loved someone whom she thought was Nicolas, and she had found herself married to a Nicolas who became more and more a stranger. She thought of this self-centred, moody being, with his impatience, his hot fits of anger and his cold indifference, his disregard of her warnings, and she felt again the pang with which she had parted from her first romantic dream. The dream was not Nicolas, but she had once thought it was.

  Stephen looked down again.

  “Please go on. We haven’t much time.”

  Elizabeth’s voice became a mere whisper.

  “Next day Petroff came,” she said, and paused on that. It was a long pause, but at last she went on. “He said Nicolas had been shot as a counter-revolutionary—and all his papers belonged to the State. He took everything. Next day he came back. He asked me about the aluminium process. He went on asking me until I fainted. They scraped the walls and pulled up the floors, but they didn’t find any more papers. I told them Nicolas never wrote anything down. If it hadn’t been for the process, I think they would have just turned me out to starve like they do if they don’t think you are any use to them, but they wanted the process very badly. They didn’t think I knew anything, but they weren’t quite sure.… Petroff took me to Tronsk where his mother was. He told me I was lucky to be housed and fed in return for looking after her.” She gave the faintest, saddest ghost of a laugh. “She didn’t feed me very much.”

  His hands tightened over hers.

  “Is there any more? You’d better tell me everything.”

  Everything? Twenty-four hours in a day—seven days in a week—four weeks in the month and two or three days over—twelve months to make up the year. And every hour of every day filled with the petty, senseless cruelties of an old woman to whom these cruelties were meat and drink.

  “Tell me,” said Stephen.

  She shook from head to foot.

  “I—can’t. She made me feel—degraded. It was like living in a sewer.”

  Stephen said one word very low.

  “Petroff?”

  She never knew what a relief her answer brought him.

  “No—not like that—no.” She breathed quickly and went on. “He didn’t come much—only now and then. I think they stopped bothering about the process. I was just a useful slave. Then about a month ago Petroff was there fo
r a week. He took more notice of me. I got frightened. One night I woke up saying the formula aloud. I had to sleep with the old woman. Petroff was in the next room. He didn’t hear me, but after that I was afraid to go to sleep till he had gone. A week ago he came back. In the evening the old woman said, ‘I wish you’d bring a gag for this foreigner of yours! She keeps me awake all night talking in her sleep.’ It wasn’t true of course, but she must have heard something. Petroff made a disgusting joke, but afterwards they sent me out of the room and talked. When I came back, he began about the formula again. He said, ‘My mother says you say the same thing over and over again, and she doesn’t think you’re saying your prayers.’ Then he battered at me with questions. I don’t know why I didn’t tell him the formula and have done with it, but I’d promised Nicolas, and then—they hate everyone so, and they talk all the time about World Revolution. It kept coming to me—if they get the process and it helps them to make these stronger, lighter aeroplanes, what will they do with them? That used to haunt me, and I got as if I couldn’t speak. I only wanted to die. That night the old woman was taken ill. There wasn’t time for anything except nursing her. Petroff was unhappy. He cried and behaved like a child. When she was dead, he said how lonely he was, and that I must take care of him, because his life was very valuable to the Cause. He said if I told him the formula he would marry me, but in any case I must be kind to him and comfort him, because he was all alone. He got very drunk, and I ran out of the house.… Then you found me.”

  There was just a moment when the silence seemed to Stephen to be ringing with the words he must not say. Yes, he had found her, and he would keep her. The words rang in his head, and rang in the silence. Elizabeth was aware of them, as someone who is quite deaf may be aware that the air is vibrating with the clamour of unheard bells. She was disturbed without knowing why. But it had been a relief to speak—the greatest relief that she had known for more than a year. The burden of her secret knowledge had been lifted. Stephen could carry it now.

  CHAPTER VII

  The snow did not come. A bitter wind blew, and the sky was heavy and dull.

  Elizabeth’s strength came back to her. She was astonished at the number of hours she could sleep. She went out next morning into the yard which lay behind the house. There was a rough barn with a diminished store of fodder for the one cow, which was the last pride of Akulina’s heart. Once she had had three; now it was as much as they could do to keep even one alive through the winter. She grumbled on about the old times and the new without waiting for any reply. She did not trouble herself to be at all discreet. If she couldn’t say what she liked at her time of life and in her own backyard, things had come to a pretty pass. Indeed that was just what they had come to. What was the use of sweating and straining to grow crops for Them to take away and hand over to townsfolk who had never done an honest day’s work on the land in their lives? “And if you hide a bit of corn to keep you alive through the winter they go on as if you’d done murder.” As if it wasn’t hard enough to get a living anyway, with neither of them as young as they were and Katinka so far away that she might just as well be dead. “Those who have ten children can have them all under one roof, but when you’ve only got one she’s bound to go as far away as she can.” She and Yuri had had other children, but they had lost them all, and now, when she could have done very well with a good strong girl about the house, Stefan must needs go and bring home a useless dreep of a creature with about as much colour and strength as a tallow dip which has been left out in the August sun.

  Elizabeth endeavoured to placate her.

  “I’m getting stronger.”

  “With those hands? What work have they ever done, I should like to know!”

  “I can sew,” said Elizabeth.

  “And embroider?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “And what’s the good of that, now there’s no cloth to be had? Even if one had money to buy, the government shop is only open one day in the month—and the good-for-nothing rubbish they sell!” She made a gesture of contempt. “We used to weave our own cloth, but They won’t have it. Fine new times—that’s what I say! You’ve no clothes but what you stand up in, I suppose?”

  Elizabeth shook her head.

  “When I married,” said Akulina with pride, “I’d a Sunday dress as well as a working one, and I had two embroidered handkerchiefs. I have them still. In those days stuff was made to last, not to fall to pieces when it had been worn three times.”

  While she grumbled, Elizabeth was thinking. Her bad Russian would be less noticeable in a village where a mixture of Russian and Ukrainian would probably be quite usual. She must say as little as possible of course. Perhaps she wouldn’t have to go out much.

  She found next day that she would have to make a public appearance. There was to be a special broadcast at the Soviet House, when a speech by Voroshiloff would be received. To stay away would be to expose oneself to a charge of being lacking in Revolutionary ardour. Red Stefan’s wife must be above suspicion in that respect. She could at any rate hope to be lost in a crowd, since the whole village would be there.

  They walked up the road to the pink-washed building which Elizabeth had seen standing out amongst the village houses on the day of their arrival. It contained a fair-sized hall furnished with benches. At the far end was a platform upon which there were a couple of chairs, a table, and a wireless installation. From the wall a picture of Lenin looked down, symbolically draped in red, with the blood-coloured star of the Revolution above, and the hammer and sickle below. Under this portrait was a second small table, on which reposed Lenin’s works—the Scriptures of the new State.

  The room seemed quite full as they came into it. It was lighted by unshaded wall-lamps with reflectors, and the smell of soot and oil mingled with the smell of sheepskins, tobacco and unwashed clothing. As they entered, the village schoolmaster was concluding a speech which was evidently intended as a stop-gap, for at intervals he turned from the audience to fidget nervously with the wireless controls, when a loud roaring sound supervened. Each time he did this he explained all over again that there was some trouble with the transmission, after which he continued his speech, which was all about the blessings of education. He was a thin, worried man with a weak, worried voice. No one appeared to be taking the slightest interest in what he was saying. He did not even seem to be interested in it himself. The other chair on the platform was occupied by the village President, a grey-haired man with a fine head.

  When the schoolmaster turned again to the wireless, Yuri, who had been gazing morosely at the President, remarked in a perfectly audible voice,

  “That man cheated me over a cow thirty years ago, and there he sits in a fine chair as if he were a Commissar!”

  The people in front of him turned to look, the President opened his mouth to speak, and with a sudden blare from the loud speaker Voroshiloff was addressing them from Moscow. Whatever his natural voice might have been, under the technical defects of the instrument and the schoolmaster’s inexpert fumbling it had become a super-voice—enormous, tinny, raucous. It bawled out a sentence about World Revolution and ceased abruptly. A horrible crackling took its place.

  The schoolmaster fiddled with the controls, and was evidently about to resume his seat, when a woman pushed through the crowd and, springing on to the platform, turned to face the room. After one glance Elizabeth did not need Akulina’s disgusted “Of course she must come shoving in” to tell her that this was Irina. She was tall and well made. She wore the blouse and skirt of a peasant woman, but she wore them with ease and grace. A scarlet kerchief was knotted at her breast, but her head was bare. It was a well shaped head, covered with thick glossy black hair. Elizabeth, gazing at her curiously, received an odd sense of shock. Stephen had said that Irina was good-looking. Good-looking? She was beautiful. She was perhaps the most beautiful person that Elizabeth had ever seen. From that dingy ill-lit platform her beauty bloomed like a flame. That was what she reminded Elizabeth o
f—a dark and vivid flame. She had a lovely oval face with regular features and large dark eyes. But the burning and the beauty came from within. It shone through her and seemed to light the hall.

  She began at once in a clear ringing voice which completely drowned the schoolmaster’s attempt to finish his last sentence.

  “If we cannot hear Voroshiloff, we can hear Lenin. We can hear the voice of the Revolution speaking in our own hearts and being echoed back from millions of other hearts, not only in the Union of Soviet Republics, but from the world outside, where a million million workers hail the rising of our Red Star and lift up their right hands to join with us in the overthrow of the bloody monster of Capitalism. We aim at the dictatorship of the world proletariat and the dictatorship of the world proletariat is an essential condition precedent to the transformation of World Capitalist Economy into Socialist Economy. The federations of republics will grow into a World Union of Soviet Socialist Republics uniting the whole of mankind under the hegemony of the International Proletariat.”

  Her voice had a singular dominant quality. Elizabeth saw all the faces in the hall lifted. People who had been fidgeting and whispering now stared in the direction of the platform.

  “The bourgeoisie,” declaimed Irina—“the bourgeoisie resorts to every means of violence and terror to safeguard its predatory property. Hence the violence of the bourgeoisie can be suppressed only by the stern violence of the proletariat. The conquest of power by the Proletariat is the violent overthrow of bourgeois power and the destruction of the Capitalist State.”

  The long words rolled over the listeners’ heads. Except for a few of the younger ones—little Octobrists of eight or nine, adolescent Pioneers, Young Communists—they neither understood nor wished to understand what Irina was saying. It all sounded very fine and grand, and it was doubtless pleasing to Them. In the old days you had to stand well with the land-owners, the people up at the big house. Now they were gone, but there were new masters. The peasant always has a master. Whether you use two flat stones, which is the oldest way of all, or a piece of noisy machinery, which is the very newest, it matters little to the grain which is in process of being ground.