The Summer Day is Done (2 page)

‘Mr Kirby,’ she said in English, ‘there are more princesses in Russia than churches even. They mean nothing. It’s Grand Duchesses you should beware of. I don’t wish to be called “Highness”. Will you share my coach to Sevastopol?’

‘With delight,’ he said.

Andrei gave her his hand. She took it with some affection, smiling sleepily at him from behind her half-veil as she climbed aboard. Even Princess Karinshka, a known society tigress, liked the lazy, agreeable count. His ennui was a challenge to women.

The interior of the coach was all gilt and pearwood, the adjoining coupé fitted with luxurious sleeping berths. The whole was reserved for the Princess Karinshka, although the train was destined to reach Sevastopol before nightfall. Porters and officials were aboard, seeing to
the stowing of luggage for the princess and her two companions. She ignored it all. She took her seat and became immersed in conversation with Andrei, who, lounging contentedly, assured her that for the last nine months life had been empty without her. She obviously did not believe him but at least it amused her.

‘What a dreadful liar you are, darling,’ she said.

‘My dear,’ said Andrei, ‘it’s true. Ask my good friend John if I have been myself this year.’

‘John?’ Her pronunciation of the English name was like a husky cough. ‘Who is John?’

‘Come, darling, you can do better than that,’ said Andrei. ‘You two have just met and will, I hope, be friends for life. It would be intolerable,’ he added in a murmur, ‘if you became more than that. I should have to think about ending it all. My life, I mean.’

‘You ridiculous man,’ said Princess Karinshka, ‘you could not even make the effort to load the pistol, let alone fire it.’

‘He could lean from a window and let himself fall,’ said Kirby.

‘Oh,’ she said, lifting the veil and turning her dark eyes on Kirby, ‘that’s a brilliant summing-up of all that Andrei Mikhailovich is capable of.’

She stood up and removed her coat but not her hat. She wore a dress of dove-grey silk, collared and cuffed with lace, its high neck of almost Victorian modesty if one discounted the curving swell of the bodice.

As she sat down again the train jerked, jolted
and pulled away, the tender piled high with the timber logs that fed the engine. Slowly, erratically, it began to move out of the station.

Andrei settled into luxurious inertia.

‘We’ll have champagne with our lunch,’ he said.

‘You have a brain like a drawn cork,’ said the princess.

With her veil turned up over her hat, she was regarding Kirby dispassionately now. Then suddenly she said to him, ‘Is it your opinion that England is a democracy?’

‘Be careful how you answer that, dear man,’ said Andrei, ‘for you are facing the hammer of Russian socialism.’

‘Well,’ said Kirby.

‘Well what?’ she said.

‘The principles are democratic,’ he said.

‘Is that an implication that it isn’t democratic in practice?’

‘Dearest one,’ said Andrei, ‘this is all very pleasant and comfortable.
Must
we have politics? Tell me where you have been these last nine months. Had you been naughty again?’ He took out a gold cigar case. Princess Aleka accepted a long thin cigar, so did Kirby. They smoked. ‘Well, Aleka Petrovna?’ Andrei was faintly insistent. Aleka blew smoke rings. Kirby watched her. She was catlike, her posture a silken grace. She would not be silent for long. Through the blue haze her eyes looked smoky black.

‘If you must know,’ she said, ‘I’ve been in France and England.’

‘Ah, so you were caught distributing socialist
pamphlets again,’ said Andrei. ‘She’s always doing it,’ he said to Kirby, ‘and I expect the secret police suggested to her father that if he didn’t send her somewhere far away for a while, they would send her even farther for even longer. So he sent her to France and England.’

‘It was very educational,’ said Aleka. She smiled reminiscently. ‘In France democracy is corrupt, in England it doesn’t really exist. England’s political system, whatever it is, is no better than Tsarism because there are only rich people and poor people. I made many friends among the poor, but how strange some of them were. They would keep asking me why the Tsar let so many Russians starve, and so I said it was because he was probably like their King, who let so many of them starve. They seemed quite astonished at that, especially as I was always so amused. It would have been useless to tell them I was a socialist, they would not have believed any princess could be.’

‘Socialism,’ said Kirby, extremely relaxed, ‘is for idealists, surely.’

‘Socialism is equality,’ she said, ‘and is for everyone.’

‘Unfortunately,’ said Kirby, ‘it presupposes that people are equal to equality. They’re not. People are human beings. There are always those who are better, more adaptable, more inventive and harder-working. I am for the basic rights of the individual, for the right of equal opportunities, the right to be free, the right of the labourer to be worthy of his hire, the right of all to say what we like about anything we like. I am against
exploitation, oppression, armed police, female soldiers and censorship of the press. Socialism implies that poverty is a virtue. It isn’t. It’s a regrettable condition and a matter—’

‘Oh, damn it,’ she fumed, ‘are you reading me a speech? It sounds like it and it’s all rubbish. You aren’t talking about socialism—’

‘I know I’m not,’ he said.

‘Oh, you are damnably English, aren’t you?’

‘Well, of course he is, my love,’ said Andrei placatingly, ‘and it would be so nice for all of us if you’d remember there are two things completely incompatible. Politics and peace. You can have one, you can’t have both. I’d rather have peace. Darling, life is so infernally brief. You don’t really want a revolution, do you?’

‘Go to sleep,’ she said crossly, ‘and yes, I do. I want a democratic system of government, not a Tsarist Council of fat old Ministers.’

‘Under a democracy, what would happen to the Tsar?’ asked Kirby.

Andrei shuddered. ‘Not so loud, dear fellow,’ he said.

‘But nothing will happen to him,’ said Aleka. ‘He’ll still be the Tsar but not an autocratic one. You’re against our Tsar? There, you see, Andrei, that’s an Englishman for you. He’ll hear nothing against his own royalty but wishes to do away with ours. Isn’t that outrageous?’

‘My sweet chicken,’ said Andrei, ‘why not let him speak for himself?’

‘Why don’t you?’ she demanded, her silk dress whispering as she moved restlessly. ‘You can’t be a nothing for ever.’

‘It’s my earnest wish,’ said Andrei, ‘for all of us to mind our own business and not make life discomforting for our neighbours.’

‘Poor, ridiculous Andrei Mikhailovich,’ she said, ‘you’ll be swept away one day when there are no more corners to sit in. Mr Kirby, when you are in England do you belong to the rich or the poor?’

‘Comfortably off is the expression,’ he said. ‘In Russia I borrow Andrei’s servants.’

‘Oh, pooh,’ she said. ‘One day there will be no servants in Russia. One day it will all be very different. But not for a long time. Shall I tell you why?’

‘Don’t insist, dear chap,’ said Andrei.

‘Because you can’t change any system as autocratic as ours without first changing the people,’ said Aleka, ‘and Russian people will be harder to change than any others. They’re ridiculously bound by what they think is the will of God. It isn’t the will of God at all, it’s the will of the Boyars.’

‘You’re a Boyar,’ said Andrei. He wished she would be a little less formidable. He would be able to close his eyes then and wait peacefully for lunch.

‘I disown them,’ said Aleka. ‘Mr Kirby, I could dislike all my servants, not for being servants but for not wanting to change their lot.’

‘Why not give them each an acre of land and let them become their own masters?’ said Kirby.

‘They would sit on it and die,’ she said. ‘They would die of shame. They would say I was trying to make peasants of them.’

‘Dear me,’ he said.

‘So I keep them,’ she said, ‘but I don’t apologize for it. I too am trapped by the system.’

‘Never mind,’ he said cheerfully, ‘under the system as it is Andrei is able to order champagne with our lunch.’

Princess Aleka thought little of that nonsense.

‘It’s easy for you,’ she said. ‘You can play the uninvolved observer full of complacency because whatever you see is not your responsibility.’

She said no more after that. She seemed suddenly moody. She was a paradox, an aristocrat desirous of making a backward Russia look forward. She favoured the elimination of privilege which she herself enjoyed. It was privilege which most of all held Russia back. Kirby did not see how she and others of a similar mind could replace Tsarist autocracy with a people’s democracy except by a miracle. Autocracy in Russia was immovably entrenched and was, moreover, accepted rather than objected to by the people. Such opposition bold enough to take violent action, notably in the uprising of 1905, had always been localized and easy to crush.

Nevertheless, there had been some attempt to appease insistent and growing demands for the people’s representatives to be heard in the halls of autocratic power. So in 1905 the country was allowed an elected parliament, the Duma. But the Tsar did not relinquish his right to appoint ministers and to control defence and foreign policy. He also retained the power to boot the Duma into the street, although Nicholas II,
being the mild man he was, would never have made it look exactly like that.

Nicholas was inflexible in only one thing, his belief in the divine right of the Tsars. He could not allow the Duma to introduce and pass legislation which impinged on this divinity. He dissolved the first Duma after seventy-three days, applying the boot more in sorrow than anger. He genuinely believed, in any case, that the rapport between himself and his people made an intermediary organization, such as the Duma, an anachronism. However, he was willing to try, to be generous. The second Duma came into being and lasted one hundred and three days. The third Duma was, in 1911, in its fourth year of office, its mandate being for five years. So there was hope.

Kirby had not entered Russia ignorant of its politics, its problems and its anomalies, and he had come to know more of these during his three years in various parts of the country. He could afford to linger. His father, an artillery colonel, had been killed in the Boer War. His mother, passionately devoted to her lively and flamboyant husband, did not long survive him and in 1905 Kirby at twenty-two suddenly found himself at the mercy of two possessive spinster aunts, who adored him. It was no great ordeal, for Emma and Charlotte Kirby were too lovable to make their possessiveness an irritation.

Emma, the elder, owned a Georgian cottage at Walton-on-Thames. There both sisters lived and Kirby spent most of his time with them. When Emma died in 1909 she left her not
inconsiderable investments to her nephew. She also bequeathed him the cottage, with the stipulation that his Aunt Charlotte should be in residence for her lifetime. As he had also inherited several thousand pounds from his mother, Kirby became an English gentleman in that he had independent means and did not spit in public places.

Academically, he was the product of different schools and tutors, since his parents had disdained the normal practice of sending him to a public school, preferring to have him with them wherever his father’s postings took them. He had seen the world while he was growing up, acquired a cosmopolitan outlook and an understanding of people.

He was observant. This trait had come to the notice of others. He was not as entirely uninvolved as Princess Aleka had suggested.

Quite suddenly the brakes screeched, and the whole train rocked and shuddered. They were thrown into a disorderly heap on the floor. Shouts and screams sounded from one end of the train to the other.

Kirby, conscious of slim legs in pale grey silk stockings, wanted to say, ‘Anyone for tennis?’ but decided they would think he was hysterical. He pulled himself up and helped Aleka to her feet. She dusted herself down angrily. Andrei unfolded himself disgustedly.

‘Really,’ he said to Kirby, ‘what must you think of our railways?’

‘Oh, don’t be a fool,’ said Aleka, ‘go and see what has happened, both of you.’

That autocratic command coming from a professed socialist was, thought Kirby, not quite what a democrat would have expected.

‘Is your leg broken? Are you in pain?’ he asked.

‘Don’t be so damned whimsical,’ she said.

‘We’d better go,’ sighed Andrei, ‘she’ll be unpleasant if we don’t.’

They left the coach, climbing down on to the track and mingling with passengers from other coaches. The engine was a roar of steam. Princess Aleka put her head out of the window. Kirby smiled up at her. Her hat was askew. Train officials hurried by. Andrei detained one of them to enquire what it was all about.

‘It is nothing, nothing,’ said the official and hurried on. Kirby followed, Andrei picked his leisurely way. The engine stood in huge, steaming aloofness. It had come to a halt only a few yards from the beginning of a sweeping bend. A collection of timber baulks had been jammed into its path and in such a way as almost certainly to ride the front wheels off the lines. The driver was down on the track, grimacing at the near miss. Officials and passengers seethed around him. The driver, grimy from woodsmoke, did not like being shouted at. He had not been at fault, he had not placed the obstruction there. It was not his job to clear it, he had more than enough responsibilities as it was. Had he not been alert and perceptive the train would have been wrecked. Officials who were demanding action from him were peasants. He refused to labour at removing the baulks. That was work for others.

Kirby knew they would argue interminably unless someone did something. He set to and with the help of passengers in more of a hurry to get to Sevastopol than the officials seemed to be, began to loosen the jammed timbers. The driver looked on approvingly.

‘Now there’s a man who’s not a dying bag of wind,’ he said to the officials. ‘You should be ashamed to stand aside and watch someone who has paid for his seat do your work for you.’