Byzantium Endures

As a boy I was generally more interested in doing than seeing. I am by reputation an intellectual, but my chief instincts are those of a man of action. I owe my scholarship almost entirely to my mother. She insisted on my receiving an education far better than most of the other children in the neighbourhood. Fortunately she had a number of friends who, I suppose, were chiefly would-be candidates for her hand (she was a beautiful and vivacious woman) and they were helpful with advice about the best schools and what special subjects I should pursue. Our apartment was never without at least one visitor. Often there were many more, and they were by no means all Russians. In particular there was Captain Brown, the Scottish engineer, a gentleman living in reduced circumstances. He had a room off the same staircase as ours. He was rumoured to be a deserter from the Indian army. Certainly he knew a great deal about the North-West Frontier, Afghanistan and also the Caucasus, where he had spent several years (giving credence to the notion that he might be a deserter). I hardly heard him repeat a single story, he had so many: about Kazakhs, Turkmen, Tajiks and Kirghiz brigands, about Kabul and Samarkand, or the problems of building railways in Georgia. He was a small, dark man, always genial yet giving off a sense of restrained aggression, though he was very gentle with my mother in that careful, masculine, delicate way of someone almost afraid of their own strength. He not only taught me my first English words but he gave me the set of Pearson’s Magazine which was to supply so much of the reading of my boyhood and youth, make a crucial impression on my imagination and, subsequently, my ambition. I liked him the best, I think, because my mother found him such good company. She went with him to the opera and to the theatre far more often than she went with other admirers.

Kurenvskaya was one of the most cosmopolitan suburbs. My mother was popular with her customers, who were chiefly unmarried men or the servants of well-to-do people. Some of them, doubtless from boredom or loneliness, would prolong their visits to the laundry. A few old regulars would be invited into her private office, a tiny room off the main floor of the laundry, where she would offer a glass of tea or perhaps some seed-cake. Captain Brown could sometimes be found there but more frequently the chief visitors were minor officials, including Gleb Alfredovitch Korylenko. Tall, thin, lugubrious, with the appearance of a dissolute stork, he was the local postman. Previously he had been a sailor with our Black Sea Fleet until invalided home after the disaster at the hands of the wily Japanese in 1904. Gleb Alfredovitch was full of gossip and my mother and her little circle of women friends were willing listeners, though I suspect the postman and a few others were favoured chiefly because they could be of use in my education. Sometimes I would be allowed to listen while Korylenko retailed his stories of well-to-do locals. I would sit in a corner with a piece of cake in one hand, a glass of tea in the other, learning of worlds almost as romantic as those described by Captain Brown. I have a recollection of the smell of tea, of lemon, of cake, and the heavy mixture of soap and lye, starch and dye, the hot dampness of the steam which covered everything, so that newspapers and magazines were always curling and chairs and tablecloths and rugs were always just a little moist to the touch.

The postman would occasionally come to the flat, along with one or two women and perhaps Captain Brown. They would bring a bottle of vodka and discuss the gossip from Moscow and St Petersburg and any scandal (with appropriate expressions of piety) concerning Rasputin and the Tsarina. Rasputin was well-known in his day - a wandering monk with a mEsméric personality and an adroit way of palming drugs into drinks, who wheedled himself into St Petersburg society where he led a life of total debauchery, seducing even the youngest of the Tsar’s little daughters. After a glass or two of vodka Korylenko was inclined to begin a tirade against the Court for its degeneracy. He believed that stronger men were needed to control the women, that Tsar Nicholas was too lenient. But my mother would hush him up. She would not accept any hint of political talk. She became highly nervous, for obvious reasons, at such references. Probably that was why I have always hated the tension engendered by political argument, which is always pointless. I have never judged anyone by the way he votes, so long as he does not try to get me to agree with him. And only a fool, of course, will vote himself into the slavery of socialism. In my life I have met all sorts of people. Their political beliefs rarely had much to do with their actions.