I did very little during the day, so as to be fresh for my night’s work,
though I went to see my friend the plaster-moulder who is working for so
many thousand roubles a day in my studio. He is making piece moulds of
the busts, so that I can leave duplicates when I go. I asked Andrev why
he had to be paid so much. Andrev explained that he is the only moulder
in Moscow, so he can ask what he likes: “He says he will work for this
and not for that,” and Andrev held a thousand rouble note in one hand
and a hundred rouble note in the other. “But it is all the same really,
only it is a different pattern,” and he laughed. Certainly money has no
value here, and no meaning. At 8 o’clock I went back again to the War
Commissariat in Trotsky’s car. On arrival I told him that I had got to
get this work right to-night, and that he was not to be critical and
look at it all the time and make me nervous.
He was surprised; said that he had no idea that he had that effect on
me, that all he wanted was to help: “_Je veux travailler cela avec
vous_.” His criticism, he said, was caused by intense interest, and that
for nothing in the world would he be discouraging. He promised, however,
to be good, and offer no opinion until asked. It was a better night for
work; I felt calmer and it went pretty well.
The worst difficulties were surmounted. Trotsky stood for me in a good
light and dictated to his stenographer. That was excellent. His face was
animated and his attention occupied. I got all one side of his face
done. Then came the question of the other side. He laughed, suggested
another dictation, offered to stand in another position, and called back
his stenographer. When we were alone again he came and stood close
beside the clay and we talked while I went on working. We talked a
little about myself.
He said I should remain in Russia awhile longer, and do some big work,
something like my “Victory.” An emaciated and exhausted figure, but
still fighting; that is the allegory of the Soviet.
I answered him that I could get no news of my children, and therefore
must go back.
“I must return to my own world, to my own conventional people whose
first thought is always for what the world will think. Russia with its
absence of hypocrisy and pose, Russia with its big ideas, has spoilt me
for my own world.”
“Ah! that is what you say now, but when you are away----” and he
hesitated.
Then suddenly turning on me, with clenched teeth and fire in his eyes,
he shook a threatening finger in my face: “If, when you get back to
England, _vous nous calomniez_ as the rest have, I tell you that I will
come to England _et je vous_----” He did not say what he would do, but
there was murder in his face.
I smiled: “That is all right. Now I know how to get you to England.”
Then (to fall in with his mood): “How can I go back and abuse the
hospitality and the chivalrous treatment I have received?”
He said: “It is not abusing, but there are ways of criticising even
without abuse. It is easy enough here to be blinded _par les saletés et
les souffrances_ and to see no further than that, and people are apt to
forget that there is no birth without suffering and horror, and Russia
is in the throes of a great _accouchement_.”
He talks well, he is full of imagery and his voice is beautiful.
We paused for tea, and I talked to him of things I had heard about the
schools. In reply he said he had heard no adverse reports of the
co-education scheme for boys and girls. There might be an individual
case of failure, though even of such a case he had not heard. He then
compared the present system with that of boy colleges of his own day,
and he said that his own boy of fourteen had nicer ideas about girls,
and far less cynicism, than he had at the same age. The boy apparently
confides in his mother, so he knows something about it.
To-night he sent me home alone in his car; he excused himself, saying it
was the only time it was possible for him to walk. He kissed my dirty
hand and said that he would always preserve a memory of “_une femme avec
une auréole de cheveux et des mains très sales_.”