The Man From St. Petersburg Page 16

  He went upstairs and returned Bridget's kitchen bowl.

  He came back down and looked at the bomb in the sink. He thought: I wasn't afraid. All afternoon, I was never frightened of dying. I still have no fear.

  That made him glad.

  He went off to reconnoiter the Savoy Hotel.

  SEVEN

  Walden observed that both Lydia and Charlotte were subdued at tea. He, too, was thoughtful. The conversation was desultory.

  After he had changed for dinner, Walden sat in the drawing room sipping sherry, waiting for his wife and his daughter to come down. They were to dine out, at the Pontadarvys'. It was another warm evening. So far it had been a fine summer for weather, if for nothing else.

  Shutting Aleks up in the Savoy Hotel had not done anything to hasten the slow pace of negotiating with the Russians. Aleks inspired affection like a kitten, and had the kitten's surprisingly sharp teeth. Walden had put to him the counterproposal, an international waterway from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. Aleks had said flatly that this was not good enough, for in wartime--when the strait would become vital--neither Britain nor Russia, with the best will in the world, could prevent the Turks from closing the channel. Russia wanted not only the right of passage but also the power to enforce that right.

  While Walden and Aleks argued about how Russia might be given that power, the Germans had completed the widening of the Kiel Canal, a strategically crucial project which would enable their dreadnoughts to pass from the North Sea battleground to the safety of the Baltic. In addition, Germany's gold reserves were at a record high, as a result of the financial maneuvers that had prompted Churchill's visit to Walden Hall in May. Germany would never be better prepared for war: every day that passed made an Anglo-Russian alliance more indispensable. But Aleks had true nerve--he would make no concessions in haste.

  And, as Walden learned more about Germany--its industry, its government, its army, its natural resources--he realized that it had every chance of replacing Britain as the most powerful nation in the world. Personally he did not much mind whether Britain was first, second or ninth, so long as she was free. He loved England. He was proud of his country. Her industry provided work for millions, and her democracy was a model for the rest of the world. Her population was becoming more educated, and following that process, more of her people had the vote. Even the women would get it sooner or later, especially if they stopped breaking windows. He loved the fields and the hills, the opera and the music hall, the frenetic glitter of the metropolis and the slow, reassuring rhythms of country life. He was proud of her inventors, her playwrights, her businessmen and her craftsmen. England was a damn good place, and it was not going to be spoiled by square-headed Prussian invaders, not if Walden could help it.

  He was worried because he was not sure he could help it. He wondered just how far he really understood modern England, with its anarchists and suffragettes, ruled by young firebrands like Churchill and Lloyd George, swayed by even more disruptive forces such as the burgeoning Labor Party and the ever-more-powerful trade unions. Walden's kind of people still ruled--the wives were Good Society and the husbands were the Establishment--but the country was not as governable as it had used to be. Sometimes he had a terribly depressing feeling that it was all slipping out of control.

  Charlotte came in, reminding him that politics was not the only area of life in which he seemed to be losing his grip. She was still wearing her tea gown. Walden said: "We must go soon."

  "I'll stay at home, if I may," she said. "I've a slight headache."

  "There'll be no hot dinner, unless you warn Cook quickly."

  "I shan't want it. I'll have a tray in my room."

  "You look a little pale. Have a small glass of sherry; it'll give you an appetite."

  "All right."

  She sat down and he poured the drink for her. As he gave it to her he said: "Annie has a job and a home, now."

  "I'm glad," she replied coldly.

  He took a deep breath. "It must be said that I was at fault in that affair."

  "Oh!" Charlotte said, astonished.

  Is it so rare for me to admit that I'm in the wrong? he wondered. He went on: "Of course, I didn't know that her . . . young man . . . had run off and she was ashamed to go to her mother. But I should have inquired. As you quite rightly said, the girl was my responsibility."

  Charlotte said nothing, but sat beside him on the sofa and took his hand. He was touched.

  He said: "You have a kind heart, and I hope you'll always stay that way. Might I also be permitted to hope that you will learn to express your generous feelings with a little more . . . equanimity?"

  She looked up at him. "I'll do my best, Papa."

  "I often wonder whether we've protected you too much. Of course, it was your mama who decided how you should be brought up, but I must say I agreed with her nearly all the time. There are people who say that children ought not to be protected from, well, what might be called the facts of life; but those people are very few, and they tend to be an awfully coarse type."

  They were quiet for a while. As usual, Lydia was taking forever to dress for dinner. There was more that Walden wanted to say to Charlotte, but he was not sure he had the courage. In his mind he rehearsed various openings, none of which was less than acutely embarrassing. She sat with him in contented silence, and he wondered whether she had some idea of what was going on in his mind.

  Lydia would be ready in a moment. It was now or never. He cleared his throat. "You'll marry a good man, and together with him you'll learn about all sorts of things that are mysterious and perhaps a little worrying to you now." That might be enough, he thought; this was the moment to back down, to duck the issue. Courage! "But there is one thing you need to know in advance. Your mother should tell you, really, but somehow I think she may not, so I shall."

  He lit a cigar, just to have something to do with his hands. He was past the point of no return. He rather hoped Lydia would come in now to put a stop to the conversation; but she did not.

  "You said you know what Annie and the gardener did. Well, they aren't married, so it was wrong. But when you are married, it's a very fine thing to do indeed." He felt his face redden and hoped she would not look up just now. "It's very good just physically, you know," he plunged on. "Impossible to describe, perhaps a bit like feeling the heat from a coal fire . . . However, the main thing is, the thing I'm sure you don't realize, is how wonderful the whole thing is spiritually. Somehow it seems to express all the affection and tenderness and respect and . . . well, just the love there is between a man and his wife. You don't necessarily understand that when you're young. Girls especially tend to see only the, well, coarse aspect; and some unfortunate people never discover the good side of it at all. But if you're expecting it, and you choose a good, kind, sensible man for your husband, it's sure to happen. So that's why I've told you. Have I embarrassed you terribly?"

  To his surprise she turned her head and kissed his cheek. "Yes, but not as much as you've embarrassed yourself," she said.

  That made him laugh.

  Pritchard came in. "The carriage is ready, my lord, and my lady is waiting in the hall."

  Walden stood up. "Not a word to Mama, now," he murmured to Charlotte.

  "I'm beginning to see why everybody says you're such a good man," Charlotte said. "Enjoy your evening."

  "Good-bye," he said. As he went out to join his wife he thought: Sometimes I get it right, anyway.

  After that, Charlotte almost changed her mind about going to the suffragette meeting.

  She had been in a rebellious mood, following the Annie incident, when she saw the poster stuck to the window of a jeweler's shop in Bond Street. The headline VOTES FOR WOMEN had caught her eye; then she had noticed that the hall in which the meeting was to be held was not far from her house. The notice did not name the speakers, but Charlotte had read in the newspapers that the notorious Mrs. Pankhurst often appeared at such meetings without prior warning. Charl
otte had stopped to read the poster, pretending (for the benefit of Marya, who was chaperoning her) to be looking at a tray of bracelets. As she was reading, a boy came out of the shop and began to scrape the poster off the window. There and then Charlotte decided to go to the meeting.

  Now Papa had shaken her resolution. It was a shock to see that he could be fallible, vulnerable, even humble; and even more of a revelation to hear him talk of sexual intercourse as if it were something beautiful. She realized that she was no longer raging inwardly at him for allowing her to grow up in ignorance. Suddenly she saw his point of view.

  But none of that altered the fact that she was still horribly ignorant, and she could not trust Mama and Papa to tell her the whole truth about things, especially about things like suffragism. I will go, she decided.

  She rang the bell for Pritchard and asked for a salad to be brought up to her room; then she went upstairs. One of the advantages of being a woman was that no one ever cross-questioned you if you said you had a headache: women were supposed to have headaches every now and then.

  When the tray came, she picked at the food for a while, until the time came when the servants would be having their supper; then she put on a hat and coat and went out.

  It was a warm evening. She walked quickly toward Knightsbridge. She felt a peculiar sense of freedom, and realized that she had never before walked the streets of a city unaccompanied. I could do anything, she thought. I have no appointments and no chaperone. Nobody knows where I am. I could have dinner in a restaurant. I could catch a train to Scotland. I could take a room in a hotel. I could ride on an omnibus. I could eat an apple in the street, and drop the core in the gutter.

  She felt conspicuous, but nobody looked at her. She had always had the vague impression that if she went out alone strange men would embarrass her in unspecified ways. In reality they did not seem to see her. The men were not lurking; they were all going somewhere, wearing their evening clothes or their worsted suits or their frock coats. How could there be any danger? she thought. Then she remembered the madman in the park, and she began to hurry.

  As she approached the hall she noticed more and more women heading the same way. Some were in pairs or in groups, but many were alone like Charlotte. She felt safer.

  Outside the hall was a crowd of hundreds of women. Many wore the suffragette colors of purple, green and white. Some were handing out leaflets or selling a newspaper called Votes for Women. There were several policemen about, wearing rather strained expressions of amused contempt. Charlotte joined the queue to get in.

  When she reached the door, a woman wearing a steward's arm-band asked her for sixpence. Charlotte turned, automatically, then realized she did not have Marya, or a footman, or a maid, to pay for things. She was alone, and she had no money. She had not anticipated that she would have to pay to get into the hall. She was not quite sure where she would have got sixpence even if she had foreseen the need.

  "I'm sorry," she said. "I haven't any money . . . I didn't know . . ." She turned to leave.

  The steward reached out to stop her. "It's all right," the woman said. "If you've no money, you get in free." She had a middle-class accent, and although she spoke kindly, Charlotte imagined that she was thinking: Such fine clothes, and no money!

  Charlotte said: "Thank you . . . I'll send you a check . . ." Then she went in, blushing furiously. Thank Heaven I didn't try to have dinner in a restaurant or catch a train, she thought. She had never needed to worry about carrying money around with her. Her chaperone always had petty cash, Papa kept accounts with all the shops in Bond Street, and if she wanted to have lunch at Claridge's or morning coffee in the Cafe Royal she would simply leave her card on the table and the bill would be sent to Papa. But this was one bill he would not pay.

  She took her seat in the hall quite close to the front: she did not want to miss anything, after all this trouble. If I'm going to do this kind of thing often, she thought, I'll have to think of a way to get my hands on proper money--grubby pennies and gold sovereigns and crumpled banknotes.

  She looked around her. The place was almost full of women, with just a scattering of men. The women were mostly middle-class, wearing serge and cotton rather than cashmere and silk. There were a few who looked distinctly more well-bred than the average--they talked more quietly and wore less jewelry--and those women seemed--like Charlotte--to be wearing last year's coats and rather undistinguished hats, as if to disguise themselves. As far as Charlotte could see, there were no working-class women in the audience.

  Up on the platform was a table draped with a purple, green and white VOTES FOR WOMEN banner. A small lectern stood on the table. Behind it was a row of six chairs.

  Charlotte thought: All these women--rebelling against men! She did not know whether to be thrilled or ashamed.

  The audience applauded as five women walked onto the stage. They were all impeccably dressed in rather less-than-fashionable clothes--not a hobble skirt or a cloche hat among them. Were these really the people who broke windows, slashed paintings and threw bombs? They looked too respectable.

  The speeches began. They meant little to Charlotte. They were about organization, finance, petitions, amendments, divisions and by-elections. She was disappointed: she was learning nothing. Ought she to read books about this before going to a meeting, in order to understand the proceedings? After almost an hour she was ready to leave. Then the current speaker was interrupted.

  Two women appeared at the side of the stage. One was an athletic-looking girl in a motoring coat. Walking with her, and leaning on her for support, was a small, slight woman in a pale green spring coat and a large hat. The audience began to applaud. The women on the platform stood up. The applause grew louder, with shouts and cheers. Someone near Charlotte stood up, and in seconds a thousand women were on their feet.

  Mrs. Pankhurst walked slowly to the lectern.

  Charlotte could see her quite clearly. She was what people called a handsome woman. She had dark, deep-set eyes, a wide, straight mouth and a strong chin. She would have been beautiful but for a rather fat, flat nose. The effects of her repeated imprisonments and hunger strikes showed in the fleshlessness of her face and hands and the yellow color of her skin. She seemed weak, thin and feeble.

  She raised her hands, and the cheering and applause died down almost instantly.

  She began to speak. Her voice was strong and clear, although she did not seem to shout. Charlotte was surprised to notice that she had a Lancashire accent.

  She said: "In 1894 I was elected to the Manchester Board of Guardians, in charge of a workhouse. The first time I went into that place I was horrified to see little girls seven and eight years old on their knees scrubbing the cold stones of the long corridors. These little girls were clad, summer and winter, in thin cotton frocks, low in the neck and short-sleeved. At night they wore nothing at all, night-dresses being considered too good for paupers. The fact that bronchitis was epidemic among them most of the time had not suggested to the Guardians any change in the fashion of the clothes. I need hardly add that, until I arrived, all the Guardians were men.

  "I found that there were pregnant women in that workhouse, scrubbing floors, doing the hardest kind of work, almost until their babies came into the world. Many of them were unmarried women: very, very young, mere girls. These poor mothers were allowed to stay in the hospital after confinement for a short two weeks. Then they had to make a choice of staying in the workhouse and earning their living by scrubbing and other work--in which case they were separated from their babies--or of taking their discharges. They could stay and be paupers, or they could leave--leave with a two-week-old baby in their arms, without hope, without home, without money, without anywhere to go. What became of those girls, and what became of their hapless infants?"

  Charlotte was stunned by the public discussion of such delicate matters. Unmarried mothers . . . mere girls . . . without homes, without money . . . And why should they be separated from their babies in the
workhouse? Could this be true?

  There was worse to come.

  Mrs. Pankhurst's voice rose a fraction. "Under the law, if a man who ruins a girl pays down a lump sum of twenty pounds, the boarding home is immune from inspection. As long as a baby farmer takes only one child at a time, the twenty pounds being paid, the inspectors cannot inspect the house."

  Baby farmers . . . a man who ruins a girl . . . the terms were unfamiliar to Charlotte, but they were dreadfully self-explanatory.

  "Of course the babies die with hideous promptness, and then the baby farmers are free to solicit another victim. For years women have tried to get the Poor Law changed, to protect all illegitimate children, and to make it impossible for any rich scoundrel to escape liability for his child. Over and over again it has been tried, but it has always failed--" here her voice became a passionate cry "--because the ones who really care about the thing are mere women!"

  The audience burst into applause, and a woman next to Charlotte cried: "Hear, hear!"

  Charlotte turned to the woman and grabbed her arm. "Is this true?" she said. "Is this true?"

  But Mrs. Pankhurst was speaking again.

  "I wish I had time, and strength, to tell you of all the tragedies I witnessed while I was on that board. In our out-relief department, I was brought into contact with widows who were struggling desperately to keep their homes and families together. The law allowed these women relief of a certain very inadequate kind, but for herself and one child it offered no relief except the workhouse. Even if the woman had a baby at her breast she was regarded, under the law, as an able-bodied man. Women, we are told, should stay at home and take care of their children. I used to astound my men colleagues by saying to them: 'When women have the vote they will see that mothers can stay at home and care for their children!'

  "In 1899 I was appointed to the office of Registrar of Births and Deaths in Manchester. Even after my experience on the Board of Guardians I was shocked to be reminded over and over again of what little respect there was in the world for women and children. I have had little girls of thirteen come to my office to register the births of their babies--illegitimate, of course. There was nothing that could be done in most cases. The age of consent is sixteen years, but a man can usually claim that he thought the girl was over sixteen. During my term of office, a very young mother of an illegitimate child exposed her baby and it died. The girl was tried for murder and sentenced to death. The man who was, from the point of view of justice, the real murderer of the baby received no punishment at all.