A Train of Powder
Page 36
But if it came to Kuznetsov’s knowledge it must have distressed him, for he was by all accounts an affectionate father himself, and during the last few weeks his five-year-old son must have seemed peculiarly dear to him. Misha was not with him in Kensington Palace Gardens. The Soviet Embassy has a country house for its employees, Seacox, fifty miles southeast of London near Hawkhurst in Kent, which it acquired for thirty thousand pounds. The little boy was sent down there when he and his parents were removed from their flat in Holland Villas Road. It is not known when his father saw him again. For Kuznetsov was alone when he left England on the Jaroslaw-Dabrowski on July 17. Though it might be supposed that the passages on a Polish ship would be at the disposal of the Soviet government, it was announced that there was only one cabin free and that therefore his wife and child must follow later. They sailed on August 5 on the Beloostrov. When they arrived at Moscow station Mrs. Kuznetsov looked eagerly round her, then burst into tears. Apparently she had hoped that someone would meet her whom she did not see. This may have been her husband. But other people came forward and took her away. Nobody was sorry for the Marshalls and the Kuznetsovs, for pity had long ago gone out of fashion.
Mr. and Mrs. Marshall visited Kensington Palace Gardens not once but three times; so wise was Emerson, so true was his saying, admired by Mr. Bentall of Kingston, “If a man write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbours, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten track to his door.” The Soviet Embassy might as well have been in the woods, so far as Mr. Marshall was concerned. To a lively inhabitant of Wandsworth, which is warm and moist with close-pressed current life, there can have been little enticement in Kensington’s wide and disappointed streets, where nearly every house is used less handsomely than was intended, and life seems to be draining away down the unnecessarily broad gutters. He cannot really have expected that things would have gone well with him there; if there had been any possibility that Kuznetsov could speak he would have spoken long before. But Mr. Marshall was not a free man. He was in the custody of his own fatherhood, and when his jailer bade him go with his wife, who was in the custody of her motherhood, into this alien and formal area for his son’s sake, he had to obey. They were, though they could make this journey across London, as much prisoners as the man they visited and as their son.
It is to be wondered that Kuznetsov should have had a son, knowing that the door might shut on him at any time as it had shut on the others. Mr. Marshall, too, had known well that there were nets and pits and that many a man had been caught before he could think of the words that would get him out. But the city which was traversed by the Marshalls, which encased Kuznetsov’s growing sense that something had gone wrong, was inscribed with a larger writing of that riddle. In winter the irrational process is disguised, but in summer, when children rush out of all the houses, it shows, naked and astonishing, the persistence of the human race in begetting and giving birth, in being born. In many gardens behind the little houses washing was hanging on the lines, even when it was not Monday and therefore not washing day at all by British tradition; there were rows of diapers pegged out square and white. Across a gravel path a wooden horse painted with blue spots lay on its back, the red cart it drew sticking up into the air at the authentic angle of serious accident. On the next lawn a tiny boy stood in front of cricket stumps, opening his mouth in an earnest circle as he held his bat straight and waited for an imaginary bowler to send along the ball; and in the next again, a fat little girl lumbered round and round, twirling a stick with a paper star on it. Among the shrubberies of an orphanage children in blue overalls ran and leaped as if they had not been deserted. There were many of them; there were specks of blue coming and going among the farthest trees. In the streets the air was loaded with a warm haze, smelling of dust and sunbaked bricks and mortar, which was a dry tickle in the nose and throat, yet left sweat on the skin; so down by the Thames the naked boys stood on the mud under the embankments and sunned themselves, their spare bodies erect like flames and white against the grey stone, or slid out among the diamonds of the sunlit water, shouting to other boys who shouted back from boats.
On the other side of the river the grey pavements, whitish under the excessive light, were scored with chalk marks for hopscotch, and hop, hop, hop, the little players went, lively in spite of the heat, as those cannot be who are older and have had summer after summer sucking the marrow out of their bones. In deck chairs, on the shiny blond grass in the parks, adults lay with closed eyes, their faces piteous, as if they could not support the weight pressed on them by the massive sunshine. Past them hurried children, on their way to bathe in the pools, or to hurtle themselves about on the slides and swings and whirligigs in the playgrounds, or to have a game of cricket with a curled-up coat laid on the ground for stumps. The children cried out exultantly as they went, crying without cease, as people in religious processions chant continually, that they were children, that they were with other children, that all of them were alive. If there should come to earth travellers from another planet where there is justice and all goes by reason, it must amaze them, how humanity makes a beaten track out of nothingness to this curious prison where there is no end to captivity and giving into captivity. They would wonder why the orphans in the shrubberies, the naked boys on the mudflats, the children in the parks, lifted up their voices like confident prophets, and why the adults lay still under the sun, as if they saw through their closed lids a vision which made it safe for them to rest. They might wonder if humanity knew something as yet unstated, which makes it not folly to be born. But it can be said of this larger mystery only what can be said of the lesser mystery in which William Martin Marshall was involved: the facts admit of several interpretations.
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“Greenhouse with Cyclamens I,” “Opera at Greenville,” “Mr. Setty and Mr. Hume,” and “The Better Mousetrap” were originally published in the United States in the New Yorker, to which grateful acknowledgment is made. The author also desires to thanks the editors of the Daily Telegraph, Time and Tide, the Evening Standard, and World View, in England, for the opportunities they gave her to collect the material for articles included in this volume.
copyright © 1946, 1947, 1950, 1953, 1955 by Rebecca West
cover design by Karen Horton
ISBN: 978-1-4532-0724-6
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