Whether this was a revelation to Vera, or only a confirmation of what she already knew or had perhaps suspected, it was hard to tell. She sat there on her perch, mute, aloof.
“Now,” said Fanny Ivanovna, coming up to him with indomitable determination, “you must certainly go.” And he left the room, sobbing.
“How horribly he cried,” said Sonia. I followed her out into the drawing-room. When I returned I perceived that Vera was wiping her tear-stained eyes and telling Fanny Ivanovna who had evidently been consoling her:
“And I had hated him so.... Oh, I still hate him so ... so....” She half sobbed again, wiping her tear-stained face with her little handkerchief. And I thought that I could now discover something Jewish about her pretty features.
And then there was another bell. It seemed that evening that it was one long succession of bells each carrying in its trail some fresh dramatic revelation, as though we had been privileged to witness some three-act soul-shattering melodrama. It was to be a night of bells and sobs.
VIII
This time there was a good deal of whispering between the maid on the one hand, and Sonia and Nina and Vera on the other. Then the three sisters vanished into the hall, and there was more whispering. It seemed that the heavy front door had been only half shut and that they had all gone out on to the landing.
About five minutes later they returned to Fanny Ivanovna, purring round her like three pretty kittens, till Fanny Ivanovna became suspicious. Then they grew still, and a mysterious look came on Nina’s face.
“Fanny Ivanovna,” she said.
“Yes?”
“Will you do something for me, Fanny Ivanovna?”
“I will. You know, Nina, that I will do anything for you, anything—reasonable.”
“I’m afraid you will think it unreasonable, Fanny Ivanovna.”
“What is it?” said Fanny Ivanovna, for some reason looking round at me, as though I were a party to the conspiracy.
Nina looked at Sonia, and Sonia nodded.
“Mama is outside—on the landing. She wants to see you. Will you see her? Please, Fanny Ivanovna, please.”
I understood now why Vera had come back to Petersburg.
“Please!” cried Sonia.
“Please!” echoed Vera.
Fanny Ivanovna rose very swiftly, as if by the swiftness of her movement she intended to intercept at the root that which she considered quite inadmissible.
“No!” she said, colouring highly. “No!”
“Fanny Ivanovna, please!”
“No, Nina, no. It’s out of the question.”
“Oh, Fanny Ivanovna, please!” they entreated her. “She is our mother, Fanny Ivanovna. We can’t have our mother waiting on the landing. After all, she’s our mother.”
“After all,” said Fanny Ivanovna, putting a terrible meaning of her own into these simple words, “after all I am the mistress of this house. True, I have been thrown into the mud and trampled on, told I am not wanted, done away with, about to be thrown into the street like a dog, but while I am here I am the mistress of this flat. After all, I am!” she cried out, almost in tears.
“Very well, then, I will never speak to you again,” said Nina.
The three sisters again vanished on the landing, and whispers were renewed, and Fanny Ivanovna resumed her needlework, her agile fingers, it seemed to me, moving quicker than was their custom.
“The lap-dog ...” she whispered, turning her face to me. “The German governess.... Andrei Andreiech, why should I? Why should I?...”
When at last the three sisters returned from the landing, such depressing silence descended upon the room that I thought I would do well to follow the example of the two Pàvel Pàvlovichi and go home. There was no one to see me out this time. As I reached the lower steps of the broad winding staircase I heard the faint sound of a woman weeping. Then I could see a dark silhouette between the large glass double-doors leading out into the dim street. It was also dim in the vestibule. As I came nearer I saw that it was Magda Nikolaevna Bursànova.
My first impulse was to dash upstairs for a glass of water. But the sobs died away at my approach.
It was still raining heavily.
I raised my hat.
“I have sent the porter for a cab,” she said, wiping her tears hurriedly. “I don’t know if he’ll get one now. It’s raining terribly.”
And as we waited, before I knew where I was, she too began her confession.
“You must have heard of me very often,” she said in her gentle, musical voice. She was a very gentle-mannered woman and in her youth she must have been curiously like Nina. She even had, I thought, the side-long look. “I am sure,” she said, “I shouldn’t like to hear all that you have, no doubt, been told about me.”
Then she added:
“I know you. Nina has spoken of you. But there is one thing, Andrei— I don’t know your——”
“Andrei Andreiech.”
“There is one thing, Andrei Andreiech, that I want to know. Why, why can’t we put our heads together and decide something, help each other, instead of standing on our silly dignities? Heaven knows that we are in a muddle. Heaven knows that we have all of us sinned in our own small way, Andrei Andreiech. I came. I wanted to see her, to arrange things, to have it all out. I want to marry and leave them. I want Nikolai to give me a divorce. Then I will leave them alone. They can all do just as they please. I bear no one any malice.
“I came, and I was not admitted.... Into my own house, my own flat. It was my flat, Andrei Andreiech. I chose it. I bought the things and arranged them. There isn’t a single thing in here that wasn’t mine. When all is said and done, they are my children, Andrei Andreiech. And I have to wait outside like some low hawker—a tatarin—on the landing ... not admitted....” She was about to sob again, but then thought better of it and replaced her handkerchief.
“But, Andrei Andreiech, to send my own daughter to me to Moscow as a kind of emissary to ask me on no account to grant Nikolai Vasilievich a divorce, so that he should be unable to marry again—I call that low, low.... All this time she has wanted a divorce—reproached me, in fact, for standing in the way. What has it to do with me? If Nikolai really wanted a divorce, how could I have prevented him from getting it?”
“He would lose the children,” I explained.
“Why should he lose the children?” she asked.
“It’s the Russian law.”
Magda Nikolaevna laughed. “Are you a law student?”
“No.”
“I thought not.”
“Why?”
She laughed again. She had, I noticed, a very wicked laugh.
“Andrei Andreiech, you are very, very young, and believe everything you hear. If I am in the wrong and he is in the right, is it likely, I ask you, that under any conceivable law Nikolai should lose the children? It is the one who is in the wrong that loses the children. If Nikolai does not want a divorce because he does not want to lose the children, he knows that he is in the wrong.”
“So you think that is the reason he doesn’t want a divorce?” I said, and then added, “Of course I knew that.”
“Ah, but you didn’t know why he would lose the children by a divorce. If you are logical you must admit that it is so. It’s either so, or——”
“Or?”
“Or Nikolai simply did not want a divorce.”
“Why?”
“Perhaps he didn’t want it.” She shrugged her shoulders and laughed wickedly. “You see, you can’t have it both ways. Either he didn’t want a divorce because he didn’t want to lose the children, in which case he obviously admits that he is in the wrong. Or,” she laughed wickedly, “he merely says so to Fanny Ivanovna, who is stupid and knows no better, because he does not want a divorce ... so as not to marry her.”
“But he does want a divorce,” I said.
“Now,” said Magda Nikolaevna. “I suppose you know why he wants it now?”
I nodded, and she nodded in answer—I thought rather significantly. I remembered that it had always been her wish to read for the Bar, but her own life had been too busy and complicated by legal proceedings to admit of the leisure necessary for the pursuit of her hobby.
“You know only half the story, young man,” she said. “You know, for instance, that I ran away with Eisenstein. But you don’t know why I ran away with Eisenstein.”
“I am sure I don’t want to,” I said, “if that is not being very rude.”
“Half-truths are more dangerous than lies,” said she. Here the porter returned with a cab.
She searched in her little bag for a coin, but I anticipated her.
“But you must,” she said. And dragging me after her under the raised hood of the cab and seated therein comfortably she was about to begin a long story, but suddenly checked herself.
“It’s rather absurd,” she said and then laughed softly, which for the moment made her seem to me again curiously like Nina, “that I should be telling you why I ran away with Eisenstein at a time when I ought to be telling you why I have just run away from him.”
“I am going to marry,” she said.
“Yes?”
“An Austrian, Cecedek. Do you know him?”
“No.”
“Andrei Andreiech,” she said suddenly, as we sat under the dripping roof, bouncing softly over the cobble-stones, “why don’t you go in for law? It’s so interesting.”
And glad of a change of subject I told her why I did not propose to read law. But as we turned on to the Liteiny and began ascending the convex bridge, she bent eagerly towards me and told me in great detail why she had run away with Eisenstein and why she was now running away from him.
IX
It was a day, I remember, of a peculiar warmth and fragrance, when you could feel that winter has become spring. I was strolling down the Nevski, and upon the wide, lighted splendour of this queen of streets I ran into Nikolai Vasilievich, with a pretty flapper on his arm.
“Andrei Andreiech!”
“Nikolai Vasilievich!”
And we shook hands warmly.
“May I introduce——?”
And I was introduced.
I could hardly recognize him. His careworn look seemed to have deserted him in his dissipation, as if ashamed to accompany him thither. He seemed ten years younger in her presence. He was smarter, bore himself better, seemed actually taller, bigger.... Oh, was it at all the same Nikolai Vasilievich who wrangled so furiously with Fanny Ivanovna? This Nikolai Vasilievich was as happy as a schoolboy. But before we had walked ten yards Nikolai Vasilievich was already expatiating on his unhappy family affairs. “Well, well!” he sighed. He rather liked to sigh over his sins; indeed it appeared that his distressing family burdens formed the sole subject of his conversation with this engaging flapper.
“I keep telling Nikolai,” said Zina, “‘don’t marry me, don’t. It is superfluous. I love you so much that I am perfectly prepared to live with you ... just to show you how I really love you.’ What is marriage? A piece of paper. It’s absurd. It means nothing. What do we care? What do I care? I have been reading Verbitskaya’s Springs of Happiness. She seems to agree with me.”
“No,” said her noble lover, “I wouldn’t think of taking advantage of your innocence. Verbitskaya is a fool. It would break your people’s hearts.”
“You are breaking your own people’s hearts, Nikolai Vasilievich,” I ventured.
“Exactly,” rejoined Nick. (He hardly looked old enough to warrant the dignity of “Nikolai Vasilievich.”) “I have broken enough hearts. I don’t want to break any more. I’ve had enough of this heart-breaking business, I can tell you. It is enough to break your own.”
“Your Oscar Wilde,” Zina turned to me, “said that hearts were made to be broken.”
“He also said,” I retorted, “that ‘We all kill the thing we love,’ and, in fact, a few other expensive things of that sort. But it is no reason, I assure you, why you should break anybody’s heart.”
“Exactly,” said Nicholas. “You think it very jolly to live together without being married, don’t you? But you just ask Fanny Ivanovna how she feels about it. No, my child, your Oscar Wilde is a fool.”
Quite automatically we turned into a cinema, the Parisiana in the Nevski, and witnessed the sort of stuff to which an uncomplaining public is still being treated every day and night all over the globe. When Nicholas left the box to get some chocolates Zina put her white-gloved hand on my arm. “I know,” she said, “Nikolai is being made to appear a blackguard by people who misunderstand his complex personality, but I am ready to give my life for him, Andrei Andreiech. Oh, you have no idea what a thoroughly good man he is when he is away from all those petty worries, those mean jealousies, those paltry domestic squabbles, those innumerable families all hanging round his neck, and he, alone, standing up against those legions, yes, legions of relatives and dependents and hangers-on. Oh, don’t laugh. I’m not excepting my own people. Oh, no! I am indeed ashamed, Andrei Andreiech, that it should be so. I had a dream last night. Shall I tell you what it was? It was Nikolai standing high upon a mountain peak, seeking to escape towards light and freedom and finding that he could not, because he was linked to the past. He tried to break the chains, but the past held him, clung to him, a monster with a thousand arms, like that picture in Gogol’s Terrible Vengeance. He found the past too strong for him.
“Why can’t he break with the past? Why should the past always hold him? Why should he always bear the burden of these families? Andrei Andreiech! he hasn’t lived yet. For was that life? I want to help him, make him happy, rid him of these petty worries, these mean intrigues. I want to help, to help, to help. But how can I help?... I thought, all night I thought out solutions, and then I came to what seemed to me the one reasonable, the only just solution. I proposed that we should commit suicide together. But, Andrei Andreiech, he doesn’t seem to be very keen on it. Poor boy, with all these ugly worries he is becoming horribly materialistic.”
They took me that evening to see Zina’s people. They lived across the river, over on the Petersburg side, a very large family in a small flat. There were innumerable aunts and uncles, sisters-in-law, second cousins, and such-like relatives, and of course a collection of giggling flappers practising the piano; two ancient grandfathers—the oldest thing in veterans—who had outlived their welcome, whose deaths, in fact, were looked forward to with undisguised impatience and freely discussed at meals; and a middle-aged doctor, his own health no better for his profession, with only a poor practice to support that swarm; and Nikolai Vasilievich, the mine-owner, standing behind them all like a benediction.
In addition there was Uncle Kostia, who, from what I could see, was living on the resources of his younger brother, Zina’s father. Uncle Kostia was a writer. Yet, though he had attained middle age, Uncle Kostia had never published a line. His two departments were history and philosophy, and every one in the family had the greatest respect for Uncle Kostia and thought him very clever. Later I had occasion to observe Uncle Kostia at closer range. He would wake up extremely late and would then sit for hours on his bed, thinking. He did not communicate his thoughts to anybody else; but all the members of the family took it for granted that Uncle Kostia was very clever. Uncle Kostia rarely dressed and rarely washed. When at length he parted with his bed he would stroll about through all the rooms in his dressing-gown, and think. No one spoke to him because, for one thing, all were frightened of displaying their ignorance in conversation, for Uncle Kostia was very clever, and also, I think, because they were loth to interrupt the flow of Uncle Kostia’s thoughts. At length he would settle down at a writing-table near the window in his brother’s study, and then for a long time Uncle Kostia would rub his eyes. In a languid manner he would dip his pen into ink and his hand would proceed to sketch diagrams and flowers on the margin of his foolscap, and Uncle Kostia would stare long at the window. Perhaps a buzzing fly endeavouring to find an exit would arrest his flow of thoughts, or would promote them—who knows?—but Uncle Kostia would grow very still: and one by one the members of the family would leave the room on tiptoe, and the last one out would shut the door behind him noiselessly. For Uncle Kostia was writing. What he wrote no one knew; he had never breathed a word about it to anyone. All we knew was that Uncle Kostia was very clever. From what I could make out no one had ever seen a line of his writing. But that he thought a great deal there was no question. His life was spent in contemplation. But what it was he contemplated, equally no one knew.
Such was the family to which Nikolai Vasilievich extended his protectorate.
“He is such a really good man,” confided Zina’s mother, a grey-haired, God-fearing old lady. “And to be pursued by those two wicked women both bent on making his life miserable, these cold and heartless daughters who laugh at him ... their own father! Andrei Andreiech, our lives are muddled up enough, God forgive us, and none of us knows where he is or how he stands or what he is about; but there are things that in our hearts we know we mustn’t do. And for his own daughters to go spying on their father, God forgive me, is the very limit. Just think of it, Andrei Andreiech, just think of it! Last Sunday, Zina tells me, she was about to meet Nikolai in the Summer Garden, and—can you imagine it?—his two daughters—I forget which two—with that Baron of theirs, followed them, pursued them wherever they went, giggling all the while as loud as they could, giggling.... Nikolai and Zina were finally compelled to board a tram-car to escape their pursuit. He wept when he came to me, Andrei Andreiech, and I have never seen Nikolai weep before. He said he hadn’t thought it possible of his daughters, Andrei Andreiech.”
After a somewhat sketchy dinner we all decided to go to the Saburov Theatre to see a new play. We proceeded accordingly in seven cabs and settled down in five boxes.
About half-way through the first act I perceived Nikolai give a start and then grow pale. I followed his gaze and then looked straight before me. In a box almost opposite our own sat Fanny Ivanovna, Sonia, Nina, Vera, Kniaz, and Baron Wunderhausen. For some absurd reason I, too, felt guilty and uncomfortable to the last degree, almost as if I had been caught red-handed in some disreputable act. Whether the silly play bored them and they were, like us, disgusted with the characteristic utterances of some well-to-do ex-student in the play holding forth on the disillusionment of life, or whether the sight of the prodigal Nicholas in his congenial surroundings was too much for Fanny Ivanovna; but they all left the theatre before the curtain fell on act two.
Nikolai Vasilievich seemed unusually morose as we drove home that night through the deserted streets of Petersburg. “The most perplexing thing about it all, Andrei Andreiech,” said he, “is ... well, it’s like that fable of Krilov.” And he quoted the fable with that curious pride that Russians usually take in Krilov’s un-Russian (I think British) common sense, as he instanced the case of the load pulled jointly by the swan, the crab and the pike in their several characteristically individual directions with the distressing result—the moral!—that the load, the fabulist tells us, is to-day exactly where it was before they had started on their expedition. The paradox of Nikolai’s position was that he had fled from his many family responsibilities to this engaging flapper precisely because of the intolerable burden of so many responsibilities—and had incurred additional ones.
X
Now when I ask myself how I could have so hopelessly misgauged the situation, I find it difficult to give a clear account of it. I had wanted to help, to be a friend to all those helpless, charming and kind-hearted people.... Anyhow, it was my first experience of “intervention.”
That night I lay awake in bed, planning how I could straighten out the tangle. Was it not, I pondered, up to me, their mutual confidant, to see that these childish, fascinating people did not destroy each other’s lives in their muddle-headedness and inertia? The older people had all blundered. Nina had been on a mission to Moscow, and Nina had failed. They would trust me, I said, to act for the best. And was it not a worthy task to save these helpless creatures from so much misery and anguish? Well, of course it was. Suddenly I felt violently enthusiastic. I felt so violently enthusiastic that I jumped out of bed. I paced the floor that midnight hour, thinking with a Napoleonic concentration.
I felt, as my thoughts ran ahead of me, that the dramatis personæ of this human drama was much too long to enable me to assign successfully to each character the part he was to play in his colleagues’ lives. I switched on the light over my writing-table and began to write. I wrote down their names in two columns. Then I perceived that the two columns did not serve my purpose; so I drew arrows and circles round the names and endeavoured to arrange them in sets and groups according to my own ideas as to how they should be mated. I began by mating Nina with myself. This was easy enough: it was obvious. I consented to make Baron Wunderhausen a present of Sonia. That was done. Obviously Kniaz would have to go on living on Nikolai Vasilievich till some employment could be found for him. I should have to go into this question later; examine the shares, see what possibilities they had of ever going up, and so on. Now so much was settled. Of course, Magda Nikolaevna must have her divorce. No useful purpose would be served by putting spokes in her wheel, by hindering her in her praiseworthy intention to marry Cecedek, that Austrian fellow, who was extraordinarily wealthy. They wanted all the money they could get. But the condition of this concession should be that Cecedek must agree to share the brunt of supporting the multitudinous families, dependents and hangers-on with Nikolai Vasilievich until such time at least as something more definite could be known about the mines. It might be advisable to sell the mines and re-purchase the mortgaged house in the Mohovaya. But that was a detail that could be settled later. I felt that I was getting on marvellously.
Now that Nicholas and Magda were divorced (I could not help calling them by their diminutives, for I felt so much older and wiser than they, having taken them in hand), Nicholas must be prevailed upon to marry Fanny. This step would do much to relieve the tension and prevent bad blood between the two. It would secure Fanny’s prestige in her own eyes and would consolidate her position in regard to her people in Germany. Now, Fanny having been granted this very liberal concession, which after all was nothing short of her one real great ambition in life, she on her part should not be allowed to impede Zina’s passionate desire to live with Nicholas: a gratification, as a matter of fact, demanded by the overpowering love of two human beings; and Zina, who had always been prepared for anything from suicide upward, would not begrudge Fanny the formal and somewhat hollow superiority of wedlock; while Zina’s people, in the face of the considerable financial assistance that they would continue to receive at the hands of Nikolai, and Magda’s future husband would find that their objection carried little moral weight. There remained Vera. She should stay, provisionally, with Fanny Ivanovna and Nicholas, the latter spending as much time in Fanny’s household as might be deemed fit or practicable. Vera hated her father, and Eisenstein, poor as he was, would not be likely to demand his daughter. Now Eisenstein should not be left without a job. He must leave the Stock Exchange. That was absolutely necessary. His dental qualifications should be looked into; and he might—but that at any rate was not of the first importance—be made assistant to Zina’s father (though unfortunately the latter’s practice was all too small already). How to enlarge the practice could be settled afterwards. Uncle Kostia’s manuscripts would have to be examined, and possibly some of his deeper thoughts might be published with advantage.
Now, having made these few preliminary arrangements, it was imperative to ensure the financial working of this new combine. Well, expenses must be cut down all round. Nicholas and Cecedek should not be taxed too heavily, for if they went bankrupt then the whole new structure would collapse like a pack of cards. I would set myself, at an early date, to examine very carefully the requirements of the various families and hangers-on.
First, there was Fanny’s family in Germany. Now Fanny, once definitely married to Nicholas, should have more moral courage to face the situation. Those spendthrift brothers in the Guards must be told to chuck the army and enter a commercial life. Militarism was no honourable profession. The sisters should marry. For all I knew they might long ago have married men with considerable means, but have kept it quiet from their sister, so as to continue to draw allowances from Nicky.
Now Zina’s family came next. The number of its mere hangers-on was preposterous. Of course, those two ancient grandfathers were already tottering and their end was nigh. The flappers who strummed on the piano were growing up. A few of them might be conveniently married off to suitable and financially independent young men. Zina’s father, assisted by Eisenstein, might make a better job of his doctoring; though to begin with, he should receive medical treatment himself.
Then....
I thought. There was no “then.” I had disposed of them all. There were indeed fewer cases than I had expected. I had disposed of them as I had gone along. Of course, Baron Wunderhausen, after he had married Sonia, was not really disposed of, perhaps on the contrary. But this was an isolated case into which I need not enter, at any rate just yet.
Perhaps I was young and absurd. But was I absurd? What was wrong with my proposition? What thoughtful mind would accuse me of absurdity if it only cared to look at the thing squarely? The people were helpless—children.
Of course, I would have to do it all tactfully, slowly, discreetly. But really, was it not a worthy mission? To arbitrate; to settle things. I felt as President Wilson must have felt years later when he was laying down the principles of a future League of Nations....
I stood before Nina the following day, bursting with the desire to lay it all down before her all in a heap, as it were, but holding myself back with an effort, conscious of the danger of precipitate action. “Let us sit down, Nina,” I said, fingering a large folded sheet of paper. I held another even larger sheet, rolled up under my arm. “You see, Nina, we young people must help the old people out of their muddles. They are obviously unfit to help themselves.”
“I have done what I could,” she answered. “I have been down to Moscow, but of course I admit I only acted as Fanny Ivanovna’s envoy.”
“Exactly. You have failed?”
“I didn’t enjoy plenipotentiary powers, as they call it.”
“Quite so. Now listen to me, Nina.” And I proceeded to lay before her the principles on which I said I was going to re-shape their lives: each one would have to give up something for the benefit of the whole, and each one would similarly receive a compensation of some kind in that future life of theirs: in short, as I had mapped it out the night before. I now unfolded my chart and diagram, and she bent over them and our heads nearly touched as we went into this complicated question very thoroughly and seriously indeed. I could barely suppress the look of pride that every now and then would steal over my face. I explained and propounded with something of the insolence of a creator, an artist and a prophet, and she listened to me, all absorbed in my scheme, following the diagram, I thought, with marvellous intuition.
“Ah, yes. I understand,” she murmured. “That’s good. This couldn’t be better. Ah, there you kill two birds with one stone ... oh, three birds!”
Then Nina rose.
“Well, what d’you think of it!” I said with undisguised triumph in my look. And looking at me with a quaint and sudden seriousness that astonished me immensely (to the detriment of my triumphant look), she answered:
“All this is very well, but ... pray what business is it all of yours!”
I expostulated. I told her how eager I had been to help. But she laughed. She made fun of me. She had been making fun of me all the time, even while we were bending with such a serious mien over the chart and diagram. And I perceived that her serious look, her interest in the scheme a while ago, was all deliberately put on to commit me more deeply to the exposition of my scheme in order to make more fun of me afterwards.
She laughed. She burst with merriment.
“Nina!”
She laughed still more. She was convulsed; she could barely speak, and the tears came into her eyes.
Then she opened the door into the corridor and called out:
“Sonia! Sonia!”
“Nina!” I cried in remonstrance.
“Vera!” she called. “Papa! Fanny Ivanovna! Kniaz! Pavl Pavlch!”
I had to realize, to my deep shame and anguish, that they were all at home, as they entered the room one by one. My face grew crimson.
Nina held out the chart and the diagram at arm’s length and explained, it seemed to me wilfully misrepresenting the whole thing, mating individuals in a preposterous fashion, so that Sonia would cry out:
“But Cecedek does not want to marry Fanny Ivanovna!”
And Fanny Ivanovna, colouring highly, would exclaim:
“What—what’s that?”
“They more or less belong to the same race,” said Nina. “Is that the idea?” She turned to me with assumed innocence.
And Sonia cried again, “But Zina doesn’t want to live with the dentist-Jew!”
“I take it that she’ll have to. You can’t have it all ways, you know, in such a complicated scheme.” And then with a side look at me, “Am I right?”
“And why should Cecedek subsidize anybody?”
“Why?” said Nina, with a look at me.
“You’re making a farce of it!” I cried in utter desperation.
“It’s you who are making a farce of it,” Nina cried. “Papa, he is laughing at us!”
Fanny Ivanovna walked out of the room in what seemed to me a defiant manner. I seemed to hear a solitary “Hm!”
Nikolai Vasilievich, with the diagram in his hand and trailing the chart in a degrading manner along the floor, so that I burnt with shame for my neat and able work of the night before, led me aside and said in a very earnest tone of voice, addressing me as “Young man”:
“You know we are always glad to have you here, but to make fun of our family difficulties ... to make fun ... to make fun ...” (he was getting a little heated) “of our family difficulties into which you, as our guest, were unavoidably initiated ... is, I consider, tactless and indelicate.” And he tore up first the chart and then the diagram into a thousand fragments and flung them into the great big stove in the corner of the room.
“Nikolai Vasilievich!” I cried. “I assure you I only wanted to help.”
“Oh, look here,” said Nikolai Vasilievich impatiently, turning on his heels, “please stop these unbecoming jokes. They’re not even funny.” And they all left me.
But I went into the corridor and caught Nina by the hand and dragged her back into the room and did what is known as “giving her a bit of my mind.” I was so wild that I did not know how to begin. “Very well,” I cried at last, “I shall leave you all to stew in your own juice!”
“Very well,” she said.
“And I shall never come again.”
“Very well,” she said.
And it seemed that to whatever I said in my excitement, she answered coldly and indifferently as she sat there, looking at me coldly and indifferently, “Very well,” until it irritated me beyond endurance, and I cried:
“Very well! But do you silly people realize how utterly laughable you all are? Oh, my God! Can’t you see yourselves!” (I could not see myself.) “But can’t you see that you have been lifted out of Chehov?... Oh, what would he not have given to see you and use you!”
“He’s dead,” she said.
“But there are others. Oh, no, my dear, you are not safe. What’s there to prevent some mean, unscrupulous scribbler who cares less for people than for his art, from writing you up? One doesn’t often come across such incomparable material. I feel I am almost capable of doing it myself. I’ll write up such a Three Sisters as will knock old Chehov into a cocked hat. It’s so easy. You just set down the facts. The only handicap that I’m aware of is that you are all of you so preposterously improbable that no one would believe that you were real. This is, in fact, the trouble with most modern literature. No fiction is good fiction unless it is true to life, and yet no life is worth relating unless it be a life out of the ordinary; and then it seems improbable like fiction.”
She did not answer, but by her face I could see that now she was angry.
“I wanted to help you, and this is the thanks I get....”
And feeling that I must make my exit dramatically conclusive, I said, “And now I’m going”; and then on reflection added, “and I shall never come again.”
I lingered for a moment, to give her an opportunity of stopping me. But she did not avail herself of it; and so I left the room. Once or twice I stopped in the corridor to listen if she was coming, when I intended to continue my dramatic exit. But she did not come.
It did not matter, anyhow, I thought, as I was putting on my coat (slowly while no one watched me, but if she had appeared I would have hastened my withdrawal). I knew that she would watch me from the window, and at the door there stood that beautifully proportioned nag “Professor Metchnikoff,” waiting for me. My heart leapt within my breast at the agreeable thought of how I would step into the victoria and drive off swiftly with a dramatic conclusiveness.
I dashed down the staircase. I stood beneath the porch. But where in heaven was “Professor Metchnikoff”?
And I beheld where he was.
I had often seen our wily Tartar coachman Alexei shake his little head, as I lavished praise on the shape of “Professor Metchnikoff,” and heard him say that the animal was “unreliable.” I had never believed him. Well, did I now?
I beheld a curious spectacle. The little wily Alexei, big-bottomed in accordance with the best traditions, sat helpless on his soft broad box-seat and flapped his reins in a hopeless fashion, producing with his lips an entreating but ineffectual sound, as Professor Metchnikoff, composed and dignified, retreated backward toward the tramlines at the cross-roads.
I ran to his rescue, and taking Professor Metchnikoff by the bridle I led him forward. I looked up as I did so. Thank God, Nina was not at the window. I then left Professor Metchnikoff, who stood quite quiet, and stepped into the carriage. No sooner had I done so than Professor Metchnikoff resumed his steady and dignified retreat. The coachman, strapped tightly in his cushioned clothes, was helpless as a doll. I glanced at the house, and lo! on the balcony above Nina’s window there stood Sonia, Nina, Vera, Kniaz, Fanny Ivanovna, Nikolai Vasilievich, and Baron Wunderhausen, looking down at me and laughing.
I glanced up at them and crimsoned, and then in a fury I leant forward and hit Professor Metchnikoff across the back with my walking-stick. Professor Metchnikoff halted for a moment, as if considering what to do, and then decided in favour of a retirement. And, seated in the open carriage, I retreated steadily to the accompaniment of laughter from the balcony. Despite the coachman’s frantic efforts to the contrary, I vanished backward very slowly out of sight—when suddenly the fiendish nag jerked forward and trotted home as though nothing had ever been the matter.
XI
How often then I dreamed of those white nights of Petersburg, those white mysterious sleepless nights....
Fanny Ivanovna was alone, and we sat together on the open balcony and talked about her troubles in the white night. We sat listless. We felt a strange tremor. We waited for the night, for twilight; but they were not. Heaven had come down over earth. It was one splash of humid, milk-white, pellucid mist. We could see everything before us clearly to the minutest detail. The street with its tall buildings tried hard to fall asleep, but could not: it, too, suffered from insomnia; and the black window-panes of the sleepless houses were like tired eyes of great monsters. Now and then a man would pass beneath us, his steps resounding sharp and loud upon the pavement. Curiously, he had no shadow. Then he was gone, and there was not a soul in the street.
A horrible dream crept over us.... And to rouse ourselves from its increasing domination, we talked. Talking with her, as ever, meant listening. “I have passed the tragic stage, Andrei Andreiech,” she said. “Now I don’t care. I am almost accustomed to my position.”
I tried to put a word in. “I suggest, Fanny Ivanovna, that you all break loose, disentangle yourselves from one another, and then begin at the beginning.”
But she talked on into the night, heedless of my remarks.
“I am only waiting till Nikolai Vasilievich can pay me off; then I shall return to Germany. I am indeed quite optimistic. I am now at the laughing stage. You see, our life can hardly be called a comedy, for if it were produced on the stage no one would believe it was real. No real people could be so silly. It is a farce, Andrei Andreiech. You were right when you made a farce of it then with your chart and diagram and things, do you remember?”
“I honestly wished to help,” I remonstrated.
But she laughed appreciatively, as if to say that she had noted with approval my attempt to pull her leg.
She talked in fragments. “Yes, Andrei Andreiech, you will find—it is indeed a curious thing—that girls who are brought up in such unnatural surroundings as you would think scarcely contributive to the development of the moral virtues, are often the very girls who have the strictest possible conception of morality. What they have seen around them has only had the effect of putting them upon their guard. They are morally inoculated. I haven’t the slightest hesitation in allowing them to read any books they like. They can read Verbitskaya and Artsibashev and Lappo-Danilevskaya and the rest of them if they please. You in England are fortunate indeed. You have serious, moral writers who think of the good of the race and really teach you something positive, constructive and worth while. You have Byron and Oscar Wilde....”
Like so many other people in Russia, Fanny Ivanovna believed that England has three great outstanding writers: Byron, Shakespeare, and Oscar Wilde.
“Ach! Andrei Andreiech! I have had a terrible row with Cecedek. It’s all that Baron Wunderhausen. He made love to Nina....”
I remember that at these words I sat up in my chair.
“ ... in French, Andrei Andreiech!
“‘I hate talking of such things in Russian,’ he said, thinking he would impress her. But she wouldn’t listen.”
My body relaxed in the chair.
“If there’s one thing that Nina simply cannot stand, it is being made love to ... above all in French! He came to me after that and said:
“‘Fanny Ivanovna, it came over me like that ... overnight!...’
“‘Oh, then it will go out overnight,’ I said. ‘Pàvel Pàvlovich, please don’t talk of it to me.’ But he turned to me and said in a secretive whisper:
“‘Fanny Ivanovna, if you will help me to win her heart I will be your greatest friend on earth.’ And then, after the manner of a doctor, ‘And now tell me all your troubles. We’ll see what we can do.’
“‘Pàvel Pàvlovich,’ I cried, ‘Sie sind verrückt. My troubles are my private affairs and concern no one but myself. Good night.’
“So he complained of me to Magda Nikolaevna; and, would you believe it! she sent Cecedek to tell me that she will not allow me to hamper her daughters’ happiness, that she doesn’t want them to die old maids, like me—me! if you please—that I am unfit to look after them, and so on, and so on. Andrei Andreiech, they are sixteen, fifteen and fourteen! But I can guess the true cause. She wants to marry Cecedek and she naturally doesn’t want her daughters to live with her as this would make her appear her own age, to say nothing of the danger of his falling in love with one of them. They are so pretty.”
“But why need they live with her at all?”
“Ah,” said Fanny Ivanovna. “She said emphatically that she will not have them live with their father if that’s the way he carries on. She is afraid it will corrupt their morals.”
“But doesn’t she continue to draw an allowance from Nikolai Vasilievich?”
“She does. But ever since she met Cecedek, who is preposterously rich, she has lost her faith in Nikolai Vasilievich’s mines—indeed says so openly. This distresses Nikolai very much indeed. I don’t know why it is that he attaches such importance to her faith in the mines, unless it is because he acquired those gold-mines in her time. Of course, she is anxious for her daughters’ future. She feels that their chances are getting spoiled with her own life and that of Nikolai Vasilievich becoming muddled up. I don’t doubt that she loves her daughters and means well.
“So now our Baron is again after Sonia, but really after the mines, if you ask me.” She laughed a little, privately, to herself, and then said, “I wish he’d wash his neck....
“Soon, very soon, Andrei Andreiech, I shall leave them. It will be hard ... intolerably hard. But my mind is made up. I am not such a fool, Andrei Andreiech, as not to know when my time is up. And then I have a little pride still left in me. It is now merely a matter of the mines. I am ready. I have begun to pack. I have written home to Germany. But I couldn’t post the letter. Not yet.... Andrei Andreiech: what have I to live for? Will you tell me: what? ... Only when I am gone from them perhaps the children will say: ‘She has been good to us. She has loved us like a mother’ ... and then, perhaps, I shall not have lived in vain....”
I went home by the silent river. The Fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul was like a weary watchman. The Admiralty Needle seemed lost in the white mist. I sat down on a stone seat of the embankment and rested. The broad milky river was so mysteriously calm in the granite frame of the quays. I sat and wondered; then my thoughts began to drift; and I was lost in this half light, this half dream, this unreal half existence....
PART II
THE REVOLUTION
I
THEN I went to Oxford, and when the war broke out I joined the Navy. But just before the revolution, Admiral Butt, who had gone on a special mission to Russia, applied for my ‘Anglo-Russian’ services.
I still remember very vividly the morning following on my arrival in Petrograd, when I had to meet the Admiral for the first time at the British Embassy. I ascended the broad staircase with its worn red carpet to the Chancery. Very perfect young men, very perfectly dressed, were conversing in very perfect intonations about love among monkeys. It struck me as delightfully human for diplomats. When I descended, the Admiral had not yet arrived. I talked to Yuri, the hall-porter, a clean-shaven individual of uncertain nationality, violently pro-British, and speaking several languages all very badly. Every now and then the great heavy door would open—it was snowing heavily outside—and some man or woman would come in and inquire if this was the Military District Staff. “It is the British Embassy,” replied Yuri proudly. And he explained the error. The Military District Staff was 4 Palace Square; the Embassy 4 Palace Quay. In peace-time people did come in occasionally and inquire if this was the Military District Staff; but since war had been declared they seemed to be doing little else. I pondered over the possibility of Yuri, unable one day to withstand the increasing pressure of inquiries, going mad and holding forth on this subject to his brother inmates henceforth indefinitely in a lunatic asylum.
Helping me on with my coat, Yuri was suddenly seized by a strange panic. He dropped the coat on the floor and dashed to the door. I followed him, thinking it was the revolution. I was rewarded for my exertion. The Ambassador’s car drove up, and sitting in it were Sir George Buchanan and the French Ambassador. Yuri sprang up and pulling off his cap opened the door of the vehicle and stood still in a paroxysm of reverence and awe. But the two great men within continued talking, the Frenchman in that agitated, agile manner that Frenchmen have, the Englishman with a fine superiority of distinction. The Ambassadors of the two friendly powers sat talking, evidently unaware that they had arrived. Yuri held the door open, still bareheaded, the incarnation of servility and devotion. Then they entered. Yuri made a dash for Sir George’s feet, and began hastily to unbuckle his felt goloshes, while the great diplomat with his fur collar still up to his temples and his round fur cap cocked over one ear stood panting in his great fur coat. I had an absurd idea that something great must be happening on the political horizon.
Finally the Admiral arrived. He was a tall, imperious figure. His movements were powerful and sweeping. He had the air of a man engaged in winning the war while everybody else about him was obstructing him in his patriotic task. His voice was the voice of such a man. His look seemed specially selected to match his voice. That war-winning quality was clearly manifest in his personality, but his actual work towards that end was all very obscure....
Then one morning, as I was about to cross the Troitski Bridge to meet the Admiral, I was stopped by the police and was compelled to go home and change into uniform. When I returned the revolution had already broken out. The Admiral had just witnessed the sacking of the Arsenal by a disorderly crowd. Regiment after regiment was going over to the revolution. Solitary shots, and now and then machine-gun fire, were heard from various quarters of the city. The Admiral and I stood at the window and watched. Lorry after lorry packed with armed soldiery and workmen, some lying in a “ready” attitude along the mudguards, went past us in a kind of wild and dazzling joy ride, waving red flags and revolutionary banners to shouts of “Hurrah!” from the crowds in the street. The Admiral stood with his hands folded on the window-sill, unable to withhold his enthusiasm. It was a clear, bright day, I think, and very cold.
That evening following the outbreak of the revolution was vividly impressed upon my memory. During the day I had listened to innumerable speeches, some of a Liberal loftiness; others of a menacingly proletarian character, threatening death to capital and revolution to the world at large. There was a tendency to flamboyant extravagance and exaggeration. “Down with Armies and Navies!” shouted one speaker hysterically. “Down with militarism! Through red terror to peace, freedom and brotherhood!” There were placards and banners and processions. “Land and Liberty!” was a popular watchword. Red was the dominant colour, and the opening bars of the Marseillaise were a kind of recurring Leitmotif in the tumult. Crossing a bridge I passed a company of soldiers newly revolted. They marched alert and joyous to the sound of some old familiar marching song till they came to the words “for the Czar.” Having sung these words they stopped somewhat abruptly and perplexed. “How for the Czar?” one of them asked. “How for the Czar?” they repeated, looking at each other sheepishly. Then they marched on without singing. There were peasants who did not know the word “revolution” and thought it was a woman who would supersede the Czar. Others wanted a republic with a czar. And there were others still who interpreted the word republic as “rieszshpublicoo,” thinking that it meant “cut up the public.” In the Troitski Square I was stopped by a young enthusiastic Russian officer who, attracted by my British uniform, spoke to me in English, his eyes glittering with excitement. “Sir,” he said, “you now will have more vigorous Allies.” And then in the Nevski I passed a procession of Anarchists who are regarded by the Bolsheviks with about the same degree of unmitigated horror as the Bolsheviks are regarded by the Morning Post. They marched with a gruesome look about their faces, bearing their horrible colours of black, crested with a human skull and cross-bones.
And somewhat later in the day I sat at dinner with Zina’s people on the Petrograd side, and the presence of a score of students, male and female, an engineer, a lawyer, and a journalist or two, all of that revolutionary intelligentsia, probably accounted for the Liberal atmosphere that prevailed. Yesterday they had been revolutionaries; to-day they were contented Liberals, hailing Lvov and Miliukov as the heroes of the day. The engineer drank to the future: “The old world is dead: long live the new world!”
The two ancient grandfathers were much too old and feeble to intervene on behalf of the old order of things; they had exhausted their Liberal aspirations with the liberation of the serfs in 1861 and could not see what in the world more anybody wanted. Zina’s father, underpaid and ill as he was, had lost for ever the hope of seeing better days, and failed to see how the revolution could affect his own position. Nikolai Vasilievich was still keeping him so far. These Liberals interpreted the revolution as a protest against the pro-German tendency at court, and as an attempt to get into line with the Western Democracies in this hitherto unconvincing struggle against militarism and autocracy. The news was rumoured that the Czar had abdicated. Again, it was said that a section of the court had been planning a revolution to depose the Emperor and substitute his brother Michael in order to carry on the war more vigorously; and that the people’s revolution had preceded it by two days. Some monarchists now wanted to put down the revolution in order to carry on the war; other monarchists wanted to put down the war in order to put down the revolution; and still other monarchists wanted to put down the revolution and did not care a hang about the war. The Liberals wanted the revolution to carry on the war; the Czar wanted to put down the revolution; the Socialists and workmen wanted to put down the war and to put down the Czar; and the soldiers and sailors wanted to put down their officers. The Liberal gathering drank to Russia’s Allies; and then Uncle Kostia, obviously moved by the great event, rose and said in a slow, melodious voice:
“We will not talk about or criticize the past. We will carry it gently into the depths of the garden and bury it there among the flowers. And then, carefully, we will look into the cradle and nurse very tenderly the slumbering future....”
This attitude, we all felt, was befitting to the great bloodless revolution.
II
I remember the excitement of it all. Uncle Kostia, it appeared, had risen earlier that day on account of the revolution; and after dinner, still in his dressing-gown and slippers, he paced the floor quicker than was his custom, and, contrary to his practice, discoursed at great length. He held that history was moving at an unheard-of pace, and he complained that it was indeed difficult for him, a historian, to keep pace with it. The revolution had overtaken Uncle Kostia as he was still tackling the age of Anne.
From Zina’s house I remember walking to the Bursanovs in the Mohovaya. I passed the sombre silhouettes of the snow-covered barges frozen on the Neva. It was dark now and the crowds in the streets were more tumultuous. Soldiers and civilians alike walked aimlessly, rifle slung over the shoulder. Several wine-cellars had been broken into; there were drunkards in the streets; but anyhow, all seemed drunk with the revolution. Shots were heard every now and then, mostly fired in the air, while the law courts had gone up in flames. The revolution, it was felt, had been established.
Curiously enough I had not seen the Bursanovs on my return to Petrograd until that night. They were just the same. Kniaz sat in the corner of the little drawing-room in his usual chair, and it seemed that the revolution had impressed him. But how it had impressed him no one could have divined. Need I say that the three sisters sat in much the same positions, waiting—waiting for developments? Nikolai Vasilievich was very bitter. He had regarded the war almost as a deliberate attempt of providence to complicate his already very complicated domestic situation, and considering that providence had had the satisfaction of achieving its pernicious end, it seemed he could not understand the necessity of a revolution. “Malignity! Malignity!” he muttered, lowering the blinds, as if to show that he, at any rate, would have nothing to do with it.
“Nothing noble about it at all!” he answered me.
And Fanny Ivanovna, who had been sitting silently for some time, looked as if she were entirely of his opinion on that point.
And then a horrible groan was heard from the adjoining room. I cast a swift interrogative glance at Nikolai Vasilievich. I had an idea that they had hidden some wretched half-mutilated policeman, the victim of a revolutionary mob. But Nikolai Vasilievich and Fanny Ivanovna looked awkward and ashamed. There was, I noticed, a kind of appeal for sympathy in their eyes.
“That is Fanny Ivanovna’s husband,” said Nikolai Vasilievich apologetically.
I looked incredulous, and he explained. As Fanny Ivanovna was not married to him, she was a German subject, and when war broke out she was to go back to Germany or be interned in Vologda. She refused to go to Germany till Nikolai Vasilievich had provided for her for life, but as the war had further crippled his finances he was not in a position to give her the money; so they married her to Eberheim, an elderly gentleman of German extraction but a Russian subject. As his nominal wife Fanny Ivanovna was a Russian subject and could live in Russia until such time as the improvement in the working of the gold-mines made it possible for Nikolai Vasilievich to provide for her for life. Then if he could get a divorce from his wife he would marry Zina.
“Is he wounded?” I asked, scenting revolutionary blood in the air.
“No—cancer,” said Nikolai Vasilievich. And contrasted with this word painted red, the revolution out of doors seemed pale and trifling.
“He is going to have an operation in a day or so.”
“Has he suffered long?” I inquired.
“Oh, we took him out of hospital,” explained Fanny Ivanovna. “You may think it odd, but he consented to the marriage on condition that we took him home and looked after him. He said that he would not live long in any case and that money was no earthly use to him in his condition: what he wanted was care and comfort. And now the doctors and operations are costing Nikolai Vasilievich a good bit of money, I can tell you. Really, we are most unfortunate people.... And Sonia, too, marrying Baron Wunderhausen, who, as I suspected, is a drag on Nikolai Vasilievich’s resources. Really, he cannot afford it, Andrei Andreiech. The mines——” She waved her hand. Nikolai Vasilievich, with his hands deep in his trouser pockets, stood looking at the window, though the blinds were lowered and there was nothing he could see.
“The wedding ceremony,” she went on, “was painful. I barely stood it myself. The priest at first refused to marry us. Nikolai Vasilievich had to lead him aside and bribe him. Eberheim’s condition was so bad ... critical. It was wicked.... Yet he has a way of lasting. He has lasted now for over two years. One wants to be human to him, but really, Andrei Andreiech, look at us, look at us ... us.... And now the revolution. Who wants the revolution?” She put her chin on her hand and turned her face away. There was silence.
Then, suddenly, without reason or provocation, she turned on the old Kniaz, sitting neatly in his usual arm-chair, imperturbable like a butler:
“Kniaz! Don’t sit there like that, like.... Oh, God, you’ve been sitting like that in that chair for thirteen years.... Say something! Say something!”
“What can I say?” he smiled faintly.
“What can you say!” she echoed; and again there was silence.
“Hasn’t he got any relations?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“No money?”
“Penniless.”
“Is he ... good?”
“Yes, but ... exacting.”
“Oh, poor fellow, he can’t help it,” said Nikolai Vasilievich.
“Poor fellow,” said Fanny Ivanovna.
“Poor fellow,” I echoed.
For a moment we sat in silence. We waited for Eberheim to groan again; but he too was silent; and we could just hear the measured ticking of the great oak-panelled clock in the corner and the subdued tumult of the streets below.
“And where is Magda Nikolaevna?” I asked.
“She is with Cecedek.”
“One burden less, what, Nikolai Vasilievich?”
Nikolai Vasilievich sighed.
“You would hardly say so,” said Fanny Ivanovna, “for Nikolai Vasilievich still has to keep his wife.”
“But what of Cecedek?”
“I am very sorry for him,” said Fanny Ivanovna.
And I learnt that at the outbreak of hostilities the Russian authorities had found it necessary to confiscate the whole of Cecedek’s property. They were then going to intern him, but he succeeded in proving to them that he was now a Czech; and so they set him free. But the property which they had taken from him as an Austrian they did not return to him as a Czech. He had been in correspondence with the authorities on this subject ever since July, 1914, and on his ultimate success in getting some of it refunded his marriage with Magda Nikolaevna must henceforth depend. Whether the revolution would assist him in his ambitious expectations, or would delay them further, it was hard to prophesy. Nikolai Vasilievich helped him as much as he was able in his present circumstances. In the meantime Magda Nikolaevna had suspended her application for a divorce and was still on Nikolai Vasilievich’s books for payment. But Cecedek’s attitude had not changed. He now rather liked to emphasize the Slavic side to their union, had in the last three years developed a Czech intonation in his Russian speech, professed an undue regard for his “Brother-Slavs,” pronounced his own name “Chechedek,” and in signing put those funny little accents on the C’s.
I left them very early next morning; in the excitement of the day there had been much work left overnight unaccomplished. It was about six o’clock when I crossed the Field of Mars. Soldiers in odd groups strolled along in the snow, now and then firing off a rifle in the air, just for the fun of the thing; and the capital wore that appearance of a banqueting-hall in the shrewd light of the morning after a particularly heavy feast. Fretful clouds moved swiftly across the winter sky. The morning promised a fine day.
III
The revolution dragged on through the winter and “deepened” as the months advanced. The forerunners of confusion became visible: food and commodities were being procured in an irregular manner. All were waiting....
Pictures of them recur continually to my mind, as I write. I can see Fanny Ivanovna, and particularly I can see the three sisters, always sitting in the same positions, perched on sundry chairs and sofas, Fanny Ivanovna engaged in silent contemplation over needlework, and Kniaz sitting in his usual chair, reading, or more often sitting idly, thinking into space. The seasons would be changing rapidly from one to the other—but their position never! Rain would drum against the window-pane, snow would be falling on the street below; then the ice on the Neva would begin to break and slowly move toward the Bay; and again one would feel the onset of spring, the unfolding of white nights....
“How tiring this is, Andrei Andreiech,” Fanny Ivanovna complained. “To be always waiting to begin to live. When is that upward movement in happiness, that splendid life that we are always waiting for, to begin at last? Somehow you wait for the spring. But spring has come ... alone, and only emphasizes our misery, by the contrast.... Spring makes me mad. I begin to want impossible things....”
“You are an active woman, Fanny Ivanovna,” said I. “You ought not to sit still. It’s bad for you. You ought to run about.”
“But ... I’ve got to wait.”
“I suppose waiting is sitting still. It is, in a sense....”
“It isn’t that. But what am I going to run about for? I go out shopping. But that doesn’t advance things, you understand. Besides, I simply dread asking Nikolai Vasilievich for money.”
“He hasn’t got any?”
“He has. He’s always borrowing—crescendo, forte, fortissimo! But where will it end? When? Borrowing money is all right if you can do it. But it’s not, as it were, an income; it’s not—how shall I put it?—an end in itself, is it? There’s got to be something, somewhere, sometime. Those gold-mines have got to justify themselves. Our plans, our movements, everything depends on them. That’s why it’s so annoying. They’ve got to pay, and I am confident that they will pay. But when?...”
She rose abruptly, as was her wont, her black silk skirt rustling as she swept out.
It was “Papa this” and “Mamma that” and “Fanny Ivanovna the other thing.”
“Won’t you stop sighing?” I suggested.
“It’s all very well for you,” protested the three sisters simultaneously. “But do you think it’s very nice for us?”
“What do you want, anyhow?”
They did not answer; they looked at the window, brooding.
I said in a jovial tone of voice:
“Well, I tried to help you. But you won’t be helped.”
“Helped us indeed!” they cried out simultaneously. The three sisters had a way of speaking simultaneously and almost word for word in matters of domestic politics. They were a party in themselves, stubbornly opposed to all the other camps of Nikolai Vasilievich’s family.
The night before, I had taken them to Kusivitski’s concert. People had been staring enviously at me, as if to ask: “Who are those three pretty kittens?” I felt absurdly like a proud papa. The music was excruciating. During the piano solo I clung to my chair: I could scarcely sit still. “Scriabin,” I burst out as the music stopped, “is a persistent knocking at the door—but the door doesn’t open. Still, as we might know in any case that there is nothing behind the door, that doesn’t greatly matter, does it? It’s the knocking that is a human necessity. And what a desperate knocking it is!”
Nina looked at me with that trick she had of assuming innocence and said: “Which door?”
And it flashed across my mind that, whereas Sonia played the piano with an agreeable touch of feeling, Nina’s hammering was shrill and disagreeable, while, musically, Vera was still an unknown quantity.