双语·居里夫人的故事 第五章　人物

Chapter V　People

MANYA was back in Warsaw. Her big grey eyes looked out with a laugh in them at a changed world. Her firm upper lip often twitched with a merry smile, but her face was often serious. Like the fathers of most of the world, Mr. Sklodovski let his children know that they had their living to earn. He had given up taking students and the family again lived in a little house of their own. It was hard enough, while their father was still earning, to pay the rent, the daily girl and the house-keeping and they had to look forward to the time when he would have nothing but a teacher's small pension to live on. That worried him. Like the fathers of most of the world, he had hoped to make enough money to provide for his family. Sitting by the lamp in the evening, he would sigh deeply. Four pair of happy eyes, between periwinkle-blue and grey, would look up at him and guess his thought; his four children would all protest together: “Don't worry, Father, aren't we all young and strong and able to earn for ourselves?” Mr. Sklodovski must have wondered, as he smiled at their eagerness, whether they would succeed in life as he had not done. He had worked hard and been very gifted and yet had won very little reward in money from life. Would his children be like him? The baldheaded, short, fat, little man sat under the lamp in his dark, meticulously brushed, shabby coat. Everything about him was precise and neat: his handwriting, his thoughts, his expressions, even his actions. He had brought up his children with the same exquisite, neat care. When he took them on excursions he made out the itinerary beforehand, pointed out the beauties of the landscape to them, realising, perhaps, what few people know, that most people miss seeing beauty because nobody mentions it. If they came to an old or famous building, he would tell them its history. Manya saw no faults in her father. It never occurred to her to mock his precise little ways. She thought of him as a fount of universal knowledge. And, indeed, he knew many things. He kept up with the new discoveries in physics and chemistry by buying learned pamphlets with his hard-earned savings. He knew, without a thought of his own cleverness, Greek and Latin and five modern languages. He wrote verse and read aloud beautifully to his children every Saturday evening so that they grew to know great literature. When he wanted to read to them some foreign book, David Copperfield, for example, he read it in Polish though the copy in his hand was English.

“There's nothing new at home,” wrote Manya to a friend. “The plants are quite well, thank you! The azaleas are in flower and Lancet is asleep on the rug! I have had my dress dyed and Gucia, the daily maid, is altering it. She's just done Bronia's, which is a success. I have little time and still less money. A lady who was recommended to us for lessons came; but when Bronia told her they would cost her a shilling an hour, she fled as if the house were on fire.”

Yet, paid badly or not, Manya had to teach. Nothing else was open to girls in those days. But she didn't think: “How many pupils can I get? What can I earn?” That wasn't Manya! She had her dreams—not the girl dream of getting married, nor the boy dream of engine driving. Her dream was Poland. She, Manya Sklodovska, must help Poland. How could she do that with her sixteen years and the stuff her father and her school and books had put into her head? There were others who dreamed for Poland, Manya knew, and plotted to throw bombs at the Czar. There were those who dreamed that God would answer their prayers for Poland. But, though Manya lent her passport to a revolutionary, she dreamed neither of those dreams. She believed that the most practical dream is the best: do the thing that is just in front of you; teach the Poles whom the Russian government was doing its best to keep ignorant; teach and teach and teach till Warsaw should become a great centre for the things of the mind, till Poland should lead Europe by being best.

New ideas were spreading in England and France. Manya had a friend ten years older than herself who had got wind of them and had started a secret society called the “Winged University” to study them. Manya, Bronia and Hela joined it. The little company met at one another's houses to be taught, not some weird or wild study, but just anatomy, biology and natural history. Yet at the sound of a knock at the door, a mouse in the wainscot, everyone started and trembled. If the police had caught them, it would have been prison for everybody. The members had to teach as well as learn. Manya collected a little library of books to lend to poor people but she had to teach them their letters and how to read before the books could be of any use to them.

Sometimes a Polish shop would be glad to let its work girls gather after work to meet Manya and sit thumbing books and racking brains in order to become more worthy citizens of Poland. No one was afraid that a single girl would give the secret away. Gay, reserved, little Manya, among the older, rougher girls refused to allow a single slang word or a single cigarette. Finding her curls too attractive, she cut them off, not noticing that by so doing she made herself look still more childish. She was full of work, trying her hand at everything: lectures, meetings, drawing, writing poetry, reading the literature of half a dozen countries—above all, following the far thoughts of great writers.

But what occupied her thoughts most was what was she going to do with Bronia. Bronia was getting old, or at least so thought Manya, and no one would see to Bronia's career if she didn't. Morning after morning, in fair weather or foul, she went to give her paid lessons. The rich kept her waiting, to them she was just a poor teacher, in a draughty corridor. “So sorry, Miss Sklodovska, my little girl is late this morning; you'll be able to give her her full lesson, of course?” At the end of the month her pay was forgotten. “So sorry, my husband will pay the two months together.” But Manya was needing the money then. She had been longing for it to buy a few necessary things.

Bronia was looking pale and discouraged. Manya would have to set aside her own ambitions, her desire to go to a university to satisfy her great need of knowledge. She must get Bronia off her hands first.

“Bronia, I have been thinking it all out,” she said one day; “and I have spoken to father. I think I have found a way.”

“A way to what?”

Manya had to be very careful and tactful. “Bronia, how long, could you live in Paris on what you've saved?”

“I could pay the journey and one year's living, but Medicine needs five years,” answered Bronia quickly.

“Yes, and lessons at a shilling an hour won't take us far.”

“Well?”

“Well, if each of us is working for herself, neither of us will succeed. Whilst with my plan you can take your train this autumn.”

“Manya! You're mad!”

“No. At first you can spend your own money and afterwards I will send you some. So will father. I can save for myself at the same time. And when you are a doctor, it will be my turn to go and you can help me.”

There were tears in Bronia's eyes for she understood what the offer meant to Manya but she thought the arithmetic a little odd. “How are you going to keep yourself, to help me and to save all at the same time?” she asked.

“Ah! That's the way I am finding. I am going to get a resident post where I shall be kept by someone else and have no chance to spend anything! Isn't that perfect?”

“No,” said Bronia, “I don't see why I should go first. You are cleverer. If you go first, you will succeed quickly and afterwards I can go.”

“Why? Oh foolish Bronia, dear! Aren't you twenty and I only seventeen? You have been waiting centuries. I have time. The eldest must go first. When you have a practice, you can shower gold on me! Besides I have set my heart on it, so there!”

So in September, just a month before her eighteenth birthday, Manya found herself in the waiting room of the Governesses' agency, dressed as she was sure a governess should be dressed. Her hair which had grown again was neatly done under her faded hat; her dress was plain and severe; everything about her was ordinary and quiet.

Nervously she approached the lady at the desk, holding her certificate and testimonials very tight. The lady read the testimonials very attentively and then suddenly looked at Manya; she even stared at her. “You really mean that you know German, Russian, French, Polish and English perfectly?” she questioned.

“Yes” said Manya, “though my English is not so good as the others. Still, I can teach it up to examination standard. I won the High School gold medal.”

“Ah! And what salary do you want?”

“Forty pounds a year resident.”

“I will let you know if a post offers.” With that not-tooencouraging promise, Manya left the agency.

It was not long before Manya found herself a private governess. The family's name is secret, because they would not like to remember the trick fate played them. They opened a little door for Manya Slodovska, aged eighteen, and through it, as she tells us, she caught a little glimpse of hell and she wouldn't go through. Life meant Manya to be a great giver of gifts, not an unhappy, little despised slave. They were rich, the B—s; they kept the governess in her place, speaking to her as an iceberg might speak, could it creak out its thoughts. They threw their great wealth about in public, but they kept her six months without her salary and expected her not to read in the evenings in order to save lamp oil. Their speech to people's faces was honeysweet, but behind their backs so backbiting that Manya says they didn't leave their friends a dry thread to cover them.

“I have learnt from them,” she wrote, “that people in books are true and that one is wise not to mix with those whom wealth has spoilt.” Perhaps it was such knowledge, won when she was eighteen, that made Manya Sklodovska in the far future unspoilable by any offer of great wealth!

But Manya's plan was not working. Living at the B—s in town, she found that she spent a little money every day. It was very pleasant to be able to see her father sometimes and to be able to keep up with her friends of the winged university, but when you have made up your mind to a plan, you must carry it out whatever the cost. Manya found that she must leave home entirely, must get a post in the depth of the country, where she would be able to spend nothing. In that way, Bronia, who was already in Paris, would be able to have what she had planned for her.

The very post she was seeking turned up. It was far away in the country and it was a little better paid—fifty pounds a year this time. And, of course, fifty pounds went farther in those days than now. But it was with rather a sinking heart that Manya showed her new address to her father, though probably it did not look as outlandish and far away to him as it does to us.

Melle Marya Sklodovska

c/o Monsieur Z—

SZCZUKI,

near PRZASNYSZ

It was January when Manya set out for the country, a January in Poland where the snow lay thick for months together. As the train drew slowly out of the station, she realised that she could no longer see her father waving to her. For the first time in her life she was wholly alone and frightened. Those new people in a far away village, from which there was no escape might prove to be as unkind as her last employers. Or her father, who was getting old, might be taken ill. Ought she to have left him? The long fields of snow crept by in the gathering darkness, but they had long been blotted out by Manya's tears.

Three hours in the train and then a sledge to meet her. Warm fur rugs were tucked around her and out into the snowy majesty of the winter night she speeded through a silence broken only by the noise of sleigh bells.

Four hours in the sleigh. Iced and hungry, Manya wondered if the horses would ever stop. Then a yawning space of light, an open door and a whole family to meet her—the tall master of the house, the mistress, the shy children clinging to their mother's skirt, their eyes alive with curiosity. Madame welcomed her with warm, friendly words, gave her boiling tea, took her herself to her room, and left her alone to recover some warmth and to unpack her few shabby cases.

Manya was in the depth of the country. She looked round with satisfaction at her whitewashed, simply furnished room, with its warm stove in an alcove.

The next morning she drew her curtains, expecting to see snowy fields and forests bending under snow. Instead she was greeted with factory chimneys belching black smoke. She drew back and looked again—not one chimney but many, and not a tree to be seen, not a bush, not a hedge. She was in the sugar beet district. As far as the eye could see there was nothing but ploughed land waiting for beetroot. The whole country was devoted to beetroot. For beetroot the peasants ploughed and sowed and harvested. The factories were beetroot refineries. The village consisted of the cottages of the beetroot workers sheltering under factory walls. The house where she lived belonged to the director of beetroot. The river flowed coloured with beetroot.

The factories were a disappointment to Manya. So were the young men and maidens of the big houses round. They talked of nothing but what he said and she said, of the clothes they would wear, of who was giving the next ball and of how long the last had gone on. Manya was so horrified when Mr. and Mrs. Z— came home from a dance at one o'clock in the afternoon that she seemed to have forgotten how much she had once rejoiced at dancing till eight in the morning.”Give me the pen of a caricaturist,” she exclaimed, “for some of these people are really worthy of it. The girls are geese, who don't know how to open their mouths and so far my Bronka, the eldest daughter of the house, is a rare pearl for sense and interest in life.” Besides Bronka, there was another interesting person at Szczuki, her little brother Stas, aged three. He was the life of the long, one-storied house. His pattering feet went everywhere, down the long corridors, out into the glass verandahs that looked shabby under the leafless virginia creeper. His prattle amused Manya. Once his Nanny told him that God was everywhere. “Stas doesn't like that,” he replied; “I'm afraid he'll catch me! Will he bite me?”

Andzia, Manya's special pupil, was ten and a Fidgetty Phyllis, who ran away from her lessons whenever a visitor called. Manya was supposed to teach her for four hours a day, but what with her perpetual running away and being caught and brought back and having to go back to the beginning again, work did not get on, as one might say, fast. Andzia, too, was apt to lie in bed till Manya pulled her out by the arm, a proceeding that aggravated Manya particularly. On one of those mornings, it took her two hours to re-cover her temper. The best part of her day were the three hours in which she read with Bronka and those other hours of leisure when she wrote long letters home: “I am coming to Warsaw at Easter,” she said; “and at that thought everything in me rejoices so much that it is all I can do not to shout like a savage.”

Along the muddy village lanes, she met the village children, dirty little boys and girls, their bright eyes looking out at her from under their matted tow-like hair. “Aren't these Poles?” she said to herself. “I, who have vowed to enlighten the people, can I not do something for them?” Those ragamuffins either had never learnt anything or only knew the Russian alphabet. Manya thought that it would be fun to start a secret Polish school for them.

Bronka was delighted when she heard of the idea. “Not so fast,” said Manya. “If we are caught, it will be Siberia for us, you know.” They both knew what Siberia meant—exile in a terrible land of frozen plains. But Bronka was ready to take the risk. The two girls obtained the permission of Mr. Z— and the class began.

Fortunately, there was an outside staircase to Manya's room. Ten or eighteen small, grubby boys and girls began to tramp up it. Manya borrowed a deal table and some benches and spent some of her valuable savings on buying exercise books and pens for her pupils. Then the fun began. Clumsy fingers grasped the unaccustomed instruments and letters were scrawled on white paper. Slowly the mysterious fact that you can write the sounds you hear in black on white began to dawn on the urchins. The proud parents, who could not themselves read, came up the wooden stairs and stood overwhelmed and delighted at the back of the room watching the marvellous thing a son or a daughter was doing. The sons and daughters were not doing it easily. They twisted, they sniffed, they groaned as if making a letter was as hard as carrying beetroots up a mountain. Manya and Bronka moved among them, helping them in their painful trying. They were smelly, they were often inattentive, they weren't very clever, but for the most part, their bright eyes showed that they were excited about their lessons and longing to learn.