“To help the starving people of Russia, if I can,” he answered.
“That is brave of you,” she said. “There is much danger in Russia, and no kind of comfort.”
She called to the white-headed man behind the counter. “Nicholas, Katia, here is a gentleman just come from England!”
They came from behind the counter, and the elderly man clasped Bertram’s hand.
“I used to know England well, and love my memories of it. I was a painter in those days. We lived in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. Katia was a baby then.”
The girl took Bertram’s hand, and dropped a curtsey like an English debutante.
“I remember England, just a little. It seems like a fairy-tale now!”
They served him with some soup called Bortsch, and afterwards cooked a piece of meat for him with some of the potatoes which the elderly man had peeled; and while he was eating, the lady talked to him rapidly, emotionally, as though relieving the pent-up thoughts of agonising years.
It was a tale of misery. Her husband, now peeling potatoes, had been a painter at the Imperial Court, and known to be a personal friend of the Empress. He had been arrested by the Cheka and thrown into prison, where he was kept without trial for eighteen months, half-starved, in a foul cell crowded with men of good class. Many times he was examined at night by the Extraordinary Commission, mostly young lads who tried to bully him into admission of counter-revolutionary acts. Each time he believed he was being taken to execution, like others in the cell who were taken out and shot. For some reason they had spared him. Perhaps because he was an artist, and they pretended to reverence art, though they had no reverence for life. She and Katia had been turned into the kitchen of their beautiful house, which for a time had been used as a billet for Red soldiers—rough country lads who stabbed their knives into her husband’s canvases, used the tapestries to wipe the mud off their boots, and were unspeakably filthy in their habits. She had been very much afraid for little Katia. Those young soldiers had been rough with her, as they were with peasant girls. . . . She and the child had starved many days. They would have starved to death unless they had sold, secretly and at great risk, some of the jewels they had hidden. They sold them to peasant women for potatoes and cheese. Now the peasant women were hungry themselves because of the drought! She had worked at the hardest toil, chopping wood, shovelling snow, dragging sledges to Government stores.
“Look at my hands, monsieur!”