A Train of Powder (44 page)

In the old days there were quite enough millionaires in the British Empire, though not always of British birth, to fill the street. But after 1918 a cold wind blew along the avenue. A certain number of leaseholders who, before 1914, could have afforded to live in any conceivable habitation except the Vatican, had to get out of their houses. It might have been that the war had hit the system so hard that it was cracking. There was an apparent recovery in the early twenties, but this was cancelled by the economic tornado which broke over Britain at the end of that decade. Many people feared that the capitalist system was going to collapse immediately; and therefore it seemed significant when, in 1930, the Soviet government moved into this estate which had been planned as a realization of the rosiest dreams of capitalism. It became a tenant of the Crown and set up its Embassy at Number 13, an enormous edifice on the favoured east side of the avenue, which had till then been known as Harrington House.

It was built in 1852. The dramatic appearance in its halls of Mr. Kuznetsov after his release from Wandsworth Police Station might have been designed as a celebration of its centenary. It was specially ironical that this particular house should have been acquired by the Soviet government. The house had been built by the fifth holder of the Earldom of Harrington, which had been created to reward one William Stanhope for public services rendered as Secretary of State during the second quarter of the eighteenth century. His correspondence with the British Ambassador in Russia shows that he was hardly able to spare a moment for the consideration of Muscovite matters, so absorbed was he in the obviously much more important problem of appeasing the kingdom of Spain, which was then considered as the permanent great power of Europe. The fifth Earl of Harrington, Leicester Stanhope, is known to many more people by his features than by his name, for when he was a child he sat as the model for a charming painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds called “Sprightliness,” which shows him beating a drum.

This was an omen. He was sprightly, he covered no end of ground, and he created a continual disturbance. At first his ghost must have been delighted by the sale of the house he had built to the Soviet government, for he was a romantic radical. He was an army officer, and was one of the first to raise the acute modern problem of how far a professional soldier should engage in political activities. He served out in India and supported the beginnings of the Indian nationalist movement. Later, like Lord Byron, he went out to fight as a volunteer in the Greek War of Independence, but he was far further to the left than the poet, for he advocated a republican form of government for liberated Greece, which Byron refused to do. Ultimately the Turkish government complained so vehemently of his intervention that the War Office forced him to return to England. But though he was all for revolutions he belonged to the Puritan type of reformer, and during the ten years of life which remained to him after he moved into Harrington House he constantly brooded ecstatically on the State of Maine, for he was an ardent prohibitionist, and he regarded the Maine liquor law of 1851 as the first legislative step towards the establishment of the earthly paradise; and the lavish supplies of vodka and champagne for which the Soviet Embassy parties are celebrated must have warned his ghost that this was not the revolution which he had so eagerly expected.

But there was another and more spectacular irony in the choice of this particular house. It is not like its neighbours. Except for a fantastic outcrop of stage scenery which the Indian Prince of Baroda topped with oriental cupolas, most of the houses in the avenue can be described as big houses and are just that and nothing else. But Number 13 presents clearly and with touching faith an idea which was proved an illusion by the ruin of Europe. It mirrors the imaginative prepossession which pro-German Queen Victoria and her court imposed on her age. Designed in the German Gothic style, it is loaded with pious copies of every recorded type of Gothic ornament, with tracery and oriels and quoins and crockets and cusps, and it originally sported a soaring Nurembergish pinnacle on the roof. Every brick and stone of it refers to the innocent fairy-tale country which sent us the Prince Consort, the pleasing custom of the Christmas tree,
Heilige Nacht,
the story of Rumpelstiltskin,
Baumkuchen,
the music of Mendelssohn, and the legends of the Rhine, sober, industrious, and peaceable Germany, beloved by Carlyle and Matthew Arnold; the same country which waged the two world wars, which devoured millions of her own young, cost Britain more lives than had been lost in all previous wars, and killed more Russians than all the Asiatic invaders who hacked their way across the steppes throughout the Middle Ages.

In consequence of these events the Soviet Union has occupied Kensington Palace Gardens. This was not fully achieved until after the Second World War. When Hitler ended peace, Britain and the British Commonwealth had got back on its feet after the economic tornado of the late twenties and early thirties, and in 1939, though there was a sign of weakening of the system in the presence of the Nepalese and Lithuanian Legations in the avenue, most of the houses were still occupied by millionaires. Among the Soviet Ambassador’s neighbours were the Duke of Marlborough, the Marquess of Cholmondeley, whose wife belongs to the great Indian family of Sassoon, Sir Alfred Beit, the owner of heavy holdings in South African mines, Sir Charles Seligman the banker, Sir Berkeley Sheffield, an industrialist who was among other things a leader of the paper trade, Sir Harry Oakes, the Canadian oil king who was afterwards murdered at Nassau, the Duchess of Marchena, daughter of the Spanish lady who married Sir Basil Zaharoff, Alfred Chester-Beatty, who owned mines all over the world and was a famous collector of manuscripts, Daniel Fooks, who had interests in the Far East, and G. R. Strauss, a Socialist M.P. who was a minister in the last Labour government, who had inherited his house from his father, a North Country metal broker. Today all these residents have gone except Lord Cholmondeley, the Duchess of Marchena, the widow of Mr. Fooks, and Mr. Strauss, and few of their sort have come to fill the gap. Against nineteen houses in private occupation in 1939, there were at the time of Kuznetsov’s misadventure nine. Of the rest two were bombed and three were for sale; one was still occupied by the Nepalese Legation; the premises vacated by the Lithuanian Legation were taken over by Syria, and the Lebanese Legation was next door but one; the French Ambassador had his official residence in Number 11, which belonged to the Duke of Marlborough; and the Soviet had retained Number 13 and acquired three more houses. One of these, Number 5, listed in the telephone directory as the office of the Soviet Film Agency, is among the less impressive houses outside the main avenue, round the corner in the Bayswater Road. But the other two are among the supreme manifestations of the spirit of the place. Number 18 was once the residence of the great Baron de Reuter, who with Cagliostroish, wizardly air exploited the invention of the electric telegraph by founding Reuter’s News Agency, and thus revolutionized newspaper and stock exchange practice; and it afterwards belonged to Leopold de Rothschild, the head of the English branch of the family, one of the brilliant and amusing Jews who, by charming King Edward VII, helped to get the English monarchy to set its face against anti-Semitism. Number 10 is even more splendid, and is on the east side of the avenue, with a superb terrace looking over Kensington Gardens. It was for many years owned by an exuberant financier with gold-mining interests in South Africa, named Leopold Hirsch, He added to its vastness by clapping another story on top of it, a feat which recalls the line of Milton, “Elephants endors’d with towers”; he used to disturb the calm of the district by walking about his house and gardens singing the Lieder of Schubert and Brahms in a voice as huge as his fortune and his home. It is now listed as the office of the Soviet naval attaché.

These houses have proved to be key positions. The estate is now alien territory. It might be thought that it must have been that for a long time, with all its tenants bearing such names as Marchena and Reuter, Baroda and Rothschild. But, indeed, when the place was theirs, it was as English as the Tower of London or Westminster Abbey. The parties of children which used to be seen hurrying along the avenue at the close of any afternoon, in the care of nannies or mademoiselles or Fräuleins, on the way home to tea from a dancing class or an hour spent sailing model yachts on the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens, all looked like the children in
Punch
drawings, no matter what their names might be. But now the avenue might be outside the British island, might be part of an area whose nearest frontier was, say, in the Soviet Sector in Berlin. The tedium and complication of the Russian Security system hangs over the place, not very thickly, but as visible as ground mist. There are at all hours of the night and day bored policemen yawning up and down in front of the four Soviet mansions, and private ownership of the avenue itself is now insisted upon to a tiresome degree. The two gates at each end had in the old days always been open for traffic, now one was sometimes closed; and whereas the Crown Commission porters used to carry out their duty of checking traffic in an easygoing and sensible way, they are now forced to keep strictly to the letter of the rule. Hence there was, in this tetchy time towards the end of Stalin’s reign, constantly performed a comedy which might have been written by Gogol. The porters held up every vehicle and asked the driver which house he intended to visit. If the number given was 10 or 13 or 18, the porter asked the name of the person to whom the visit was to be paid and telephoned it to the central switchboard of the Soviet Embassy to see if the visit would be welcome. Very often, if the vehicle was a commercial van with goods to deliver, the driver’s pronunciation of the name of the Russian official which was on the invoice, and which was itself often misspelled by the clerk who filled in the invoice, was not recognized by the Russian switchboard operator when it was repeated over the telephone by the porter; and then orders were given that the van was not to be allowed to proceed. This invariably exasperated the driver, who felt, reasonably enough, that if he took his crate of electric-light fittings or his bale of blankets to the house from which they were ordered, inquiry might have led to the person who actually wanted them. He was apt to regard the porter in his Crown Commissioner’s livery as the instrument of privilege, and probably hostile to the cause of the revolution; and often altercations started during which a queue formed up behind the van, composed of visitors anxious to fulfil their engagements with the Ambassador of France, Mrs. Fooks, or Lord Cholmondeley.

The Soviet Embassy carries the enormous staff of one hundred and eighty employees (as against the staff of thirty-two which the British employ at their Embassy in Moscow), and there are over seventy Russian officials working at various agencies whose lives centre in the Embassy. Many of these have their families with them, so there are not infrequently to be seen strolling in the avenue groups of dark and thick-set men and women with their children, all, even to the tiniest boys and girls, clad in the stiff, rectangular type of tailoring by which Soviet citizens can always be picked out against a Western background. These people are instantly likeable, because of the manifest warmth of the affection they bear one another, and because of the humour which plays about their eyes and lips. They have also (which makes them neither more nor less likeable, for it is something which may alight on any nation when its turn comes round) the air of conquerors treading conquered ground. They walk with the same slow complacent lurch as the occupation troops in Germany; and they too stare at the passers-by, not insolently, not even unkindly, but as if the passers-by were blind and could not see them stare. The Russians know, of course, that according to the book of the rules there ought to be a military victory to seal such a conquest, but their kindliness and their pride lead them to nourish a hope that that necessity has in this instance been obviated. For surely they would not have been permitted to pitch their camp in this stronghold of capitalism were not the system about to crumble into ruins, were not their enemies even now so far confounded that they could not think it worth while to muster their forces for what must inevitably be defeat.

This view is illusory. The decay of Kensington Palace Gardens means simply that there have been two wars lately, and that the community has altered its way of spending its wealth in the last few decades. If these houses are no longer private homes, it is largely because servants’ wages and the cost of fuel—which means miners’ wages—have risen enormously; and if the duty of keeping these houses in the state of repair required by the Crown has become a burden that can be borne by few, it is because builders’ wages also have risen and because the labour and material available for constructional purposes are now being diverted to other forms of building, such as prefabs and the London County Council apartment houses which surround the park at Wandsworth where Marshall and Kuznetsov were arrested. Nor would it be safe to deduce from the state of the avenue that the plutocracy of the West had carried within their loins the seeds of their own destruction, and that the families who had sold their houses had let their property fall from hands palsied by degeneracy. The Harringtons still do their duty as agriculturalists in the North of England, and the son of the South African millionaire to whom they sold their house now farms and directs various corporations in South Africa. In no wise do they resemble the men of Nineveh and Babylon, of Tyre and Sidon.

Indeed, the Soviet government had done no more by its choice of quarters than take four white elephants off the real-estate market. But the myth of its significance is strong among the Russians, and it must have profoundly affected Kuznetsov during the weeks he passed in Harrington House before his departure from England. Whatever interpretation he placed on the story of his meetings with Marshall, he must have spent those weeks in a state of apprehension. If the superficial interpretation be correct, and he was simply an unfortunate man who had had too much luck and had managed to rise very high in the MVD in spite of his unusual lack of talent for police work, and he had not intended the Special Branch to discover his meetings with Marshall, then there was good ground for the popular belief that his return to Russia would take him to some extreme form of punishment. But if the right interpretation be that which comes up through facts when they are stared at for any length of time, and Mr. Kuznetsov was not stupid but obedient and conscientious, and a model police officer in every way, and the Special Branch had been intended to detect his relationship with Marshall and arrest him as a spy, then he still had reason to fear the worst. He could not be as sickeningly sure of his ultimate end as he would have been if the superficial interpretation was correct. But he may well have felt sick with uncertainty.