THE COLLECTED WORKS OF E. M. DELAFIELD (Illustrated Edition). E. M. Delafield
notice it if I do go to sleep, my host abruptly inquires of me which writer of fiction is leading the younger school in England now? Which indeed?
I must think of a name, and I must try to think of one that will convey something to my hearers into the bargain.
I hope to combine a modicum of truth with a certain amount of diplomacy by saying: "Dreiser."
"Theodore Dreiser?"
"Theodore Dreiser," I repeat firmly, and I really think I have displayed great presence of mind, considering that I am more than half asleep.
"I meant," says my host, "which of the moderns. Theodore Dreiser is the literature of the grandmothers, yes?"
Not of any of the grandmothers I know, he isn't. But I don't say so. Theodore Dreiser and I retire together into the ranks of the grandmothers and are disinterred no more.
Only just before we go away, at three o'clock, the only other woman present asks me rather sharply if I have any silk stockings, aspirins, lip-sticks, cotton frocks, or nail-scissors to sell.
I suppose she thinks it's all I'm fit for—and I am disposed to agree with her, and make a rendezvous for next day, for her to come to my hotel and inspect my belongings.
Shortly afterward I say good-night to Peter at his door and continue on my way—Red Square, Kremlin, Mausoleum, fir trees, Basil Cathedral, Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all, Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all.
IV
The Russian lady keeps her word. She much more than keeps it. She not only comes and buys everything that I want to sell, but swoops down on a large number of things that I don't want to sell, and says she'll take them as well. She opens my wardrobe and takes down my frocks, she lifts up the pillow on my bed by a sort of unerring instinct—like a water-diviner—and discloses my pajamas, and she looks inside my sponge-bag. (What can she possibly suppose that I am hiding inside my sponge-bag?)
"Look, I take this ink-bottle off of you as well, and if you have a fountain-pen I take that, and I take for my husband the blue frame (he will not want the photograph; besides it is your children, you will like to keep it) and for myself I take those things what I have already bought, and the red jumper, the pajamas, the two frocks. Have you any boiled sweets?"
No, I haven't any boiled sweets. And nothing will induce me to part with the safety ink-bottle or the blue frame or my only two frocks.
It takes a long while to convince the Russian lady that I really mean this, and I have eventually to concede the red jumper and the pajamas. She still looks so fixedly at the ink-bottle that I become unnerved, and distract her by an offer of meat-juice tablets—for her husband—and handkerchiefs and safety-pins for herself.
She buys them all and pays me in roubles on the spot. When I put the money away in my bag she says she will buy the bag, and when I hastily thrust the bag into my suitcase she says she will buy the suitcase.
I get her out of the room at last by giving her a lip-stick as a sort of bonus, like a pound of tea for a cash sale.
When, in the passage outside, I refer to our morning's work she says, "Hush Not so loud," and I realize that the whole transaction has been an illicit one and that Comrade Stalin would disapprove. We might perhaps even find ourselves, like the ill-conducted poet, constructing a new bridge across the Neva.
All the same, if I'd known what a shortage there is of pretty, brightly colored odds and ends in the Soviet Republic, I think I should have brought a great many more of them with me—and not only for the sake of turning a doubtfully honest rouble out of them either.
V
One morning Peter and I go to Kolominsky escorted by the Little Monster. She says it is an ancient monastery, and when we get there it looks like an ancient monastery but she recants and says it was a Palace of Ivan the Terrible. I don't know which she means. Prefer to think of it as a monastery.
Much the most peaceful spot I have seen in Russia—no Comrades, no reconstruction, not even a picture of Lenin with outstretched arm and clenched fist.
Just as I am sitting on a stone wall under the lime trees and looking down at the fields and the river, the guide tells me that on this exact spot Ivan the Terrible used to watch the peasants being flogged.
It is a great pity she cannot let well alone. However, it is to-day that we hear her, for the first and last time, make a joke. On the way back to the tram, passing through a tiny village, we see a little calf lying on the roadside, with a small pig nuzzling affectionately against it, both of them fast asleep in the sunshine.
Even the swivel eye of the Little Monster softens as she gazes down at them and she says:
"Look! In a Socialist state—no prejudice!"
For the moment, as we all three laugh, she seems quite human.
It doesn't last. She becomes as hortatory and tiresome as ever long before the tram has lurched back into Moscow with us, and makes us get off at the wrong stop, so that we have to walk several additional miles to Peter's hotel.
"It still seems odd to be lunching at four o'clock."
"Yes, doesn't it? Shall you have Bortsch again to-day?"
"Yes, I like it."
"How fortunate you are. But their fish is better than their meat, and the ice cream is good."
"Excellent. Much, much better than the compote."
"Oh, the compote!"
We do not describe the compote to each other. It is not necessary, as we have met it, both here and in Leningrad, at every meal. We know all about the rather tough, acid little fruits in the top of the glass dish and the sliced apple below and the two rather consoling little bits of tinned apricot at the very bottom. Curious, how very much one seems to think and talk about one's food in Moscow.
Also one's drink. The mineral water is good but expensive. The ordinary, plain water—what, in any other country, would be the drinking-water—arrives on the table boiled. And very well-advised too. But either the boiling or its own natural properties have turned it pale yellow and given it a strange smell and a very peculiar taste. The remaining alternative, since neither of us drinks wine, and the beer—which is excellent—is a ruinous price—is tea in a glass.
Meals, it is scarcely necessary to say, take a very long time in Russia. Hours elapse between the moment of sitting down, and detaching from its book the coupon that represents food, and the moment when the waiter comes to take one's order. Hours more between each course. (The coupon entitles one to three courses. I have never tried to ask for a second helping, but I don't think the coupon would run to it.)
The tea comes at the very end, and is always much too hot to drink, and so necessitates another long wait.
Sometimes Peter and I talk like the thoughtful and intelligent people we really are, and discuss Socialism, and Communism, and tell each other that we really ought to have seen Russia before the Revolution in order to judge of the vast improvement effected. (When Peter says this to me it is very reasonable. When I say it to him it is simply idiotic, as before the Revolution he was an infant in the nursery.)
Sometimes we discuss our neighbors.
"I saw that man over there when I was in Batum. He speaks Dutch."
"Does he? Yes, he looks as though he might. There are some Germans at my hotel. They've made friends with Mrs. Pansy Baker and she went with them to see an abortion clinic—and a boot-factory."
"What fun. Have you seen a single pretty woman yet in Russia?"
"No. Have you?"
"No."
Once, when a blonde with black eyelashes and a tightly fitting white frock comes in and sits down all by herself at the table next to ours, Peter hisses at me through his teeth:
"If ever there was one, I'll