Charlotte looked forward with mixed feelings to Belinda’s coming-out ball. She had never been to a town ball, although she had been to lots of country balls, many of them at Walden Hall. She liked to dance and she knew she did it well, but she hated the cattle-market business of sitting out with the wallflowers and waiting for a boy to pick you out and ask you to dance. She wondered whether this might be handled in a more civilized way among the “Smart Set.”
They got to Uncle George and Aunt Clarissa’s Mayfair house half an hour before midnight, which Mama said was the earliest time one could decently arrive at a London ball. A striped canopy and a red carpet led from the curb to the garden gate, which had somehow been transformed into a Roman triumphal arch.
But even that did not prepare Charlotte for what she saw when she passed through the arch. The whole side garden had been turned into a Roman atrium. She gazed about her in wonderment. The lawns and the flower beds had been covered over with a hardwood dance floor stained in black and white squares to look like marble tiles. A colonnade of white pillars, linked with chains of laurel, bordered the floor. Beyond the pillars, in a kind of cloister, there were raised benches for the sitters-out. In the middle of the floor, a fountain in the form of a boy with a dolphin splashed in a marble basin, the streams of water lit by colored spotlights. On the balcony of an upstairs bedroom a band played ragtime. Garlands of smilax and roses decorated the walls, and baskets of begonias hung from the balcony. A huge canvas roof, painted sky blue, covered the whole area from the eaves of the house to the garden wall.
“It’s a miracle!” Charlotte said.
Papa said to his brother: “Quite a crowd, George.”
“We invited eight hundred. What the devil happened to you in the park?”
“Oh, it wasn’t as bad as it sounded,” Papa said with a forced smile. He took George by the arm, and they moved to one side to talk.
Charlotte studied the guests. All the men wore full evening dress-white tie, white waistcoat and tails. It particularly suited the young men, or at least the slim men, Charlotte thought: it made them look quite dashing as they danced. Observing the dresses, she decided that hers and her mother’s, though rather tasteful, were a trifle old-fashioned, with their wasp waists and ruffles and sweepers: Aunt Clarissa wore a long, straight, slender gown with a skirt almost too tight to dance in, and Belinda had harem pants.
Charlotte realized she knew nobody. Who will dance with me, she wondered, after Papa and Uncle George? However, Aunt Clarissa’s younger brother, Jonathan, waltzed with her, then introduced her to three men who were at Oxford with him, each of whom danced with her. She found their conversation monotonous: they said the floor was good, and the band-Gottlieb’s-was good; then they ran out of steam. Charlotte tried: “Do you believe that women should have the vote?” The replies she got were: “Certainly not,” “No opinion,” and “You’re not one of them, are you?”
The last of her partners, whose name was Freddie, took her into the house for supper. He was a rather sleek young man, with regular features-handsome, I suppose, Charlotte thought-and fair hair. He was at the end of his first year at Oxford. Oxford was rather jolly, he said, but he confessed he was not much of a one for reading books, and he rather thought he would not go back in October.
The inside of the house was festooned with flowers and bright with electric light. For supper there were hot and cold soup, lobster, quail, strawberries, ice cream and hothouse peaches. “Always the same old food for supper,” Freddie said. “They all use the same caterer.”
“Do you go to a lot of balls?” Charlotte asked.
“ ’Fraid so. All the time, really, in the season.”
Charlotte drank a glass of champagne-cup in the hope that it would make her feel more gay; then she left Freddie and wandered through a series of reception rooms. In one of them several games of bridge were under way. Two elderly duchesses held court in another. In a third, older men played billiards while younger men smoked. Charlotte found Belinda there with a cigarette in her hand. Charlotte had never seen the point of tobacco, unless one wanted to look sophisticated. Belinda certainly looked sophisticated.
“I adore your dress,” Belinda said.
“No, you don’t. But you look sensational. How did you persuade your stepmother to let you dress like that?”
“She’d like to wear one herself!”
“She seems so much younger than my mama. Which she is, of course.”
“And being a stepmother makes a difference. Whatever happened to you after the court?”
“Oh, it was extraordinary! A madman pointed a gun at us!”
“Your mama was telling me. Weren’t you simply terrified?”
“I was too busy calming Mama. Afterward I was scared to death. Why did you say, at the palace, that you wanted to have a long talk with me?”
“Ah! Listen.” She took Charlotte aside, away from the young men. “I’ve discovered how they come out.”
“What?”
“Babies.”
“Oh!” Charlotte was all ears. “Do tell.”
Belinda lowered her voice. “They come out between your legs, where you make water.”
“It’s too small!”
“It stretches.”
How awful, Charlotte thought.
“But that’s not all,” Belinda said. “I’ve found out how they start.”
“How?”
Belinda took Charlotte’s elbow and they walked to the far side of the room. They stood in front of a mirror garlanded with roses. Belinda’s voice fell almost to a whisper. “When you get married, you know you have to go to bed with your husband.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
“Papa and Mama have separate bedrooms.”
“Don’t they adjoin?”
“Yes.”
“That’s so that they can get into the same bed.”
“Why?”
“Because, to start a baby, the husband has to put his pego into that place-where the babies come out.”
“What’s a pego?”
“Hush! It’s a thing men have between their legs-haven’t you ever seen a picture of Michelangelo’s David?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s a thing they make water with. Looks like a finger.”
“And you have to do that to start babies?”
“Yes.”
“And all married people have to do it?”
“Yes.”
“How dreadful. Who told you all this?”
“Viola Pontadarvy. She swore it was true.”
And somehow Charlotte knew it was true. Hearing it was like being reminded of something she had forgotten. It seemed, unaccountably, to make sense. Yet she felt physically shocked. It was the slightly queasy feeling she sometimes got in dreams, when a terrible suspicion turned out to be correct, or when she was afraid of falling and suddenly found she was falling.
“I’m jolly glad you found out,” she said. “If one got married without knowing… how embarrassing it would be!”
“Your mother is supposed to explain it all to you the night before your wedding, but if your mother is too shy you just… find out when it happens.”
“Thank Heaven for Viola Pontadarvy.” Charlotte was struck by a thought. “Has all this got something to do with… bleeding, you know, every month?”
“I don’t know.”
“I expect it has. It’s all connected-all the things people don’t talk about. Well, now we know why they don’t talk about it-it’s so disgusting.”
“The thing you have to do in bed is called sexual intercourse, but Viola says the common people call it swiving.”
“She knows a lot.”
“She’s got brothers. They told her years ago.”
“How did they find out?”
“From older boys at school. Boys are ever so interested in that sort of thing.”
“Well,” Charlotte said, “it does have a sort of horrid fascination.”
Suddenly she saw in the mirror the reflection of Aunt Clarissa. “What are you two doing huddled in a corner?” she said. Charlotte flushed, but apparently Aunt Clarissa did not want an answer, for she went on: “Do please move around and talk to people, Belinda-it is your party.”
She went away, and the two girls moved on through the reception rooms. The rooms were arranged on a circular plan so that you could walk through them all and end up where you had started, at the top of the staircase. Charlotte said: “I don’t think I could ever bring myself to do it.”
“Couldn’t you?” Belinda said with a funny look.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it. It might be quite nice.”
Charlotte stared at her.
Belinda looked embarrassed. “I must go and dance,” she said. “See you later on!”
She went down the stairs. Charlotte watched her go, and wondered how many more shocking secrets life had to reveal.
She went back into the supper room and got another glass of champagne-cup. What a peculiar way for the human race to perpetuate itself, she thought. She supposed animals did something similar. What about birds? No, birds had eggs. And such words! Pego and swiving. All these hundreds of elegant and refined people around her knew those words, but never mentioned them. Because they were never mentioned, they were embarrassing. Because they were embarrassing, they were never mentioned. There was something very silly about the whole thing. If the Creator had ordained that people should swive, why pretend that they did not?
She finished her drink and went outside to the dance floor. Papa and Mama were dancing a polka, and doing it rather well. Mama had got over the incident in the park, but it still preyed on Papa’s mind. He looked very fine in white tie and tails. When his leg was bad he would not dance, but obviously it was giving him no trouble tonight. He was surprisingly light on his feet for a big man. Mama seemed to be having a wonderful time. She was able to let herself go a bit when she danced. Her usual studied reserve fell away, and she smiled radiantly and let her ankles show.
When the polka was over Papa caught Charlotte’s eye and came over. “May I have this dance, Lady Charlotte?”
“Certainly, my lord.”
It was a waltz. Papa seemed distracted, but he whirled her around the floor expertly. She wondered whether she looked radiant, like Mama. Probably not. Suddenly she thought of Papa and Mama swiving, and found the idea terribly embarrassing.
Papa said: “Are you enjoying your first big ball?”
“Yes, thank you,” she said dutifully.
“You seem thoughtful.”
“I’m on my best behavior.” The lights and the bright colors blurred slightly, and suddenly she had to concentrate on staying upright. She was afraid she might fall over and look foolish. Papa sensed her unsteadiness and held her a little more firmly. A moment later the dance ended.
Papa took her off the floor. He said: “Are you feeling quite well?”
“Fine, but I was dizzy for a moment.”
“Have you been smoking?”
Charlotte laughed. “Certainly not.”
“That’s the usual reason young ladies feel dizzy at balls. Take my advice: when you want to try tobacco, do it in private.”
“I don’t think I want to try it.”
She sat out the next dance, and then Freddie turned up again. As she danced with him, it occurred to her that all the young men and girls, including Freddie and herself, were supposed to be looking for husbands or wives during the season, especially at balls like this. For the first time she considered Freddie as a possible husband for herself. It was unthinkable.
Then what kind of husband do I want? she wondered. She really had no idea.
Freddie said: “Jonathan just said ‘Freddie, meet Charlotte,’ but I gather you’re called Lady Charlotte Walden.”
“Yes. Who are you?”
“Marquis of Chalfont, actually.”
So, Charlotte thought, we’re socially compatible.
A little later she and Freddie got into conversation with Belinda and Freddie’s friends. They talked about a new play, called Pygmalion, which was said to be absolutely hilarious but quite vulgar. The boys spoke of going to a boxing match, and Belinda said she wanted to go too, but they all said it was out of the question. They discussed jazz music. One of the boys was something of a connoisseur, having lived for a while in the United States; but Freddie disliked it, and talked rather pompously about “the negrification of society.” They all drank coffee and Belinda smoked another cigarette. Charlotte began to enjoy herself.
It was Charlotte’s mama who came along and broke up the party. “Your father and I are leaving,” she said. “Shall we send the coach back for you?”
Charlotte realized she was tired. “No, I’ll come,” she said. “What time is it?”
“Four o’clock.”
They went to get their wraps. Mama said: “Did you have a lovely evening?”
“Yes, thank you, Mama.”
“So did I. Who were those young men?”
“They know Jonathan.”
“Were they nice?”
“The conversation got quite interesting, in the end.”
Papa had called the carriage already. As they drove away from the bright lights of the party, Charlotte remembered what had happened last time they rode in a carriage, and she felt scared.
Papa held Mama’s hand. They seemed happy. Charlotte felt excluded. She looked out of the window. In the dawn light she could see four men in silk hats walking up Park Lane, going home from some nightclub perhaps. As the carriage rounded Hyde Park Corner Charlotte saw something odd. “What’s that?” she said.
Mama looked out. “What’s what, dear?”
“On the pavement. Looks like people.”
“That’s right.”
“What are they doing?”
“Sleeping.”
Charlotte was horrified. There were eight or ten of them, up against a wall, bundled in coats, blankets and newspapers. She could not tell whether they were men or women, but some of the bundles were small enough to be children.
She said: “Why do they sleep there?”
“I don’t know, dear,” Mama said.
Papa said: “Because they’ve nowhere else to sleep, of course.”
“They have no homes?”
“No.”
“I didn’t know there was anyone that poor,” Charlotte said. “How dreadful.” She thought of all the rooms in Uncle George’s house, the food that had been laid out to be picked at by eight hundred people, all of whom had had dinner, and the elaborate gowns they wore new each season while people slept under newspapers. She said: “We should do something for them.”
“We?” Papa said. “What should we do?”
“Build houses for them.”
“All of them?”
“How many are there?”
Papa shrugged. “Thousands.”
“Thousands! I thought it was just those few.” Charlotte was devastated. “Couldn’t you build small houses?”
“There’s no profit in house property, especially at that end of the market.”
“Perhaps you should do it anyway.”
“Why?”
“Because the strong should take care of the weak. I’ve heard you say that to Mr. Samson.” Samson was the bailiff at Walden Hall, and he was always trying to save money on repairs to tenanted cottages.
“We already take care of rather a lot of people,” Papa said. “All the servants whose wages we pay, all the tenants who farm our land and live in our cottages, all the workers in the companies we invest in, all the government employees who are paid out of our taxes-”
“I don’t think that’s much of an excuse,” Charlotte interrupted. “Those poor people are sleeping on the street. What will they do in winter?”
Mama said sharply: “Your papa doesn’t need excuses. He was born an aristocrat and he has managed his estate carefully. He is entitled to his wealth. Those people on the pavement are idlers, criminals, drunkards and ne’er-do-wells.”
“Even the children?”
“Don’t be impertinent. Remember you still have a great deal to learn.”
“I’m just beginning to realize how much,” Charlotte said.
As the carriage turned into the courtyard of their house, Charlotte glimpsed one of the street sleepers beside the gate. She decided she would take a closer look.
The coach stopped beside the front door. Charles handed Mama down, then Charlotte. Charlotte ran across the courtyard. William was closing the gates. “Just a minute,” Charlotte called.
She heard Papa say: “What the devil…?”
She ran out into the street.
The sleeper was a woman. She lay slumped on the pavement with her shoulders against the courtyard wall. She wore a man’s boots, woolen stockings, a dirty blue coat and a very large, once-fashionable hat with a bunch of grubby artificial flowers in its brim. Her head was slumped sideways and her face was turned toward Charlotte.
There was something familiar about the round face and the wide mouth. The woman was young…
Charlotte cried: “Annie!”
The sleeper opened her eyes.
Charlotte stared at her in horror. Two months ago Annie had been a housemaid at Walden Hall in a crisp clean uniform with a little white hat on her head, a pretty girl with a large bosom and an irrepressible laugh. “Annie, what happened to you?”
Annie scrambled to her feet and bobbed a pathetic curtsy. “Oh, Lady Charlotte, I was hoping I would see you, you was always good to me. I’ve nowhere to turn-”
“But how did you get like this?”
“I was let go, m’lady, without a character, when they found out I was expecting the baby; I know I done wrong-”
“But you’re not married!”
“But I was courting Jimmy, the undergardener…”
Charlotte recalled Belinda’s revelations, and realized that if all that was true it would indeed be possible for girls to have babies without being married. “Where is the baby?”
“I lost it.”
“You lost it?”
“I mean, it came too early, m’lady, it was born dead.”
“How horrible,” Charlotte whispered. That was something else she had not known to be possible. “And why isn’t Jimmy with you?”
“He run away to sea. He did love me, I know, but he was frightened to wed-he was only seventeen…” Annie began to cry.
Charlotte heard Papa’s voice. “Charlotte, come in this instant.”
She turned to him. He stood at the gate in his evening clothes, with his silk hat in his hand, and suddenly she saw him as a big, smug, cruel old man. She said: “This is one of the servants you care for so well.”
Papa looked at the girl. “Annie! What is the meaning of this?”
Annie said: “Jimmy run away, m’lord, so I couldn’t wed, and I couldn’t get another position because you never gave me a character, and I was ashamed to go home, so I come to London…”
“You came to London to beg,” Papa said harshly.
“Papa!” Charlotte cried.
“You don’t understand, Charlotte-”
“I understand perfectly well-”
Mama appeared and said: “Charlotte, get away from that creature!”
“She’s not a creature, she’s Annie.”
“Annie!” Mama shrilled. “She’s a fallen woman!”
“That’s enough,” Papa said. “This family does not hold discussions in the street. Let us go in immediately.”
Charlotte put her arm around Annie. “She needs a bath, new clothes and a hot breakfast.”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” Mama said. The sight of Annie seemed to have made her almost hysterical.
“All right,” Papa said. “Take her into the kitchen. The parlormaids will be up by now. Tell them to take care of her. Then come and see me in the drawing room.”
Mama said: “Stephen, this is insane-”
“Let us go in,” said Papa.
They went in.
Charlotte took Annie downstairs to the kitchen. A skivvy was cleaning the range and a kitchenmaid was slicing bacon for breakfast. It was just past five o’clock: Charlotte had not realized they started work so early. They both looked at her in astonishment when she walked in, in her ball gown, with Annie at her side.
Charlotte said: “This is Annie. She used to work at Walden Hall. She’s had some bad luck but she’s a good girl. She must have a bath. Find new clothes for her and burn her old ones. Then give her breakfast.”
For a moment they were both dumbstruck; then the kitchenmaid said: “Very good, m’lady.”
“I’ll see you later, Annie,” Charlotte said.
Annie seized Charlotte’s arm. “Oh, thank you, m’lady.”
Charlotte went out.
Now there will be trouble, she thought as she went upstairs. She did not care as much as she might have. She almost felt that her parents had betrayed her. What had her years of education been for, when in one night she could find out that the most important things had never been taught her? No doubt they talked of protecting young girls, but Charlotte thought deceit might be the appropriate term. When she thought of how ignorant she had been until tonight, she felt so foolish, and that made her angry.
She marched into the drawing room.
Papa stood beside the fireplace holding a glass. Mama sat at the piano, playing double-minor chords with a pained expression on her face. They had drawn back the curtains. The room looked odd in the morning, with yesterday’s cigar butts in the ashtrays and the cold early light on the edges of things. It was an evening room, and wanted lamps and warmth, drinks and footmen, and a crowd of people in formal clothes.
Everything looked different today.
“Now, then, Charlotte,” Papa began. “You don’t understand what kind of woman Annie is. We let her go for a reason, you know. She did something very wrong which I cannot explain to you-”
“I know what she did,” Charlotte said, sitting down. “And I know who she did it with. A gardener called Jimmy.”
Mama gasped.
Papa said: “I don’t believe you have any idea what you’re talking about.”
“And if I haven’t, whose fault is it?” Charlotte burst out. “How did I manage to reach the age of eighteen without learning that some people are so poor they sleep in the street, that maids who are expecting babies get dismissed, and that-that-men are not made the same as women? Don’t stand there telling me I don’t understand these things and I have a lot to learn! I’ve spent all my life learning and now I discover most of it was lies! How dare you! How dare you!” She burst into tears, and hated herself for losing control.
She heard Mama say: “Oh, this is too foolish.”
Papa sat beside her and took her hand. “I’m sorry you feel that way,” he said. “All young girls are kept in ignorance of certain things. It is done for their own good. We have never lied to you. If we did not tell you just how cruel and coarse the world is, that was only because we wanted you to enjoy your childhood for as long as possible. Perhaps we made a mistake.”
Mama snapped: “We wanted to keep you out of the trouble that Annie got into!”
“I wouldn’t put it quite like that,” Papa said mildly.
Charlotte’s rage evaporated. She felt like a child again. She wanted to put her head on Papa’s shoulder, but her pride would not let her.
“Shall we forgive each other, and be pals again?” Papa said.
An idea which had been quietly budding in Charlotte’s mind now blossomed, and she spoke without thinking. “Would you let me take Annie as my personal maid?”
Papa said: “Well…”
“We won’t even think of it!” Mama said hysterically. “It is quite out of the question! That an eighteen-year-old girl who is the daughter of an earl should have a scarlet woman as a maid! No, absolutely and finally no!”
“Then what will she do?” Charlotte asked calmly.
“She should have thought of that when-She should have thought of that before.”
Papa said: “Charlotte, we cannot possibly have a woman of bad character live in this house. Even if I would allow it, the servants would be scandalized. Half of them would give notice. We shall hear mutterings even now, just because the girl has been allowed into the kitchen. You see, it is not just Mama and I who shun such people-it is the whole of society.”
“Then I shall buy her a house,” Charlotte said, “and give her an allowance and be her friend.”
“You’ve no money,” Mama said.
“My Russian grandfather left me something.”
Papa said: “But the money is in my care until you reach the age of twenty-one, and I will not allow it to be used for that purpose.”
“Then what is to be done with her?” Charlotte said desperately.
“I’ll make a bargain with you,” Papa said. “I will give her money to get decent lodgings, and I’ll see that she gets a job in a factory.”
“What would be my part of the bargain?”
“You must promise not to try to make contact with her, ever.”
Charlotte felt very tired. Papa had all the answers. She could no longer argue with him, and she did not have the power to insist. She sighed.
“All right,” she said.
“Good girl. Now, then, I suggest you go and find her and tell her the arrangement, then say good-bye.”
“I’m not sure I can look her in the eye.”
Papa patted her hand. “She will be very grateful, you’ll see. When you’ve spoken to her, you go to bed. I’ll see to all the details.”
Charlotte did not know whether she had won or lost, whether Papa was being cruel or kind, whether Annie should feel saved or spurned. “Very well,” she said wearily. She wanted to tell Papa that she loved him, but the words would not come. After a moment she got up and left the room.
On the day after the fiasco, Feliks was awakened at noon by Bridget. He felt very weak. Bridget stood beside his bed with a large cup in her hand. Feliks sat up and took the cup. The drink was wonderful. It seemed to consist of hot milk, sugar, melted butter and lumps of bread. While he drank it Bridget moved around his room, tidying up, singing a sentimental song about boys who gave their lives for Ireland.
She went away and came back again with another Irishwoman of her own age who was a nurse. The woman stitched his hand and put a dressing on the puncture wound in his shoulder. Feliks gathered from the conversation that she was the local abortionist. Bridget told her that Feliks had been in a fight in a pub. The nurse charged a shilling for the visit and said: “You won’t die. If you’d had yourself seen to straightaway you wouldn’t have bled so much. As it is you’ll feel weak for days.”
When she had gone, Bridget talked to him. She was a heavy, good-natured woman in her late fifties. Her husband had got into some kind of trouble in Ireland and they had fled to the anonymity of London, where he died of the booze, she said. She had two sons who were policemen in New York and a daughter who was in service in Belfast. There was a vein of bitterness in her which showed in an occasional sarcastically humorous remark, usually at the expense of the English.
While she was explaining why Ireland should have Home Rule, Feliks went to sleep. She woke him again in the evening to give him hot soup.
On the following day his physical wounds began visibly to heal, and he started to feel the pain of his emotional wounds. All the despair and self-reproach which he had felt in the park as he ran away now came back to him. Running away! How could it happen?
Lydia.
She was now Lady Walden.
He felt nauseated.
He made himself think clearly and coolly. He had known that she married and went to England. Obviously the Englishman she married was likely to be both an aristocrat and a man with a strong interest in Russia. Equally obviously, the person who negotiated with Orlov had to be a member of the Establishment and an expert on Russian affairs. I couldn’t have guessed it would turn out to be the same man, Feliks thought, but I should have realized the possibility.
The coincidence was not as remarkable as it had seemed, but it was no less shattering. Twice in his life Feliks had been utterly, blindly, deliriously happy. The first time was when, at the age of four-before his mother died-he had been given a red ball. The second was when Lydia fell in love with him. But the red ball had never been taken from him.
He could not imagine a greater happiness than that which he had had with Lydia-nor a disappointment more appalling than the one that followed. There had certainly been no such highs and lows in Feliks’s emotional life since then. After she left he began to tramp the Russian countryside, dressed as a monk, preaching the anarchist gospel. He told the peasants that the land was theirs because they tilled it; that the wood in the forest belonged to anyone who felled a tree; that nobody had a right to govern them except themselves, and because self-government was no government it was called anarchy. He was a wonderful preacher and he made many friends, but he never fell in love again, and he hoped he never would.
His preaching phase had ended in 1899, during the national student strike, when he was arrested as an agitator and sent to Siberia. The years of wandering had already inured him to cold, hunger and pain; but now, working in a chain gang, using wooden tools to dig out gold in a mine, laboring on when the man chained to his side had fallen dead, seeing boys and women flogged, he came to know darkness, bitterness, despair and finally hatred. In Siberia he had learned the facts of life: steal or starve, hide or be beaten, fight or die. There he had acquired cunning and ruthlessness. There he had learned the ultimate truth about oppression: that it works by turning its victims against each other instead of against their oppressors.
He escaped, and began the long journey into madness, which ended when he killed the policeman outside Omsk and realized that he had no fear.
He returned to civilization as a full-blooded revolutionist. It seemed incredible to him that he had once scrupled to throw bombs at the noblemen who maintained those Siberian convict mines. He was enraged by the government-inspired pogroms against the Jews in the west and south of Russia. He was sickened by the wrangling between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks at the second congress of the Social Democratic Party. He was inspired by the magazine that came from Geneva, called Bread and Liberty, with the quote from Bakunin on its masthead: “The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.” Finally, hating the government, disenchanted with the socialists and convinced by the anarchists, he went to a mill town called Bialystock and founded a group called Struggle.
Those had been the glory years. He would never forget young Nisan Farber, who had knifed the millowner outside the synagogue on the Day of Atonement. Feliks himself had shot the chief of police. Then he took the fight to St. Petersburg, where he founded another anarchist group, The Unauthorized, and planned the successful assassination of the Grand Duke Sergey. That year-1905-in St. Petersburg there were killings, bank robberies, strikes and riots: the revolution seemed only days away. Then came the repression-more fierce, more efficient and a great deal more bloodthirsty than anything the revolutionists had ever done. The secret police came in the middle of the night to the homes of The Unauthorized, and they were all arrested except Feliks, who killed one policeman and maimed another and escaped to Switzerland, for by then nobody could stop him, he was so determined and powerful and angry and ruthless.
In all those years, and even in the quiet years in Switzerland that followed, he had never loved anyone. There had been people of whom he had grown mildly fond-a pig-keeper in Georgia, an old Jewish bomb-maker in Bialystock, Ulrich in Geneva-but they tended to pass into and then out of his life. There had been women, too. Many women sensed his violent nature and shied away from him, but those of them who found him attractive found him extremely so. Occasionally he had yielded to the temptation, and he had always been more or less disappointed. His parents were both dead and he had not seen his sister for twenty years. Looking back, he could see his life since Lydia as a slow slide into anesthesia. He had survived by becoming less and less sensitive, through the experiences of imprisonment, torture, the chain gang and the long, brutal escape from Siberia. He no longer cared even for himself: this, he had decided, was the meaning of his lack of fear, for one could only be afraid on account of something for which one cared.
He liked it this way.
His love was not for people, it was for the people. His compassion was for starving peasants in general, and sick children and frightened soldiers and crippled miners in general. He hated nobody in particular: just all princes, all landlords, all capitalists and all generals.
In giving his personality over to a higher cause he knew he was like a priest, and indeed like one priest in particular: his father. He no longer felt diminished by this comparison. He respected his father’s high-mindedness and despised the cause it served. He, Feliks, had chosen the right cause. His life would not be wasted.
This was the Feliks that had formed over the years, as his mature personality emerged from the fluidity of youth. What had been so devastating about Lydia’s scream, he thought, was that it had reminded him that there might have been a different Feliks, a warm and loving man, a sexual man, a man capable of jealousy, greed, vanity and fear. Would I rather be that man? he asked himself. That man would long to stare into her wide gray eyes and stroke her fine blond hair, to see her collapse into helpless giggles as she tried to learn how to whistle, to argue with her about Tolstoy, to eat black bread and smoked herrings with her and to watch her screw up her pretty face at her first taste of vodka. That man would be playful.
He would also be concerned. He would wonder whether Lydia was happy. He would hesitate to pull the trigger for fear she might be hit by a ricochet. He might be reluctant to kill her nephew in case she were fond of the boy. That man would make a poor revolutionist.
No, he thought as he went to sleep that night; I would not want to be that man. He is not even dangerous.
In the night he dreamed that he shot Lydia, but when he woke up he could not remember whether it had made him sad.
On the third day he went out. Bridget gave him a shirt and a coat which had belonged to her husband. They fitted badly, for he had been shorter and wider than Feliks. Feliks’s own trousers and boots were still wearable, and Bridget had washed the blood off.
He mended the bicycle, which had been damaged when he dropped it down the steps. He straightened a buckled wheel, patched a punctured tire, and taped the split leather of the saddle. He climbed on and rode a short distance, but he realized immediately that he was not yet strong enough to go far on it. He walked instead.
It was a glorious sunny day. At a secondhand clothes stall in Mornington Crescent he gave a halfpenny and Bridget’s husband’s coat for a lighter coat that fitted him. He felt peculiarly happy, walking through the streets of London in the summer weather. I’ve nothing to be happy about, he thought; my clever, well-organized, daring assassination plan fell to pieces because a woman cried out and a middle-aged man drew a sword. What a fiasco!
It was Bridget who had cheered him up, he decided. She had seen that he was in trouble and she had given help without thinking twice. It reminded him of the great-heartedness of the people in whose cause he fired guns and threw bombs and got himself sliced up with a sword. It gave him strength.
He made his way to St. James’s Park and took up his familiar station opposite the Walden house. He looked across at the pristine white stonework and the high, elegant windows. You can knock me down, he thought, but you can’t knock me out; if you knew I was back here again, you’d tremble in your patent-leather shoes.
He settled down to watch. The trouble with a fiasco was that it put the intended victim on his guard. It would now be very difficult indeed to kill Orlov because he would be taking precautions. But Feliks would find out what those precautions were, and he would evade them.
At eleven a.m. the carriage went out, and Feliks thought he saw behind the glass a spade-shaped beard and a top hat: Walden. It came back at one. It went out again at three, this time with a feminine hat inside, belonging presumably to Lydia, or perhaps to the daughter of the family; whoever it was returned at five. In the evening several guests came and the family apparently dined at home. There was no sign of Orlov. It rather looked as if he had moved out.
I’ll find him, then, he thought.
On his way back to Camden Town he bought a newspaper. When he arrived home Bridget offered him tea, so he read the paper in her parlor. There was nothing about Orlov either in the Court Circular or the Social Notes.
Bridget saw what he was reading. “Interesting material, for a fellow such as yourself,” she said sarcastically. “You’ll be making up your mind which of the balls to attend tonight, no doubt.”
Feliks smiled and said nothing.
Bridget said: “I know what you are, you know. You’re an anarchist.”
Feliks was very still.
“Who are you going to kill?” she said. “I hope it’s the bloody King.” She drank tea noisily. “Well, don’t stare at me like that. You look as if you’re about to slit me throat. You needn’t worry. I won’t tell on you. My husband did for a few of the English in his time.”
Feliks was nonplussed. She had guessed-and she approved! He did not know what to say. He stood up and folded his newspaper. “You’re a good woman,” he said.
“If I was twenty years younger I’d kiss you. Get away before I forget myself.”
“Thank you for the tea,” Feliks said. He went out.
He spent the rest of the evening sitting in the drab basement room, staring at the wall, thinking. Of course Orlov was lying low, but where? If he was not at the Walden house, he might be at the Russian Embassy, or at the home of one of the embassy staff, or at a hotel, or at the home of one of Walden’s friends. He might even be out of London, at a house in the country. There was no way to check all the possibilities.
It was not going to be so easy. He began to worry.
He considered following Walden around. It might be the best he could do, but it was unsatisfactory. Although it was possible for a bicycle to keep pace with a carriage in London, it could be exhausting for the cyclist, and Feliks knew that he could not contemplate it for several days. Suppose then that, over a period of three days, Walden visited several private houses, two or three offices, a hotel or two and an embassy-how would Feliks find out which of those buildings Orlov was in? It was possible, but it would take time.
Meanwhile the negotiations would be progressing and war drawing nearer.
And suppose that, after all that, Orlov was still living in Walden’s house and had decided simply not to go out?
Feliks went to sleep gnawing at the problem and woke up in the morning with the solution.
He would ask Lydia.
He polished his boots, washed his hair and shaved. He borrowed from Bridget a white cotton scarf which, worn around his throat, concealed the fact that he had neither collar nor tie. At the secondhand clothes stall in Mornington Crescent he found a bowler hat which fitted him. He looked at himself in the stallholder’s cracked, frosted mirror. He looked dangerously respectable. He walked on.
He had no idea how Lydia would react to him. He was quite sure that she had not recognized him on the night of the fiasco: his face had been covered and her scream had been a reaction to the sight of an anonymous man with a gun. Assuming he could get in to see her, what would she do? Would she throw him out? Would she immediately begin to tear off her clothes, the way she had used to? Would she be merely indifferent, thinking of him as someone she knew in her youth and no longer cared for?
He wanted her to be shocked and dazed and still in love with him, so that he would be able to make her tell him a secret.
Suddenly he could not remember what she looked like. It was very odd. He knew she was a certain height, neither fat nor thin, with pale hair and gray eyes; but he could not bring to mind a picture of her. If he concentrated on her nose he could see that, or he could visualize her vaguely, without definite form, in the bleak light of a St. Petersburg evening; but when he tried to focus on her she faded away.
He arrived at the park and hesitated outside the house. It was ten o’clock. Would they have got up yet? In any event, he thought he should probably wait until Walden left the house. It occurred to him that he might even see Orlov in the hall-at a time when he had no weapon.
If I do, I’ll strangle him with my hands, he thought savagely.
He wondered what Lydia was doing right now. She might be dressing. Ah, yes, he thought, I can picture her in a corset, brushing her hair before a mirror. Or she might be eating breakfast. There would be eggs and meat and fish, but she would eat a small piece of a soft roll and a slice of apple.
The carriage appeared at the entrance. A minute or two later someone got in and it drove to the gate. Feliks stood on the opposite side of the road as it emerged. Suddenly he was looking straight at Walden, behind the window of the coach, and Walden was looking at him. Feliks had an urge to shout: “Hey, Walden, I fucked her first!” Instead he grinned and doffed his hat. Walden inclined his head in acknowledgment, and the carriage passed on.
Feliks wondered why he felt so elated.
He walked through the gateway and across the courtyard. He saw that there were flowers in every window of the house, and he thought: Ah, yes, she always loved flowers. He climbed the steps to the porch and pulled the bell at the front door.
Perhaps she will call the police, he thought.
A moment later a servant opened the door. Feliks stepped inside. “Good morning,” he said.
“Good morning, sir,” the servant said.
So I do look respectable. “I should like to see the Countess of Walden. It is a matter of great urgency. My name is Konstantin Dmitrich Levin. I am sure she will remember me from St. Petersburg.”
“Yes, sir. Konstantin…?”
“Konstantin Dmitrich Levin. Let me give you my card.” Feliks fumbled inside his coat. “Ach! I brought none.”
“That’s all right, sir. Konstantin Dmitrich Levin.”
“Yes.”
“If you will be so good as to wait here, I’ll see if the Countess is in.”
Feliks nodded, and the servant went away.