He said I should remain in Russia awhile longer, and do some big work, something like my “Victory.” An emaciated and exhausted figure, but still fighting; that is the allegory of the Soviet.
I answered him that I could get no news of my children, and therefore must go back.
“I must return to my own world, to my own conventional people whose first thought is always for what the world will think. Russia with its absence of hypocrisy and pose, Russia with its big ideas, has spoilt me for my own world.”
“Ah! that is what you say now, but when you are away——” and he hesitated.
Then suddenly turning on me, with clenched teeth and fire in his eyes, he shook a threatening finger in my face: “If, when you get back to England, vous nous calomniez as the rest have, I tell you that I will come to England et je vous——” He did not say what he would do, but there was murder in his face.
I smiled: “That is all right. Now I know how to get you to England.” Then (to fall in with his mood): “How can I go back and abuse the hospitality and the chivalrous treatment I have received?”
He said: “It is not abusing, but there are ways of criticising even without abuse. It is easy enough here to be blinded par les saletés et les souffrances and to see no further than that, and people are apt to forget that there is no birth without suffering and horror, and Russia is in the throes of a great accouchement.”
He talks well, he is full of imagery and his voice is beautiful.
We paused for tea, and I talked to him of things I had heard about the schools. In reply he said he had heard no adverse reports of the co-education scheme for boys and girls. There might be an individual case of failure, though even of such a case he had not heard. He then compared the present system with that of boy colleges of his own day, and he said that his own boy of fourteen had nicer ideas about girls, and far less cynicism, than he had at the same age. The boy apparently confides in his mother, so he knows something about it.
To-night he sent me home alone in his car; he excused himself, saying it was the only time it was possible for him to walk. He kissed my dirty hand and said that he would always preserve a memory of “une femme avec une auréole de cheveux et des mains très sales.”