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- Herausgeber: DigiCat
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Elephant Never Forgets," Ethel Lina White crafts a gripping narrative that intricately weaves psychological suspense with elements of crime fiction. Set against the backdrop of a seemingly tranquil community, the novel delves into themes of memory, identity, and the profound impacts of the past on the human psyche. White employs a distinctive literary style characterized by meticulous attention to detail and a slow-building tension that culminates in a shocking conclusion. Her work is marked by a cinematic quality, indicative of her strong background in screenwriting, which enhances the reader's immersion into its layered plot. Ethel Lina White, a prominent figure in the crime and mystery genres during the early 20th century, drew inspiration from her own experiences and observations of society. Her literary career evolved during a time when women were beginning to assert their voices within predominantly male literary arenas. The intricate character studies and atmospheric settings in her work reflect her keen understanding of human nature, cementing her place as a forerunner in psychological thrillers. "The Elephant Never Forgets" is highly recommended for readers who appreciate nuanced character development and an intricate plot. It invites exploration into the depths of memory and the consequences of long-buried secrets, making it a quintessential read for aficionados of classic crime fiction. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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The Elephant Never Forgets
Table of Contents
Introduction
In The Elephant Never Forgets, the terror that nothing is ever truly erased collides with the fragile hope that a single, ordinary person might still slip through the mesh of a system that remembers everything, so that every queue, signature, interview, and glance becomes both a test and a trap, and the question pulsing beneath each page is whether memory—inscribed in files, rehearsed in whispers, and etched in conscience—protects or condemns, because when forgetting is forbidden and recall is weaponized, survival depends less on heroic strength than on the delicate art of navigating what can, and cannot, be safely known.
Ethel Lina White, a British writer renowned for psychological suspense, situates this novel within the tradition of interwar thrillers that expose how fear germinates in everyday routines. First published in the late 1930s, The Elephant Never Forgets belongs to an era when anxieties about bureaucracy, borders, and authoritarian power shadowed European life. Rather than relying on melodrama or sensational gore, White builds tension from procedure—permits, offices, timetables—and the unnerving politeness of officials. The book is a thriller, but its menace is administrative and socially coded, unfolding in a modern city where vigilance is constant, private lives are scrutinized, and small misjudgments can have outsized consequences.
At the novel’s outset, a visitor far from home discovers that a trip meant to be temporary has begun to tighten around her, as delays accumulate, documents multiply, and every attempt to settle a simple matter opens onto fresh interrogations. Friends are hard to read, strangers harder, and the institutions that promise help keep immaculate records that seem to remember more than the protagonist herself would like recalled. White restricts the canvas to waiting rooms, apartments, streets, and corridors, evoking how urgency heightens when movement is hedged. The reading experience is one of mounting claustrophobia, guided by a lucid, observant narrative voice alive to nuance and risk.
Stylistically, White writes with crisp economy, favoring precise observation over florid flourish, so that a misplaced word, an alteration in a clerk’s expression, or the muffled echo of steps becomes a lever of suspense. Dialogue is guarded, layered with double meanings that invite readers to infer what cannot be openly said. Scenes often pause at thresholds—of rooms, of decisions, of borders—producing a rhythm of acceleration and arrest that feels both nerve-tightening and eerily plausible. The tone is cool, civilized, and needled with irony, yet beneath the polish lies tremor: a moral pressure accumulating as options narrow and the cost of error rises.
Several themes interlock to shape the novel’s power. Memory, both personal and institutional, functions as fate: the past is docketed, indexed, and ready to be retrieved when least convenient. Surveillance is pervasive, yet it is administered through manners as much as through force, making consent look like courtesy. Bureaucracy appears not as comic fussiness but as a labyrinth that tests character, erodes trust, and isolates individuals in plain sight. Mobility—who may leave, who must stay—becomes a measure of freedom. Above all, White explores how ordinary decency contends with systems designed to make people complicit, frightened, and forgetful of their own moral bearings.
Read today, The Elephant Never Forgets feels unsettlingly current. Although composed in the late 1930s, its preoccupation with files, dossiers, and observation anticipates contemporary debates about data trails, border regimes, and the quiet coercions of administrative life. The novel’s insistence that danger can reside in routine interactions—in applications, checkpoints, and customer-service smiles—speaks to readers navigating digital verification, watchlists, and opaque decision-making. Its portrait of a traveler caught between rules and survival resonates with migrants, students, and professionals whose status can shift with a stamp. White’s focus on how power hides in process offers a clear lens for thinking about modern institutions.
Approached as pure entertainment, the book is a sleek exercise in tension; read as social observation, it becomes a study of how fear is organized and remembered. White invites us to feel the drag of time when every minute must be accounted for, to notice how language can soothe while it constricts, and to assess the quiet bravery that persistence requires. Without spoiling its turns, it is enough to say that the novel rewards attentiveness to detail and the ethics of small choices. The elephant of the title endures as emblem and warning: institutions remember, but so, crucially, do individuals.
Synopsis
Ethel Lina White’s The Elephant Never Forgets is a suspense novel from the interwar period that transposes her signature psychological unease to a stark political landscape. The story follows a foreign visitor who enters the Soviet Union expecting regulated travel and routine procedures, only to discover how rigid rules, watchful officials, and opaque processes shape every movement. White begins with mundane obstacles—permits, escorts, and timetables—that subtly narrow the protagonist’s options. As a simple stay lengthens beyond comfort, the book establishes a tense premise: in a country where records are absolute and authority unanswerable, even a minor misstep can become a trap.
Initial chapters trace the visitor’s attempts to comply with unfamiliar systems while recovering control of basic necessities, notably documents and currency, that remain subject to official oversight. A missed appointment or an unguarded question seems to echo through offices she never sees, and the courtesy of guides begins to feel like surveillance. White’s clipped sequences—hotel corridors, registry counters, inspection rooms—convey a narrowing corridor of choices. The protagonist learns that departure requires endorsements that arrive only when they are permitted to arrive, and that kindness from strangers frequently conceals a ledger, a report, or an obligation she does not understand.
Gradually she joins a fragile community of outsiders and residents who share tips for surviving the city’s routines while avoiding attention. Their conversations are coded with caution, balancing sympathy against the risk of being overheard. Stories circulate about vanished acquaintances, delayed messages, and officials who know more than they reveal. The novel heightens suspense through small uncertainties: a door left ajar, a phone line that clicks, a letter redirected. As the circle closes ranks, alliances emerge across nationality and class, but each alliance carries a question—whether friendship is genuine support or a calculated arrangement approved, or compelled, by unseen supervisors.
Pressure intensifies when questions turn to intentions and loyalties. The visitor is summoned to routine interviews that test her memory, asking for dates, places, and names that appear trivial yet seem to be cross-checked elsewhere. White uses these scenes to show how bureaucracy becomes an instrument of narrative control: the state writes the story unless individuals can revise it. Efforts to secure authorization to depart reveal overlapping authorities whose decisions contradict one another while somehow reinforcing delay. With money dwindling and permits expiring, the protagonist must choose between patience that may never be rewarded and action that, if misjudged, could brand her suspect forever.
From these pressures a plan takes shape, drawing in a handful of companions whose motives are as opaque as the system they hope to evade. Some offer expertise in routes and regulations; others possess the social leverage that opens guarded doors. White crafts a tense balance between cooperation and doubt: every helper could be an informant, every shortcut could be a trap laid for the impatient. Timetables, tickets, and identifications become talismans and liabilities at once. The narrative rhythm quickens as checkpoints multiply, and the group must decide whom to trust with knowledge that, if leaked, would end their chances at once.
The journey, when it begins, is less escape than negotiation. Trains and corridors replace streets and hotels, but scrutiny travels with them. At each barrier, clerks appear who recite rules while noting deviations with meticulous calm. Here the title’s image gains force: the system remembers. It keeps names, faces, slips, and signatures, and it retrieves them without hurry. White sustains suspense through mundane detail—platform clocks, compartment rosters, the weight of a suitcase—converting logistics into psychological strain. The protagonist confronts a dilemma of identity: whether to be fully known by a power that never forgets, or to risk erasure to become safely unknown.
White resolves the immediate crisis without abandoning moral ambiguity, allowing fear, courage, and compromise to remain in uneasy balance. Without disclosing outcomes, the novel endures for its portrait of ordinary people navigating a system that weaponizes paperwork and memory. It stands alongside the author’s other work for its meticulous construction of menace from routine details and for its empathy toward the vulnerable. The Elephant Never Forgets remains resonant as a study of surveillance, travel, and trust under authoritarian pressure, and as a reminder that, in such conditions, the struggle to leave becomes inseparable from the struggle to remain oneself.
Historical Context
Ethel Lina White, a British writer of popular suspense fiction (1876–1944), published The Elephant Never Forgets in 1937, in the tense late‑interwar climate. The novel is set in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin and uses the realities of a centrally planned, tightly policed society as its backdrop. Contemporary institutions frame the action: state travel is mediated by Intourist, daily life is regulated by internal passports and permits, and contact with officials can be decisive. British readers, already familiar with White’s The Wheel Spins (1936), encountered here a thriller that transposes their era’s bureaucratic and ideological pressures into a narrative of mounting unease.
After the launch of the First Five‑Year Plan in 1928, the USSR pursued rapid industrialization and collectivization, transforming cities and workplaces by the mid‑1930s. This upheaval brought strict administrative controls: a 1932 internal passport system limited movement and tied residents to registered addresses and jobs. Foreign specialists and visitors were invited to showcase progress, yet their activities were carefully supervised. Urban spaces were characterized by communal apartments, rationing queues, and official queues for documents, where a stamped form determined access. Such conditions created credible constraints on mobility and communication in fiction, allowing a thriller to be powered by permits, checkpoints, and watchful intermediaries.
The political climate darkened sharply after the assassination of Sergei Kirov in 1934, a turning point used to expand security powers. In 1934 the NKVD was established as a unified internal security and police force, and from 1936 to 1938 the Great Purge unfolded. The Moscow Trials—of the Sixteen (1936), the Seventeen (1937), and the Twenty‑One (1938)—broadcast confessions and executions of former Bolshevik leaders, while broader arrests reached far beyond elites. Newspapers in Britain and elsewhere reported these proceedings, highlighting denunciations, surveillance, and fear of sudden detention. A suspense narrative set amid such uncertainties could reflect the pervasive vulnerability of ordinary residents and foreign visitors.
Repression operated through codified mechanisms as well as atmosphere. NKVD “troikas” conducted expedited, extrajudicial judgments, and Order No. 00447 (July 1937) authorized mass operations against designated “anti‑Soviet elements,” feeding the Gulag labor‑camp system. In Moscow, the Lubyanka served as the security headquarters and a detention site, emblematic of opaque procedures and indefinite confinement. Housing blocks and offices were permeated by informant networks, and conversations could be monitored. For a novel reliant on tension rather than battlefield action, such institutional structures offered ready, factual scaffolding for plots about vanishing acquaintances, watched corridors, and the ever‑present risk posed by a misplaced word or paper.
Foreign travel to the USSR in the 1930s was centralized through Intourist (founded 1929), which arranged itineraries, guides, and hotels. Visitors were typically kept to approved routes, with access to factories or provincial towns requiring permits. High‑profile episodes reinforced the sense of jeopardy: in 1933, the Metro‑Vickers affair saw British engineers arrested and tried in Moscow for alleged sabotage and espionage, straining Anglo‑Soviet relations and filling British papers. Hotels favored by foreigners, such as the Metropol in Moscow, were understood to be monitored. These practices produced a verifiable framework of surveillance and constraint that informs how outsiders move, speak, and attempt to leave.
British readers encountered news from the Soviet Union filtered through rival interpretations. Some journalists and intellectuals treated the regime as a controversial experiment; others condemned its coercion. The Moscow Trials, refugee testimonies, and reporting on arrests were debated alongside domestic worries about fascism’s rise after 1933 in Germany and in Italy under Mussolini. Spy scares and official secrecy laws at home also primed audiences to read stories of surveillance with special unease. In this polarized atmosphere, a British thriller set in the USSR could speak to competing hopes and fears, without requiring technical espionage detail to evoke an authoritarian state’s pressures.
Interwar thrillers increasingly traded on contemporary geopolitics. Writers such as Eric Ambler (The Dark Frontier, 1936; Uncommon Danger, 1937) folded political realism into suspense, while Graham Greene’s travel‑tinged narratives explored moral ambiguity. Ethel Lina White’s hallmark was placing an ordinary, often female, protagonist in escalating peril amid everyday settings. The Wheel Spins (1936) dramatized disappearance on a train; The Elephant Never Forgets applies similar claustrophobic logic to a bureaucratic, policed society. By relying on queues, permits, and officials rather than exotic supervillains, the book aligns with the decade’s shift toward plausible menace rooted in modern institutions and international anxieties.
Appearing in 1937, at the height of the Great Purge, the novel draws on widely reported Soviet practices—intensive surveillance, regulated travel, and opaque detentions—to structure its suspense. Its emphasis on documentation, guided movement, and the consequences of casual talk mirrors the documented mechanics of Stalin‑era control, while the vulnerability of a foreigner underscores how borders and bureaucracy can both invite and entrap. Without offering political treatise, the book functions as a popular‑fiction critique of arbitrary power, dramatizing the erosion of personal security in a modern state. In doing so, it captures a defining interwar anxiety about totalitarian systems.
The Elephant Never Forgets
CHAPTER I
AS Anna looked through the double windows of her bedroom at the hotel, she became suddenly conscious of the passage of time. Although the port was not yet sealed, winter had gripped the small northern town almost overnight. The sky was purple-dark with snow-clouds, and the old stunted trees opposite were blown forward by the wind until they rapped the wall with knobby knuckles.
"Time I went back to England," she told herself. "There's nothing to stop for now."
Time. It was curious how this element was to dominate the situation. Anna often had the impression of being imprisoned within a maze, five minutes before closing-time. Its windings were neither numerous nor complicated; but, if she lost her head and took a wrong turning in her haste, she might reach the outlet—only to find the door locked.
The weather that morning corresponded with her own bitter mood. She was feeling bleakly disillusioned as the aftermath of an unpleasant scene with Otto yesterday, when she had broken with him finally, on the score of his disloyalty.
While she had no real ground for complaint because his so-called secretary—Olga—occupied a position in his scheme which she herself had declined to fill—she was appalled by the wholesale scale of his operations in the love-market, and also by his admission that she had helped to finance his romance.
In fact, the only redeeming feature of a bad business was her ability to swear in Russian.
Notwithstanding her fluency, the final score was his, because she could not assail the logic of his defence.
"You know that here we believe in collectivisation[1]," he reminded her. "Since you are a monopolist, what are you doing in Russia?"
The reason was that she was a victim of glamour. Ever since she had met Otto at a debating society in the east end of London, she had been ensnared by his personality. He had not only the golden beard of a Viking and dark-blue eyes which were chill as polar seas, but he was essentially a spell-binder.
Whenever he talked, shoals of bright words bubbled up responsively in her own brain. He became her star and she followed, or rather, accompanied him to Russia, where she helped to finance his new venture—a non-political paper, confined to art, literature and science.
As long as the dream lasted, her surroundings were misted with illusion. It is doubtful whether she ever saw the dim grey northern town as it was in reality. To her, there was glamour in the tall cramped houses and the stone steps leading down to the olive water of the port; glamour in the green-grape twilight; glamour in the blaze of starlight.
Above all, there was glamour in the communal life in Otto's newspaper-office, where violent young men and women gathered around the stove, to talk of everything—from the stratosphere above to the drains which were under the earth.
And now the dream was ended—slain by Olga and the first frost.
As she looked around her, Anna was aware, for the first time, of the dingy purple-pink wallpaper—the colour of pickled cabbage—and the shabby painted furniture of her bedroom.
"Mother would think this pretty grim," she thought.
She was gazing pensively at the fluff under her bed, when the door opened and the middle-aged chambermaid entered, carrying a mop and pail.
She had an impoverished white skin which was dry as rice-paper, and a coronet of black hair.
Crossing to the window, she stood beside Anna and pointed to certain dark blotches on the opposite wall.
"You see those marks," she said. "They put the Guards there and shot them down."
Anna suppressed a shudder as she made a consciously enlightened comment.
"A bad means to a good end, comrade. But it was inevitable to progress."
"Inevitable," agreed the chambermaid. "If the worms are allowed to nibble the cabbage, loyal citizens would have no bortsch...In the prisons they serve grey-eyes soup. And when the tide is high, the water trickles through the gratings of the cells."
In spite of her academic agreement that the penalties of disloyalty should be stringent, Anna changed the subject.
"Shall we play chess to-night?" she asked. "It will be my last chance to try to beat you. I'm going back to England to-morrow."
"Why?" asked the chambermaid.
"Why not? After all, I'm English."
"You? Anna Stephanovitch? Then why do you speak Russian so well?"
As the woman stared at her with sceptical eyes, Anna began to explain.
"Because, when I was a baby, my mother married a Russian. He was a naturalised British subject, and I've always been called by his name. He took the place of my own father who was killed in the War, before I was born. After he died, my mother married again. She's good at it. And now she's living in the Argentine...But I loved my stepfather and when I came to Russia, it was like coming home."
The chambermaid nodded approval, for she appreciated the double obituary notice in the autobiography.
"So you have lost two fathers. And now you have lost your lover," she remarked. "It is said that Otto is spending money on the woman Olga, who works in the newspaper office. He has bought her a fine new fur coat."
Anna's anger flared up again as she listened, for she guessed that, indirectly, she was the real donor of the coat.
"Otto is not my lover," she said hotly. "And I don't need presents."
"Then you are rich like all the English? At home, do you have white bread, and sugar instead of a toffee apple dip?"
"Yes," replied Anna bitterly. "At my home, there was always too much of everything, while people were starving."
Her eyes were sombre as she gazed down at the line of wind-tormented trees. In spite of his flash of spirit in response to her every mood, her stepfather had been a gross-looking, bearded man, who was too fond of creature comforts.
"My stepfather was very stout," she told the chambermaid. "But inside, he was thin. His mind was like a pure flame. He ate too much and he died, at dinner, from a stroke. He choked and was dead in one minute."
"His food burst him," declared the chambermaid.
She was enchanted with the anecdote, but Anna's face was tragic as she thought of the Hampstead mansion—that over-stuffed nest of domestic luxury—and the extravagant meals.
At the time she was too young to understand that her mother's lavish housekeeping was supplementary to her fundamental determination—to keep a good husband happy to the day of his death.
Filled with a sense of angry frustration at the social inequality, the girl divided society into a chronically overfed middle-class and an eternally hungry proletariat—while she used the adjective "bourgeois" to cover every insult the most fertile imagination could invent.
Her own protest took the form of rebellion, when she ran away from school and got a job in a draper's shop.
She soon came back, but her mutiny persisted. After her stepfather's death, her pent-up energy found relief in a series of social experiments.
"Anna's broken out again," her mother would confide to the expensive scented ladies who accompanied her to the cinema—which met every intellectual need. "I'm told she's selling flowers in High Holborn. So anti-social to the other poor flower-girls, with so much competition in everything...But it amuses her, and she's not brought home any 'little things' yet."
Selling flowers in the street...Sleeping under an archway...The shop...A pickle factory...As the pictures flitted across Anna's mind, the chambermaid caught her arm.
"Look who's here," she said.
With a strange thrill of excitement, Anna gazed down at a woman who was striding across the road. In a brutal and debased manner she was beautiful, with blonde colouring and vivid blue eyes. Her bobbed flaxen hair was cut in a straight fringe across her forehead and her loose lips were scarlet. She wore breeches, a sheepskin coat, and men's boots, which made her feet appear enormous.
Anna was struck by the fact that the few pedestrians shrank away from her, as though they wished to escape her notice.
"That is Hirsch," said the chambermaid. "She is the People's Prosecutor."
"I've not seen her before," said Anna. "I wonder what she has come for."
"Business." The chambermaid lowered her voice as she added, "Business which is transacted in cellars."
"You mean—executions?"
"Surely. She has shot hundreds down in the cellars. It is a patriotic duty and the pay is handsome. But they say that so much killing has turned her crazy."
Anna could not understand her sudden spurt of terror.
"I'm a British subject," she reminded herself. "My passport is in order. I have money. And I'm going back to England to-morrow."
At that moment, she was so close to the outlet of the maze, that one step would take her through the door.
CHAPTER II
THE town looked different when Anna left the hotel, in order to buy her ticket for a soft place in the train. The change was actual and not the effect of lost illusions. During the night, the wind had stripped the trees and the streets were carpeted with layers of leaves.
They covered every surface so thickly that they blotted out inequalities and outlines. Unable to see where the pavement ended, Anna side-stepped off the kerb, caught her heel in a crack, and slipped to her knees in the gutter.
This time, she swore in English.
"Thank goodness, I'll soon be walking on a decent pavement again," she told herself as she scrambled to her feet.
She did not know it, but the moment was epic...When she ran away from school, to earn her living in a shop, her stepfather had refused to interfere.
"No," he said to his wife's hysterical pleading. "I will not send detectives after her as if she were criminal. The little one has intelligence and will come to no harm. Let her stand on her own feet for a while. Presently she will return."
But Anna had never come back...It is true that a subdued schoolgirl of the same name and appearance was soon in residence again at the Hampstead mansion; but she—herself—was still wandering in the rebel territory of her mind.
It was not until she paid tribute to the good offices of the L.C.C. that she took her first step back to the home which was no longer there.
Just then, London seemed so near that she could almost see the buses inside Victoria Station yard and the scarlet electric signs quivering through a dun transparency. These lights stood for safety even if they conjured up no thrill.
Her feelings were mixed as she scuffled through the fallen leaves. Common sense made her realise the futility of regret, which was partly due to season.
She could not recall the summer, when the salt mist veiled the old buildings of the port to the dim beauty of faded tapestry, and the trees in the avenue told stories in husky whispers. Impossible, too, to recapture the fraternity spirit of those endless, unlicensed talks around the stove in Otto's office, when the only convention was always to use the unexpurgated word.
Of all these wild men and girls, there were only three persons with whom she came into more than casual contact. These were Otto, Olga and Conrad Stern.
Now, only Conrad remained.
"I must say 'Good-bye' to him," she thought regretfully. "Pity. Sheer waste of an interesting man."
Yet although he was one of those who counted, she did not want to stay in this strange town, which was all that remained of the dark enchanted city of her dream. The tall thin houses seemed to have shrunk as though they were frost-bitten to their foundations, while their fronts were grey as clinkered ash. Involuntarily she thought of their cellars, as the People's Prosecutor, in her blonde brutality, tramped across her mind.
This was a town where people disappeared[1q]. To-day you spoke to a man and arranged to meet him on the morrow. If he did not keep his appointment, you asked no questions. And you might not see him again.
In her eagerness to identify herself with the Komsomol[2], or communal youth of the country, Anna shared their enthusiasm for an experiment so stupendous, that it stunned—even while it stirred—her imagination. Yet while she agreed that its enemies must be destroyed, she shrank from a method of espionage where the individual was at the mercy of his fellow.
As a rule, she hurried by the prison, where the tidal river, which swept one side, was now in flood. It rushed past the wall in a swift brown wave which appeared almost level with the lowest line of windows.
Drawn by a morbid fascination, she lingered for a minute. The wind had piled up an enormous drift of leaves against an iron door. It imparted an air of desuetude, as though people had gone inside, but had never pushed the portal outwards again.
She walked on quickly before she could think too vividly of the fate of any prisoners inside. Cells weeping with river water. The grey eyes of fish floating in soup. A last appointment to meet a lady—a blonde with a taste for cellars.
When she reached the square, on her way to the post office—it had an air of desertion. There were no market-stalls to dwarf its size to-day. The giant equestrian statue in the middle seemed magnified to a symbol of civic authority. As she passed beneath the pedestal, his rearing horse appeared on the point of crashing down upon her skull.
Her intention was, as usual, first to collect any mail, and then to go to the café. That morning, the woman official did not disappoint her, for she handed her a letter from a pigeon-hole.
She recognised the handwriting on the envelope, and stuffed it into her bag, unopened. Her community spirit did not extend to former school friends—and Gloria James could wait.
When she was inside the double doors of the café, she stood looking for Conrad Stern. The room was overheated by an enormous stove, but, apart from its atmosphere, it was a pleasant refuge from the grey outside world. A brass samovar bubbled cheerfully and each indiarubber plant wore its jacket of coloured, plaited paper. Above all rose the thrum of talk, like the whir of a myriad spinning-tops.
Conrad Stern was seated at a small table—by a window. Closely-shorn, clean-shaven and monocled, his appearance was in strong contrast with most of the shaggy company, although he would have been a striking personality in other circumstances. There was distinction in his tall thin figure and the moulding of his face which always made Anna curious to unveil the mystery of his origin.
When she drew nearer, he rose to meet her.
"I rather hoped you might come here," he said.
"I wanted to meet you too," Anna told him. "I'm going back to England."
"Then—" he hesitated before he added, "then you know about Otto?"
"Yes. I've heard also that Olga has a new fur."
Humiliated by the knowledge that their quarrel was already in circulation, Anna tried to speak lightly.
"I'm not quite blind," she said. "Of course, just at first I thought he was rather splendid. But lately I've realised how cheap he really is. In fact, we had a row."
She remembered the essential adjective and added hastily, "we had a bloody row."
Conrad Stern smiled slightly as he crossed to the buffet to get tea for her. When he returned with the cup of weak, scalding fluid, he asked an abrupt question.
"How are you off for money?"
"I've enough for my journey," she told him.
"Good." His voice held relief. "Passport in order?"
"Yes. The original visa expired, but Otto got it renewed, the other day. Whenever they wanted to see my papers at the hotel, he wangled things for me. A man can always slip his mistress through when he can't take his wife."
Anna laughed as she spoke, for she had been rather flattered by the general assumption of a freedom of which she had never availed herself. It made her feel definitely Russian. Aware, however, of Conrad's silence, she denied the rumour, for the first time.
"Of course, I was never that," she said.
The frost of his face relaxed as he smote the table with his palm.
"Why didn't you tell me that before?" he asked. "As long as you were Otto's friend, you were not in my landscape. We've wasted too much time. We might have been—comrades."
