“If you come with me, gentlemen, I shall be very glad to show you.”
“Are you English?” asked Bertram.
The boy laughed, and said his father was English, but now dead. His mother was a Russian lady. She taught languages, especially English, to students who came to her at night after their day’s work. She received three thousand roubles a lesson, and was never home till past midnight, and then very tired. He chattered cheerfully as he strode over the snow in heavy boots, a little fellow, with bright eyes and a lively sense of humour. Yet it was not a merry tale he told, though fantastic.
“I was an important person for a time. They made me President of Arts and Sciences. I gave lectures to working men at night, on the origin of art, evolution, and elementary biology.”
“How old were you then?” asked Bertram.
“Sixteen,” said the boy. “Now I am eighteen.”
He looked no more than fourteen.
One day he was arrested for counter-revolutionary opinions. Some working-man had discovered that his father was an “aristocrat,” or objected to his discipline in class. Anyhow, he was denounced, and kept in prison for nine months. His poor mother had nearly died of grief. Then he was liberated, luckier than others who had been shot in batches for the same suspicion. Now he was an office-boy in a Government department.
“It’s been perfectly rotten,” he said, using English slang with a foreign accent.
He halted outside the Marinsky Theatre, and saluted, and then shook hands.