Red Stefan Read Online Free PDF Page A

story.
    â€œWell, after that they sent me to Russia. I was to be one of Katinka’s twenty odd children, and I was to go to her father, old Yuri, who’s driving us now. It was my own idea. Katinka used to talk about her father, but she hadn’t seen him since she married, and I knew he wouldn’t have the slightest idea how many children she had. I don’t think she knew herself—she just went on having them. So, when I turned up in Yuri’s village and said I was his grandson Stefan, neither he nor anyone else had the least doubt about me. I wasn’t eighteen, and I looked younger, though I was so big, because my skin was very fair in those days. I used to have to keep it well smudged with dirt till it darkened a bit.”
    â€œWhat did you do?” asked Elizabeth.
    â€œNot very much at first. I had to come and go, and get to know the ropes. Then they wanted to know about the Tsar and his family. You know all the rumours there were. Well, they wanted someone to go to the place and find out what had happened—whether they were really dead or not. And after that there were other things—getting people across the frontier, and, of course, making regular reports as to what was going on. I had to serve my two years in the Red Army and I was over here for four years straight on end, and then I was back in England for a bit. I’ve been backwards and forwards ever since. My riskiest job was working in a poison-gas factory at Trotsk.” He laughed. “I was glad to get out of that with a whole skin, I can tell you!” After a pause he said, “I expect this will be my last job.”
    Elizabeth felt a thrill of superstitious fear. She said, “Why?” a little breathlessly. She could just see him now, black against the greyish white of the snow. The line of the horizon showed beyond his shoulder. It bounded an endless desolate flatness on which their cart must look like the merest speck. The sky overhead showed the approach of dawn. A yellowish tinge began to invade the grey. The horse’s hoofs rang on the frozen snow.
    â€œWhy?” said Stephen. “Oh, just because … I don’t want to go on being a Russian peasant for the rest of my life. I’ve saved a bit, and when old Carey died a year or two ago he left me a couple of thousand pounds and one of his farms. It was very decent of him, and I hope I haven’t said anything about him that I oughtn’t to. We just didn’t talk the same language—that’s all. I went into partnership with a cousin, Tom Carey, an awfully good fellow, and we’ve started breeding horses. Did I tell you I was pretty good with horses?”
    â€œNo, you didn’t,” said Elizabeth.
    â€œWell, I am. It’s part of my job really. You see I could go all up and down the country as a horse-doctor. I’d got to be something that would account for my being away a good bit. I took on cows and pigs as a side-line, and it was all very useful. I got quite well known. I might have been taken on as an agronom if I’d wanted the job—they go round lecturing to the peasants, you know. But that wouldn’t have suited me. You can’t just disappear if you’re in a government job—and sometimes it suits me to disappear.”
    â€œI shouldn’t have thought you’d want to be too well known.”
    He laughed, leaned close to her, and said in a loud stage whisper.
    â€œSsh! Not a word! I’m not always Red Stefan.” Then, drawing back again, in a different voice, “Now it’s your turn.”
    He was at once aware of a withdrawal. The silence between them seemed rigid for a moment. Then she said,
    â€œI told you. There’s nothing more.”
    Stephen’s thoughts plunged and reared at that. Nothing more—when he wanted to know every single thing that she had ever thought or done. Well, some day she would tell him. He reined in those racing