Red Stefan (7 page)

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 of—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.

The room was warm and full of the satisfying smell of oil. Irina's voice was mesmeric. She talked about the Agricultural Front, about the Five Year Plan, about the necessity for communizing everything—The Collectivized Farm was essential—resistance to Collectivization must cease—only by way of the Collective Farm could true Socialism be established and the needs of the Proletariat satisfied. At the mention of the Collective Farm a slight glaze filmed the eyes of the listeners. Elizabeth was aware that Irina no longer held them spell-bound. Some deep, instinctive resistance made itself felt.

As Irina paused on a period, Akulina said in a bitter whisper, “Cock-a-doodle-doo! When a hen takes to crowing she's ready for the pot!”

Her neighbour on the bench, a little bent old woman, gave a brief cackle of laughter. She stared inquisitively past Akulina and Yuri at Stefan and the new wife he had brought home. She chuckled again and poked Akulina with her elbow.

“Those crowing ones don't always catch the men,” she said.

Akulina snorted. Whatever else Varvara was, she was at least quiet in the house. She said so, not troubling whether her words travelled beyond old Masha or not.

The little old woman giggled.

“To have that one in the house would be like having an earthquake there!” She indicated Irina with a jerk of her chin.

A boy with a wild, thin face had jumped up on a bench in the front of the hall and was talking fervently but not very audibly about the Young Communist movement. The fidgeting had begun again, and a buzz of talk. The two old ladies continued their conversation with a good deal of enjoyment.

Irina remained upon the platform. Standing beneath the portrait of Lenin, she surveyed the inattentive audience with an air of disdainful impatience.

“Looks at us as if we weren't good enough to tread on!” was Akulina's comment.

Masha nodded.

“She'd have had your Stefan fast enough if she could have got him. It wasn't for want of trying if she didn't. What's this girl like that he's married? She looks a quiet one, as you say.”

“Oh, she's quiet.” Akulina's tone was disparaging in the extreme.

“Any dowry?”

“Who has a dowry nowadays, when we're all stripped to the bone? Three cows I had, as you know—and how we're going to get the one that's left through the winter—”

“Is she any good in the house?” pursued old Masha.

Yuri had gone to sleep. From across him Stephen caught enough of the women's conversation to make him uneasy. Masha was the most inquisitive old woman in the village, and would undoubtedly pass on all she could glean to her six daughters-in-law, and all her neighbours. The gleaning would be well garnished.

The Young Communist was still addressing a completely inattentive room. Stephen thought it was time to make a diversion. He jumped on the bench and began to sing
The Red Flag
in a fine rolling baritone. At the first note Irina's expression changed. Exaltation replaced disdain. Springing to the front of the platform, she joined in the song. It was immediately taken up by all the younger part of the audience.

The trivial nursery-rhyme tune went with a swing. Elizabeth's fancy gave it its original German words. The deserted lover naïvely addresses a fire-tree:

“O fir-tree, oh, fir-tree,

How green are your leaves—”

He contrasts them with his sweetheart's fickle behaviour:

“O maiden, O maiden,

How false is your heart!

You swore to me when I was lucky.

Now I am poor, you throw me over.

O maiden, O maiden,

How false is your heart!”

It was a far cry from this pastoral simplicity to the angry passions of
The Red Flag
, yet these had an ugly naïveté of their own.

She looked up at Stephen towering above her, and thought how strange it was to see him swinging his arms in time to the rhythm and throwing a world of revolutionary fervour into his fine voice.

When the song was finished, there were cries of “More!” and “Go on, Stefan!” A girl of about seventeen began to sing, but she was hushed down. Stefan was evidently a popular performer, and there were demands for favourite songs. In response to one of these he gave a highly dramatic rendering of a folk-song about a man who was hunted down by a wolf. It was rather a blood-curdling performance, and old Yuri woke up to mutter, and mumble disapproval.

When the last “Yoi-hoi!” had died away, Stephen jumped down from the bench, to find Irina at his elbow. Elizabeth had seen her leave her place on the platform and make her way towards them with an uneasy sense of danger. When she saw her standing by Stephen, the thought of how well matched they were passed through her mind like a draught of cold air. She was as finely made for a woman as he for a man. Her head rose above his shoulder, while her dark hair and eyes and warm, vivid pallor were in perfect contrast to his blue eyes and ruddy colouring.

Irina addressed him at once with an air of intimacy.

“That was well sung! We have missed you here—I have missed you. There are many things which I would like to discuss with you. You have not been in Moscow?”