Red Stefan by Patricia Wentworth Page B

break the silence,
    â€œAkulina puts a red light under her ikon, and the Communists put a red star over Lenin’s picture. It’s funny—isn’t it?”
    Stephen looked over his shoulder and then back again.
    â€œAkulina frightened herself with her own stories. She was like a child, afraid to go to sleep in the dark. She knows dozens of stories and she loves telling them. She likes frightening herself, I think. Do you know what you reminded me of the first time I saw you?”
    This was abrupt, even for Stephen. If Elizabeth had not so very much wished to know what it was that she reminded him of, she could easily have gone on talking about Akulina. Instead there was one of those pauses. To Stephen it was not a pause at all, because his thoughts were on that first picture of Elizabeth and the inner vision it had given him. To Elizabeth it was a hush of suspense.
    Stephen looked at his picture.
    A cold street and a lowering sky, and a long line of people waiting for the scanty bread of the Revolution, a great many of them old, because if you had a relation past work, she had to pay her way by standing in the bread queue while the able bodied attended to their jobs. All looked hungry, cold, and pinched. Elizabeth stood far down the line. She would have a long time to wait before she got her ration. He saw her most vividly—the set of her head, the line of cheek and chin, the arch of the brow, the frozen patience in which she stood. Something kindled in him at the very first look. It was like the lamp which Akulina burned before her ikon. But it never went out.
    When Stephen had finished looking at the picture in his mind, he said,
    â€œThree or four years ago I was waiting at the edge of a lake. I had to meet a man, and he was late. It was very cold. There was a lot of cloud in the sky, and a wind, and it had begun to freeze hard. I was looking at the water, and all of a sudden I saw a star in it. The wind had moved the clouds and the star came through—I could see it in the water. It wasn’t bright like a star ought to be on a frosty night. It looked as if it were drowned. That’s the word that came into my head about it, you know—drowned. Just for a moment I couldn’t think why it looked like that. And then, of course, I realized that it was because the lake was skinning over. The star was drowned under the ice. When I saw you the first time, you were standing in a bread queue in that beastly thin dress of yours with the wind cutting like a knife. As soon as I saw you, I thought about that drowned star, because that’s what you looked like—as if the ice were freezing over you.”
    Elizabeth felt most oddly touched and embarrassed. There was not the slightest emotion in Stephen’s voice. It was exactly the same voice in which he would have made a remark about the weather. It did not change in the least when he said without any pause,
    â€œYou’re sure you’ll be strong enough to travel in a day or two? I don’t want you to be ill again.”
    â€œI shan’t be ill again. I feel—different.”
    She had been starving for more than bread. Stephen had fed her—comforted, protected, shielded her—given her kindness. What sort of ungrateful stone had she got for a heart, to be proud and angry because he had another friend? Perhaps he had been friends with Irina for years. And why not? The heart which she accused did not really feel at all like a stone. There was a new warmth about it. It shrank and trembled in a most unstonelike way.
    â€œIt’s a funny thing about revolutions,” said Stephen cheerfully—“they always seem to lead to bread queues. They had them in the French Revolution, you know. The Soviets have a lot in common with the French Revolution people—bread queues, and a currency that’s so depreciated that outsiders won’t look at it, and laws to prevent people getting out of the earthly paradise