‘Your Highness,’ said Karita, ‘we have come to see you.’
Aleka peered incredulously.
‘Karita? What are you doing here, for God’s sake?’ The sky rained snow on them as Aleka stared at Karita’s furs, at the elegance and beauty they gave her. She swung round on Kirby. The driver was torn between wanting payment and wanting to witness. He coughed. Aleka ignored him. ‘How dare you,’ she said to Kirby in fury, ‘oh, how dare you!’
‘Her Highness,’ observed Kirby to Karita, ‘is already up and down.’
‘Libertine!’ hissed Aleka. ‘You have torn this innocent from my protection and from her loved ones! I will have you shot!’
‘Highness, no,’ cried Karita, ‘oh no!’
It was intensely interesting, thought the driver, but it was the sort of thing that could go on indefinitely and cost a man money. Didn’t they realize how competitive it was plying for hire? No, the fact was they were the kind of people who didn’t have to ply for hire. Theirs was a world of comfort and talk. Talk, talk, talk. And here they were now, going at it in the snow and having the time of their lives. He shifted crunchingly from one foot to the other.
‘Oh,’ sneered Aleka, ‘you’ve run off with him, have you, girl? The seducer has won you with a fur coat, has he? Karita, I blush for you. You whom I’ve seen grow from a child. Oh, fool of a girl. Do you think a fur coat can make you happy? Do you think a man can? Karita, I blush for your lost innocence and your stupidity.’
‘Your Highness, you are blushing very unnecessarily,’ said Karita.
‘Oh, my word,’ said Kirby and found it difficult to keep his face straight. ‘Let me pay the driver and deal with the luggage, and then we can all talk about it in my apartment.’
The driver had lumbered off the luggage, it stood bulkily in the snow. Kirby paid him off so handsomely that the man took back all he had said to himself, and to clear his conscience he spoke out.
‘God go with you, Highness,’ he said to Kirby, ‘and may He do more than that. You’re in for a fiery time with these two and will need all the help you can get.’
‘You insolent!’ shouted Aleka. He touched his whip to his shaggy hat, mounted and drove off grinning and happy. Kirby brought the apartment porter out to deal with his luggage and then went up. The apartment was on the second floor. Karita was in immediate approval. She had been afraid he would not do himself justice and could not think why he had not taken a magnificent house. But she could not fault the spaciousness of the apartment, the number of rooms and the effects and furnishings. The drawing room was laid with a deep red carpet, spaced with red-padded chairs. There were warm velvets and brocades, rugs and tapestries, a dining room of panelled walls and two bedrooms.
He and she looked it over. Princess Aleka followed them about, a vision of pale, accusatory beauty. She was ready to cry with temper.
‘Princess,’ said Kirby at last, ‘please sit down. There’s nothing wrong, I assure you.’
‘Oh, damnation,’ she said, ‘are you married to her, then?’
‘Your Highness!’ Karita was inexpressibly shocked.
‘What the devil are you doing here together, then?’
Kirby made her sit. The apartment was warm, she was stifled in her furs but refused to remove even her hat. She would suffer bodily discomfort as well as mental turmoil. Nothing would make her believe that Ivan Ivanovich had brought Karita to St Petersburg for the good of her soul. The man was a swine. They all were.
Kirby explained. Karita helped. Aleka began to listen. The atmosphere became calmer. Kirby put it all very concisely. The swine sounded sincere enough. Karita looked angelically so.
‘Oh, don’t go on,’ Aleka said suddenly, ‘isn’t it enough that you let me make a fool of myself? Ivan, you do some unspeakable things to me. And then you wish me to do you a favour, to release Karita. Where did she get that sable?’
‘She got it because she needed it. Aleka sweet, would you have her perish?’
‘I only want to protect her.’
He looked into her brooding, suspicious eyes. His look made her flush a little angrily.
‘She’ll be safe with me and from me,’ he said, ‘but if you say so, she must remain in your service and go back to Karinshka.’
Karita seemed to wince. She turned and went into the main bedroom to unpack his luggage. Aleka regarded Kirby from under drooping lids. He was so bronzed that she felt anaemic. He was seducing her from her resentment with that smile of his. She wrenched herself away from it, got up and flung her coat off, revealing a deep green dress that brought her paleness to life.
She turned to him. She was smiling. She took off her hat and tossed it on to a chair. Her auburn hair was dressed to softly shade her forehead.
‘Ivan? You’re pleased that we met tonight? You haven’t said so.’
‘I’m always pleased to meet you, Aleka. You’re an excitement.’
She came forward and put her hands on his shoulders, her lightly rouged mouth provocative.
‘You could not tolerate dull little England after Russia, could you?’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t have gone, I told you not to. I should have gone to Karinshka if I’d known you were at Livadia. Alexandra would not have refused to have me there too. Why didn’t you let me know? Oh, of course, that wouldn’t have suited you, would it? There was Alexandra Fedorovna to fetch and carry for. I should have been excessively in the way. It isn’t very flattering to feel I’m less stimulating than she is. Although she’s an Empress, she’s not exactly pulsating.’
‘Do Empresses have to be?’ he asked.
‘Oh you, with your silly words.’ She smoothed his shoulders, her hands lightly caressing. ‘I’ve been everywhere except to the Crimea. Ivan, everything is beginning to be tremendously active and I’ve been sticking pins into ministers. Tonight I’m having a late supper after the theatre. Come at half past ten.’
‘What about Karita?’
She flashed into fire again.
‘Oh, is she so indispensable that you have to bring her too?’
‘I mean, what about releasing her to me? Will you, dear Princess?’
‘Let us see,’ she said and she called Karita. Karita came from the bedroom, looking more as Aleka remembered her in a neat blue dress cuffed and collared with white. ‘Karita, you can’t live with Ivan Ivanovich. What would people think?’
‘Where else would his servant live, Highness?’
‘But not just you alone, Karita, there must be others.’
‘Highness, it’s not for me to decide about others.’
‘You have a great deal to learn, silly girl. Do you really wish this new life, to be away from the Crimea and old Amarov, and have Ivan Ivanovich walk your legs off? He has a habit of wandering far and wide, you know.’
Yes, he had wandered off to Kiev, thought Karita. That had been upsetting. But what was that compared with other things? She would be serving a friend of the Tsar himself, and the Grand Duchess Olga Nicolaievna had wished very much for her to do that. Then there was the obvious fact that Ivan Ivanovich needed her. He simply had no idea of the injustice he did himself – what must people have thought of him at times, a man of his position without a servant? Besides, he made her laugh, he teased her. It would be terrible if he engaged someone else instead of her. She would miss her chance of going to England. That would make her parents look foolish as well as herself. And he would make someone else laugh in her place.
‘Highness,’ she said, ‘if it doesn’t upset you too much I would like to be in his service. I’m to go to England with him if you agree.’
‘Are you indeed?’ The princess looked as if she had made the one discovery that mattered. ‘So that’s it, is it? He’s going back to England already, is he?’
‘Before you go on to say I can’t get her there quickly enough,’ said Kirby, ‘I’ve already explained I’ll be in St Petersburg for some time.’
‘Now he’s cross with me,’ said Aleka. ‘That is what you’ll have
to put up with whenever you speak out of turn, Karita. But if this is what you really wish, then I’ll agree. There, have I pleased you both?’
‘Oh, your Highness,’ said Karita, grateful, ‘you’ve pleased me very much.’
‘Did you wish it as much as that?’ said Aleka sweetly. ‘Be careful, child.’
Karita, with a modestly innocent look, dropped a curtsey, bobbed her head to Kirby, and returned to her work in the bedroom. There she permitted herself a happy whirl or two in waltz time.
‘Well, Ivan?’ said Aleka.
‘Thank you, Princess.’
‘Oh, how formidable you are to deal with! Am I myself to ask for a kiss when I’ve just released the sweetest girl in the Crimea to you?’
He kissed her, his arms around her, his mouth warm with friendship and gratitude. She closed her eyes, hiding the laughter in them, but it communicated itself physically in quivers.
‘What are you laughing at?’ he asked.
‘At you, darling. At myself. At us. How silly we all are, and we are nothing compared with events. But how lovely to have friends, how sublime to laugh with them. Dear Ivan, that’s what life is all about. You know it, I know it, Andrei almost knows it, but there are so few others.’
‘And the poor and oppressed?’
‘That’s the strength of the poor and oppressed, they can still laugh. That’s what makes them worth every sacrifice.’
‘You might sacrifice your wealth,’ said Kirby, ‘but what else?’
She picked up her handsome fur, he took it and helped her into it.
‘My friends, my scruples and my pity,’ she said. ‘Did you enjoy Livadia?’
‘Very much.’
‘But of course. If you were a Russian I’d tell you it was healthier not to become too intimate with the Romanovs. But you’re not. So.’ She shrugged. She smiled. ‘Ivan, we’ll enjoy the season together in St Petersburg.’
‘I enjoyed some of it last year with Andrei. Will it be different with you?’
‘Much more stimulating, darling,’ she purred. ‘Andrei avoids people who matter. I like to meet them. Of course,’ she added thoughtfully, ‘my time isn’t all my own, but we will see as much of each other as possible. You see, I have a new lover at the moment.’
‘Well, how delightful,’ he said very agreeably, ‘I hope he’s stimulating. You deserve that, however new he is.’
‘Cad,’ she said. ‘But I thought I’d tell you.’
‘I appreciate it. Thank you.’
‘Most Englishmen are fairly civilized,’ she said, picking up her hat, ‘but you are damnable. You’ll come to supper tonight?’
‘I’ll look forward to it very much.’ He saw her to the door.
As he opened it she said, ‘I lied, you know. I don’t have a lover, not at the moment.’
‘Aleka Petrovna,’ he said, ‘that’s anybody’s fault but yours, and I’ll do all I can to find you one.’
She looked for a moment as if she would claw him. Then she burst into laughter.
‘Oh, Ivan Ivanovich, how good that we’ve met again. There are only two men I adore, you and Andrei Mikhailovich. You’ll see him tonight. Goodbye now.’
She gave him her hand. He kissed it. She was laughing when he straightened up. It might, he thought, have been the democrat in her that was ridiculing the outmoded mumbo-jumbo of the privileged.
Later he went to Aleka’s supper reception. Karita did not mind a bit being left.
‘Goodness, you are not to consider me,’ she said.
She was very quaint.
The reception reminded Kirby of the boisterous carousings at Karinshka last year. It took place in the magnificent drawing room of her palatial house in the Prospekt Nevskiy, a hugely roaring fire adding heat to the fire of the conversation. It differed from the conversation at Karinshka in that it took place standing up. The supper was served buffet-style, but plates, forks and full mouths did not impede the flow of words. Nothing could get in the way of Russian voices. Forks indeed could emphasize the more telling points. The sound of discussion and argument rose and fell like surf around the eardrums.
At Karinshka the guests had all been of the nobility, the young, cynical and irresponsible kind. Here in St Petersburg Aleka drew to her house a much more varied collection of individuals. She strove for an intellectual symposium, Kirby supposed, but the effect seemed just the same. There were young and burning progressives, whose command of political phraseology was such that every sentence was an oration.
‘Only a combustible agglomeration of the most incorruptible ideals exploding as one will bring down the bastions of reactionary philistines, only—’
‘Yes, yes,’ roared a well-fed journalist with a face like a paunch, ‘but have you got a match? My cigar’s gone out.’
He had to roar. The din of discussion was indescribable. Even then the burning young orator didn’t quite catch the whole of the roar and passed him a clean fork instead.
There were intense students. They were either pale-faced young men or terribly earnest young women. They assailed the ears of writers and painters, and were assailed in their turn or out of their turn. Aleka moved from group to group, joining arguments and starting new ones. She was goddess-like in a gown of palest cream. In her excitement, her half-covered bosom rose and fell, and the paunch-faced journalist said he was damned if she had any right to introduce that factor into an aesthetic argument on the principles of inalienable factory rights for workers.
‘What,’ he said in a loud aside, ‘has a bosom to do with any principles?’
‘Well,’ said Kirby, who received the full force of the aside, ‘it does belong to our hostess. One must allow her some advantage.’
‘I suppose one could look at it in that light, but it’s damned unnerving,’ said the journalist.
Andrei had found a chair. He reposed limply, gratefully. He had been delighted to see Kirby again. He lifted a languid hand in acknowledgement as the Englishman came to join him.
‘Dear man, did you ever?’ he said, his lazy handsomeness accentuated by a displaced lock of black hair. ‘The supper is beyond reproach, old boy, but how can one digest food in this atmosphere?’
Nobody else was having that kind of trouble. The more the guests talked the hungrier they became.
‘I’m surprised you’re here,’ said Kirby.
‘Compulsive reaction of twitching limbs, my friend. She calls, my limbs obey.’
‘I can’t think why you don’t marry her, you’ll suit each other perfectly.’
‘Love is one thing,’ said Andrei, ‘to be devoured is another. Is there some champagne?’
A liveried servant, self-trained to telepathic perfection for moments like this, bore down on them with a tray of filled glasses. They each took a glass. The golden liquid popped around the rims.
Not until the food had gone did the guests depart. They were as loquacious as ever and for minutes the street outside was full of loud voices, and then all was quiet. Aleka slumped into a chair, stretched her legs in ecstasy. The room was littered. Cigarette smoke curled lazily around walls and ceiling. The roaring fire had subsided.
‘Open a window,’ said Aleka.
Andrei paled.
A servant appeared, parted vast hanging curtains and opened a window. Damp, icy air rushed madly in to heat itself. Andrei shivered. Aleka breathed deeply. Earrings ruby red depended from her pierced lobes and three strands of matching stones rested like fire around her neck and over her bosom. Kirby put his head out of the window. The Prospekt Nevskiy was a cold, brilliant white.
‘Man’s inhumanity to man is a sad thing,’ said Andrei, and retreated from the incoming cold to stand with his back to the fire.
‘You can shut it now,’ said Aleka. Kirby closed the window. ‘Well, Ivan, what did you think of my guests?’
‘Didn’t I meet most of them at Karinshka last year?’ he said.
‘Are you mad?’ she said.
‘They sounded the same.’
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br /> ‘Andrei, did you hear that?’ She was reclining in feline content. ‘That is our Ivan come back to us, isn’t it? Andrei, isn’t he precious? How did we ever manage to be amused without him?’
‘I haven’t been amused,’ said Andrei, ‘not with everyone so distressingly agitated about everyone else. No one is taking the time to enjoy life, everyone is in a hurry to make things respectably dismal for the rest of us. They are all talking about saving Russia. Ah, poor innocents, in saving it their way they’ll destroy it, and then they’ll say, “What happened?”’
‘Andrei, you see,’ smiled Aleka, ‘is at last becoming involved. He’s actually beginning to talk. We will all talk. It is nice now, just the three of us. Ivan, socialism is getting stronger all the time. We shall yet have it while we’re still young.’
‘You won’t like it,’ said Kirby.
‘Oh, you are a Tsarist, of course. You can’t see any good in socialism.’
‘I can see it would work for others,’ he said, ‘but not for you, Aleka.’
‘Because I’m a Boyar and wealthy? Pooh,’ she said, ‘you think I wish to remain privileged? I am for a socialist Russia and I can’t make conditions to preserve this for myself or that for myself. I wouldn’t want to. If I have to I’ll work. I would not be ashamed to. I will work for the state.’
She never could, thought Kirby. It would drive her mad. She would die if she were chained, and she had no idea of what work entailed, even less idea of what work for the state meant. Others could accept it, would accept it. Aleka could not. She wanted to think she could, but it would stupefy her, destroy her. She was born to invigorate people, to amuse, to shock, to entertain. When Rome burned, aristocrats turned to their fiddles. Socialists did away with fiddles. Cromwell did away with them in England. The people hated it.
Before Aleka could endure it in practice, socialism would have to become sophisticated. It would have to grow up.
There was only one way she could work for the state. In the theatre. There she would make the workers laugh and cry.
The Summer Day is Done Page 16
