Michael Pearce - Dmitri and the One-Legged Lady

‘They’re not just my words, they’re what everyone is saying.’

The Father Superior turned on him.

‘Enough of that sort of talk! You go and find a Father and tell him I told you to have a few words with him!’

‘Well, I will: but that’s not going to bring me bread, is it?’

‘What you need is not bread but straightening out!’

Dmitri had an unusual feeling as the sleigh approached Kursk; he felt that he was returning to civilization. This was not how he usually felt about Kursk. Dmitri was all for the bright lights of St Petersburg; and light of any sort, in his view, had yet to reach Kursk. Nevertheless, as the sleigh drew up in front of the Court House, he felt a twinge of, well, not quite affection for the city, more the feeling that a sailor has when after long months he returns to the land. Kursk, though on the very edge, was at least on land; whereas the Monastery was very definitely at sea.

‘Oh, that icon business,’ said the Procurator dismissively when Dmitri went in to see him. ‘I wouldn’t spend too much time on that if I were you.’

Which accorded pretty well with Dmitri’s own intentions.

Boris Petrovich pushed a pile of papers towards him.

‘These have just come in,’ he said. ‘Will you take a look at them? I am going out to lunch.’

The Procurator was always going out to lunch.

‘In our position,’ he told Dmitri, ‘it is important to keep a finger on the social pulse.’

Vera Samsonova, the junior doctor at the local hospital, said she knew what that meant and that if Boris Petrovich tried putting his finger on her pulse again, she’d stick a syringe in him.

To Dmitri’s surprise, however, he himself was invited out to lunch. To his even greater surprise, the invitation came from the Governor, whom Dmitri had hitherto supposed to be entirely unaware of his existence.

‘Mr Kameron?’ said the tall dark girl standing beside him. ‘What sort of a name is that?’

‘Scottish,’ said Dmitri. ‘My great-great-grandfather came from Scotland.’

‘But how romantic!’ cried the girl.

‘Kameron?’ said the Governor’s wife. ‘Is that the Kamerons of Gorny Platok?’

‘Why, yes!’ said Dmitri, amazed that anyone had heard of the small farm where his grandfather presently resided. The estate had once been larger but successive generations of spendthrift Kamerons had sold off land until his grandfather had put his foot down and insisted that henceforth male Kamerons should work for a living.

‘Then we have something in common,’ said the Governor’s wife, giving Dmitri her arm and leading the way into lunch. ‘Our side of the family have always been gentlemen.’

‘But Mr Kameron no longer lives on his estate. Mother,’ said the tall dark girl. ‘He is a lawyer.’

‘Well one has to be something. I suppose.’

‘And how do you find the law, Mr Kameron?’ asked the dark girl.

‘It is at an interesting stage in Russia at the moment. Miss Mitkin. It could go either forward or backward. Until recently, as I’m sure you know, the only law we had was what the Tsar decreed.’

‘Well, isn’t that enough?’ said the Governor’s wife.

‘Not always. What if the Tsar himself does something wrong?’

‘But is that likely?’

‘Not the Tsar himself, perhaps; but what about those who serve him?’

‘The Government, you mean?’

‘Possibly.’

‘Governors?’ said the Governor.

‘Well –’

‘These are radical notions, Mr Kameron,’ said the Governor heavily.

‘Mr Kameron is, of course, very young,’ said the Governor’s wife.

‘But in touch with the new tone of the times, don’t you think?’ said her daughter.

‘Ah, the tone of the times!’ said the Governor’s wife, steering the conversation into safer channels.

After lunch the two women retired and the Governor led Dmitri into a pleasant room which seemed to serve as a second sitting room. Its walls were covered with icons.

‘Quite nice, aren’t they?’ said the Governor, seeing, and mistaking, Dmitri’s interest.

‘And some of them are not without value. They’re all domestic icons, of course. Not,’ he smiled, ‘like the Lady whose acquaintance you have recently been making.’

‘Dmitri Alexandrovich,’ said the Governor in a fatherly tone, ‘– a little more cognac? – are you religious?’

The question caught Dmitri off guard. The fact was that this was a tricky point in the Kameron family. For generations the Kamerons, as loyal servants of the Tsar, had been members of the Orthodox Russian Church. Then with Dmitri’s grandfather the line had hiccuped. Awkward as always, he had announced that he had become a Freethinker, with the result that he had been dismissed from the Tsar’s service. His son, awkward, too, and determined, as all male Kamerons, to quarrel with his father, had conversely announced his return to the faith; only the faith that he had elected to return to was that of his Scottish ancestors. Since, however, there were no Presbyterian churches in Russia at the time, the genuineness of his return had not been able to be tested and while the Tsar’s officials were working this out he had been allowed to continue in the Tsar’s service and had been still serving at the time of his unfortunately early death. All this had left Dmitri in some difficulty as to his own position.

‘Well –’

‘My advice,’ said the Governor,’– another cognac? – is to leave unto God the things that are God’s and unto man the things that are man’s.’

‘Seems reasonable,’ said Dmitri.

‘That is what it says in the Bible. Or more or less. And I have always found it a sound maxim to follow. At least as far as the Russian Church is concerned.’

‘Good idea,’ said Dmitri. The last cognac had left him rather blurred.

‘I commend the principle to you as a good one to adopt. Especially in the case of the One-Legged Lady.’

‘But that’s just what has not happened!’ cried Dmitri. ‘Man has just walked in and helped himself to –’

‘I was not speaking of others,’ said the Governor, annoyed. ‘I was speaking of you.’

The haze descended again.

‘Of me? Oh, yes, well –’

‘And of the One-Legged Lady.’

The One-Legged Lady? Who the hell was she? It sounded intriguing. He must look her up some time. But, wait a minute –

‘The One-Legged Lady?’

‘Is no business of yours. It will only lead to trouble. You mark my words, Dmitri Alexandrovich, I have a nose for such things. You keep right out of it. Assume a wisdom if you have it not. That’s what the English poet, Shakespeare, says. Or more or less. Wise man, Shakespeare. What he doesn’t know about the Russian Church isn’t worth knowing. You keep right out of it. That’s my advice, Dmitri Alexandrovich. Keep right out of it.’

He had invited a few friends round that evening to celebrate his promotion to Assistant Procurator. Unfortunately, their congratulations fell short of the whole-hearted.

‘You’ve let them buy you off, Dmitri,’ said Vera Samsonova, never one to shrink from telling other people the truth about themselves.

‘The surprise is that you were prepared to let yourself go so cheaply,’ said Igor Stepanovich.

Dmitri fired up.

‘If you tried to sell yourself, you wouldn’t get an offer!’ he retorted.

It had been a hard decision on his return from Siberia whether to stay in state service or to try to pursue an independent career at the St Petersburg Bar.

‘But to agree to work for them!’ said Sonya reproachfully. ‘After all they’ve done!’

Sonya had recently returned from Europe, where she had drunk deep of the liberal notions that the little group of friends liked to meet regularly to discuss.