Authors: Rebecca West
For there could be only one reason why Soviet Intelligence should have wished to seduce the awkward and inept child William Martin Marshall: to put him on a salver and serve him up to British Intelligence, to divert its attention from another and more valuable agent, possibly not British at all, who was working on so nearly the same field as Marshall that the British and American Intelligence authorities would think, having arrested Marshall, that they had stopped the leak which had been troubling them and could relax their vigilance. So far so good for Kuznetsov. He could not have trussed Marshall up more competently had he been a professional poulterer and the lad a Christmas goose. Kuznetsov had even put in some fancy touches on which he was able to congratulate himself; prodigious cantrips on his way to his appointments which looked the very thing a not-too-clever spy would do if he were trying to throw detectives off his trail. But the other agent, the agent who was not Marshall, must be very valuable. He must indeed be enormously valuable if to cover him Soviet Intelligence deemed it worth while to stage this prolonged and elaborate farce, which involved the withdrawal from his duties of such a responsible official as Kuznetsov, even though that might be only for a time. But whether it would only be for a time must have been one of the questions which worried Kuznetsov during those weeks. The ways of Intelligence being what they are, there would be British and American observers in Soviet
Russia who would have their eyes on Kuznetsov. If he was to be visible, at liberty and in good condition, then these observers would say, “What, is that not Kuznetsov? Why is he walking about at his ease after he made that catastrophic blunder? Can it be that the Marshall case, after all, was not what it seemed?” There would be no simpler way for the Soviet government to convince them that the Marshall case was exactly what it seemed on the surface than by punishing Kuznetsov severely, by punishing him for a long time, by finding, if it were possible, a form of punishment which would lull foreign suspicions for ever. It is to be noted that when the Soviet government accuses persons of conspiring against it, such as Rajk, the witnesses who testify that they conspired with them are afterwards treated as if that evidence were true, however patently false it may be, and are punished accordingly.
Often Kuznetsov must have lifted his head from his work and sent his thoughts along the avenue to the gates where the porters in the Crown Commissioners’ livery turned back or let pass the incoming traffic. For him the hinges of the trap worked the other way. He had been allowed to go back to his flat once to pack up his luggage, but only once. Not possibly could he get out of Kensington Palace Gardens again until his colleagues took him down to the docks. In ordinary circumstances a foreign diplomat can walk out of his Embassy and seek asylum with the British authorities. But as it would have been very natural that he should want to do this, and as nothing was more certain than that the British authorities would have refused to receive him unless he approached them in the candid spirit of another Gouzenko, he would have been unwise if he had betrayed any desire for fresh air and exercise. He was suffering a form of imprisonment oddly crude for such an elegant residential area, but, of course, that incongruity may have counted for him as a consolation. Such Russians as he, able and resourceful and disciplined, place themselves at the disposal of the great organization which has taken over their country because it claims to be able to compel success, and they belong to the breed of the successful. It is well known that success depends on efficiency; and efficient management cuts its losses, sacrifices the smaller profit to the larger, scraps without hesitation the equipment which has had its day. Now that Kuznetsov found himself relegated to the category of the cut loss, the smaller profit, the obsolete equipment, he could comfort himself by reflecting that the management which was jettisoning him had the justification that it was in fact efficient; it had penetrated into the stronghold of British capitalism, it could be assumed that it had achieved its object and that the West was dying. If, as his mind ranged along the avenue, he thought of the men in the buildings occupied by the Embassies of other countries, who were certainly not in a state of detention and fear like himself, he probably despised them as children of a less glorious race, who would be spared great misfortunes only because nothing great of any sort would ever meet them on their road.
Often, during those days of high summer, he may well have had less heroic hours of consolation, have fallen into drowsiness, forgotten that he must soon start on a journey, and abandoned himself to the pleasantness of the place, pretending, perhaps, he was going to be able to stay there as long as he liked. The rooms in the Soviet Embassy buildings are quiet and cool, and there is no reason to fear the ghost of the fifth Earl of Harrington at Number 13, for he must surely have fled his old home for ever during the Second World War, for there was only one cause as dear to his later years as prohibition, and that was Polish Independence. Un-haunted, these rooms would exercise the spell which is cast by the whole avenue. All these houses were built in the age when it was thought that there was enough of everything to go round, and the illusion in the architects’ minds controlled their hands and still influences our eyes. It is impossible to remain for long among these serene masses of masonry without beginning to believe that all is well and will continually grow better. A conniving myth is told by the view from the windows, which blends the scattered treetops of Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park into a woodland where there might revel a company of beings in the dress of another age, dancing and speaking to one another always in verse. Kuznetsov must have often thought that Kensington Palace Gardens would have been a very agreeable spot indeed, if only people had not kept on coming to it.
He might have finished his career in peace if there had never come to this door the gangling boy, William Martin Marshall, twitching and pouting as if the old system were a harsh wind blowing on purpose to spite him, swaying and languishing as if he were courted by the new system. And in these later hours Kuznetsov might have been able to forget him had not the boy’s father also availed himself of the damnable accessibility of Kensington Palace Gardens. For the intrepid bus driver, who believed so fervently in the power of speech, who was of the opinion that if one spoke of things happening a certain way one could make them happen that way, did all he could to have his wish and talk it out with the man who could have saved his son from jail. He made the journey from Wandsworth with his wife, in his pocket a letter he had written to Kuznetsov, urging him to make a statement which would make it clear that he received no information from his son. He took it to Number 13, leaving his wife to wait outside. They both struck those who saw them as having aged by years since the trial. The letter was taken from him, and he was put into a small room. After an hour the letter was returned to him, and he was told that he could not see Mr. Kuznetsov, and was sent away. His appeal must have struck any Soviet official as light-minded and naïve, like a hysterical proposal to raise a sunken submarine by some device which ignored the mathematics of aquatic pressure.
But if it came to Kuznetsov’s knowledge it must have distressed him, for he was by all accounts an affectionate father himself, and during the last few weeks his five-year-old son must have seemed peculiarly dear to him. Misha was not with him in Kensington Palace Gardens. The Soviet Embassy has a country house for its employees, Seacox, fifty miles southeast of London near Hawkhurst in Kent, which it acquired for thirty thousand pounds. The little boy was sent down there when he and his parents were removed from their flat in Holland Villas Road. It is not known when his father saw him again. For Kuznetsov was alone when he left England on the
Jaroslaw-Dabrowski
on July 17. Though it might be supposed that the passages on a Polish ship would be at the disposal of the Soviet government, it was announced that there was only one cabin free and that therefore his wife and child must follow later. They sailed on August 5 on the
Beloostrov.
When they arrived at Moscow station Mrs. Kuznetsov looked eagerly round her, then burst into tears. Apparently she had hoped that someone would meet her whom she did not see. This may have been her husband. But other people came forward and took her away. Nobody was sorry for the Marshalls and the Kuznetsovs, for pity had long ago gone out of fashion.
Mr. and Mrs. Marshall visited Kensington Palace Gardens not once but three times; so wise was Emerson, so true was his saying, admired by Mr. Bentall of Kingston, “If a man write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbours, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten track to his door.” The Soviet Embassy might as well have been in the woods, so far as Mr. Marshall was concerned. To a lively inhabitant of Wandsworth, which is warm and moist with close-pressed current life, there can have been little enticement in Kensington’s wide and disappointed streets, where nearly every house is used less handsomely than was intended, and life seems to be draining away down the unnecessarily broad gutters. He cannot really have expected that things would have gone well with him there; if there had been any possibility that Kuznetsov could speak he would have spoken long before. But Mr. Marshall was not a free man. He was in the custody of his own fatherhood, and when his jailer bade him go with his wife, who was in the custody of her motherhood, into this alien and formal area for his son’s sake, he had to obey. They were, though they could make this journey across London, as much prisoners as the man they visited and as their son.
It is to be wondered that Kuznetsov should have had a son, knowing that the door might shut on him at any time as it had shut on the others. Mr. Marshall, too, had known well that there were nets and pits and that many a man had been caught before he could think of the words that would get him out. But the city which was traversed by the Marshalls, which encased Kuznetsov’s growing sense that something had gone wrong, was inscribed with a larger writing of that riddle. In winter the irrational process is disguised, but in summer, when children rush out of all the houses, it shows, naked and astonishing, the persistence of the human race in begetting and giving birth, in being born. In many gardens behind the little houses washing was hanging on the lines, even when it was not Monday and therefore not washing day at all by British tradition; there were rows of diapers pegged out square and white. Across a gravel path a wooden horse painted with blue spots lay on its back, the red cart it drew sticking up into the air at the authentic angle of serious accident. On the next lawn a tiny boy stood in front of cricket stumps, opening his mouth in an earnest circle as he held his bat straight and waited for an imaginary bowler to send along the ball; and in the next again, a fat little girl lumbered round and round, twirling a stick with a paper star on it. Among the shrubberies of an orphanage children in blue overalls ran and leaped as if they had not been deserted. There were many of them; there were specks of blue coming and going among the farthest trees. In the streets the air was loaded with a warm haze, smelling of dust and sunbaked bricks and mortar, which was a dry tickle in the nose and throat, yet left sweat on the skin; so down by the Thames the naked boys stood on the mud under the embankments and sunned themselves, their spare bodies erect like flames and white against the grey stone, or slid out among the diamonds of the sunlit water, shouting to other boys who shouted back from boats.
On the other side of the river the grey pavements, whitish under the excessive light, were scored with chalk marks for hopscotch, and hop, hop, hop, the little players went, lively in spite of the heat, as those cannot be who are older and have had summer after summer sucking the marrow out of their bones. In deck chairs, on the shiny blond grass in the parks, adults lay with closed eyes, their faces piteous, as if they could not support the weight pressed on them by the massive sunshine. Past them hurried children, on their way to bathe in the pools, or to hurtle themselves about on the slides and swings and whirligigs in the playgrounds, or to have a game of cricket with a curled-up coat laid on the ground for stumps. The children cried out exultantly as they went, crying without cease, as people in religious processions chant continually, that they were children, that they were with other children, that all of them were alive. If there should come to earth travellers from another planet where there is justice and all goes by reason, it must amaze them, how humanity makes a beaten track out of nothingness to this curious prison where there is no end to captivity and giving into captivity. They would wonder why the orphans in the shrubberies, the naked boys on the mudflats, the children in the parks, lifted up their voices like confident prophets, and why the adults lay still under the sun, as if they saw through their closed lids a vision which made it safe for them to rest. They might wonder if humanity knew something as yet unstated, which makes it not folly to be born. But it can be said of this larger mystery only what can be said of the lesser mystery in which William Martin Marshall was involved: the facts admit of several interpretations.
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“Greenhouse with Cyclamens I,” “Opera at Greenville,” “Mr. Setty and Mr. Hume,” and “The Better Mousetrap” were originally published in the United States in the
New Yorker
, to which grateful acknowledgment is made. The author also desires to thanks the editors of the
Daily Telegraph, Time and Tide, the Evening Standard
, and
World View
, in England, for the opportunities they gave her to collect the material for articles included in this volume.