THE COLLECTED WORKS OF E. M. DELAFIELD (Illustrated Edition). E. M. Delafield
aren't any of in Russia!"
I understand him perfectly.
In Russia now, we have repeatedly been told, there are no prostitutes.
They have all been collected and placed in a sort of Home of Rest, like aged horses in England.
It is, I believe, possible to go and visit them. I suppose if we ever do, they will be expected to answer any indiscreet question that any of us may, through the guide, elect to ask them.
I think, on the whole, I won't visit the prostitutes.
Sometimes Peter and I just talk about England, and Hartland Quay, and the Fourth of June at Eaton, and people we both know in London or Devonshire. It feels like looking back into another life, and on those occasions—which are generally in the small hours of the morning after a gruelling day of trams, comrades, museums, clinics, and factories—I go past the Kremlin, the fir trees, and the Mausoleum without so much as noticing them. I go on down the hill, and past the reconstruction on the river-bank, where the drill is hard at it, and into my hotel.
The dining room is brightly lit and full of people, and a little orchestra is playing "Sous les Toits de Paris"—as it does nightly.
I look in as I go by.
Mrs. Pansy Baker, the American communist, it at a table with her Germans, talking to them very earnestly. She is saying: "I have had a sad life."
I think this must be the beginning of a reference to Mr. Baker. Very likely he too has had a sad life.
In my bedroom is one cockroach. I don't like it at all. But it is headed toward the door, which I civilly hold open for it, and out it goes. A lull in the reconstruction work has set in, and I think what a good moment this will be in which to go to sleep.
The orchestra, now playing something very odd that I keep on thinking I know but can't identify, is nothing. Sometimes I win this nightly race with the reconstruction, sometimes I don't.
To-night it has only reculé pour mieux sauter, And they have got quite a new tool to work with—something like a hammer, dropping slowly down a flight of steps, over and over again, one step at a time. At last it drops once too often, and they don't pick it up again.
We are back once more at "Sous les Toits de Paris." Sur les lits de Moscou...
They Also Serve: The Provincial Lady in Leningrad
There is no unemployment in the Soviet Union: everybody can, and indeed must, work; and so far as I know, everybody does. As a kind of offset to this universal activity, everybody—when not working—sits about and waits.
At the Leningrad Hotel I also sit about and wait. I wait for the Intourist Bureau to telephone the people to whom I have brought letters of introduction. I wait for the lift, which has just taken three Comrades upstairs, to come down again—which it never does. I wait for my ten o'clock supper—ordered at nine, and brought—with any luck—at about eleven. I sit in the hall and wait, for nothing in particular. I am becoming Russianized.
A very old man comes in, wearing a fur cap and a coat. (Ancien régime, like a picture in an old nurserybook.) He sits down on a fraction of a bench which is already occupied by two French ladies, a girl in a blouse and skirt, and a Comrade smoking a cigarette.
There are never enough seats to go round in the hotel. Most of the people who come in and wait have to wait on their feet, leaning against walls. They do it fatalistically, obviously inured. The enormous shabby portfolios they all carry—like degraded music-cases—lie at their feet.
What, I wonder, are all these cases? They can't all be carrying important secret documents for the Government. Yet all the Comrades have portfolios, except the very old man who has a newspaper parcel instead, from which protrudes the tail of a fish. Perhaps the Comrades who are less ancien régime carry their fish in portfolios? The old man, I am sorry to say, spits.
I turn my attention elsewhere. An English tourist has come into the office, and I know by the brisk and businesslike way in which he begins that he is newly arrived and has no experience of Russian methods—unlike me. (At this I feel elderly and superior, and think of Julia Mills amid the Desert of Sahara.)
"There's a man I want to get hold of as soon as possible," says the Englishman blithely. "I haven't got his address, but you'll find him in the telephone book. Harrison, the name is."
"Harrison?"
"Harrison."
"You do not know where he lives?"
"I'm afraid not."
"Not in which street is his apartment?"
"No. But he'll be in the telephone book."
"Perhaps you know where is his office?"
"No, but—"
"Not in which street is his office?"
"I only know that his name is Harrison, and he's in Leningrad, and you'll find him in the telephone book."
"Ah, But you have not his address."
"It'll be in the telephone book."
"Ah."
There is a long silence. At this stage—for I have heard this dialogue before, and have often taken part in it myself—some English tourists, and most American ones, look round for the telephone book and swoop down upon it. This Englishman, however, is of inferior mettle. Or perhaps he has Russian blood in him.
He waits.
Presently Intourist utters once more:
"He has a telephone number?"
"Yes. He'll be in the book."
"Ah, It is at his house or at his office, the telephone?"
"His office, I think."
"And the name it is Harrison?"
"Harrison."
Faint demonstrations of searching for the book.
"The book it is not here. I will send."
A young blonde, who has, to my certain knowledge, been standing waiting for the better part of an hour, is sent to fetch the book. Perhaps it is for that and nothing else that she has been waiting? Intourist waits, the Englishman waits, we all wait.
The French ladies on the bench have begun to mutter to one another, low and venomously.
"Mais voilè—elle n'a pas de cceur. Tout simplement. Elle manque de coeur."
"Ça, par exemple—non!"
"Moi, je vous dis que si."
"Moi, je vous dis que non."
Deadlock.
The very old man has now, I think, fallen into a coma. What an abominable thing it is to keep him waiting all this time! He is a hard-working peasant, and his haughty employer, the Grand Duke, is upstairs drinking champagne—
What am I thinking of? The poor Grand Duke is, if fortunate, giving dancing lessons somewhere on the Riviera. The old man is a worker, a Comrade—he is quite all right.
Still I don't think they need keep him waiting such a very long while.
Presently the blonde returns with the telephone book, and Intourist begins to turn over the leaves, and to say once more:
"Harrison?"
"Harrison."
"Ah, Harrison," Along pause.
"No. He is not here,"
"But I think he must be. I say, would you mind if I had a look?"