Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [504]
She had become a being apart. He supposed he loved her. And now he was thinking, instead, of asking her to finance their personal flight.
For in 1913, Popov was weary. There was no hope of revolution. Lenin’s attempt to reunite the Socialist left had met with little success. There had been more arrests. Even young Stalin had been exiled to Siberia. Truly, it seemed to him, he had done all that reasonably could be done.
‘We could go abroad,’ he suggested.
And, to her own astonishment, Mrs Suvorin, for a long moment, considered it.
He was an extraordinary man. She had learned much from him. He had caused her to think long and hard about her life; and he had even altered her political outlook. ‘I do think we must have democracy,’ she had finally confessed. ‘I just can’t see anything else that’s fair. I still want, personally, to keep the Tsar; but we need a Constituent Assembly.’ It had become a point of secret passion with her.
Yet he also troubled her. Talking to him about the revolution it was as if, sometimes, he had grown a protective covering – a carapace – that shut out all human feelings that might interfere with the business in hand. At such times she would think: He would kill and never care.
And now the revolutionary had surrendered. He was smiling almost sheepishly. And she wanted to take him in her arms.
The door burst open quite suddenly, as Nadezhda stepped into the room. She was wearing a long dressing gown and her hair was loose down her back. She was shaking, yet also smiling.
‘Ah, yes,’ she said calmly. ‘My mother worries about my friends. Perhaps she would prefer it if they were Bolsheviks.’
Popov gazed at her, but said nothing.
‘Would you, Mama?’ she insolently asked. Then with sudden fury: ‘Just so you know I know how you treat poor Papa.’ And turning to Popov: ‘You ought to be locked up. Perhaps you will be.’
‘Nadezhda, go to your room,’ Mrs Suvorin said promptly. But to Popov she had to murmur: ‘You had better leave.’ And to his look of enquiry she could only shake her head sadly. ‘Impossible.’
Both mother and daughter knew, from then on, that they would never mention the incident again.
1914, August
Slowly and solemnly, through the dusty summer heat, the procession wound through the streets. Priests in their jewelled robes, and wearing heavy mitres, led the way. Some carried icons, others huge banners. A choir was chanting. And as they passed, like waves unfurling themselves along a shore, a sea of hands rose and made the sign of the cross, while heads and backs bowed low. For this was Holy Russia still; and Russia was at war.
Alexander Bobrov watched with tears of emotion in his eyes. What a summer it had been. There had been a drought, and a total eclipse of the sun. Every peasant in every village had therefore known that some disaster was probably at hand. But now that it had come, here in the streets of Moscow, it was as if some wonderful religious transformation had taken place. Suddenly all differences were forgotten, all Russians became brothers, united in defence of the fatherland.
Behind the icons, someone was carrying a huge portrait of the Tsar. It might have seemed strange, had anyone paused to consider it, that this man with scarcely a drop of Russian blood in his veins, and who resembled his cousin King George V of England as much as anyone, should be the central figure in this almost Asiatic pageantry. His serious, rather unimaginative face with its short brown beard gazed out, not like some icon, nor like the grim rulers of Muscovite times, but in his own persona – a puzzled, well-meaning, and rather reluctant German prince, trapped by destiny in an alien eastern empire. But he was the Tsar, the little father of