But the pianist had resumed.
“What is this?” Nina asked.
“A fox-trot,” I replied, very superior.
I sat on the small seat facing the three sisters, as Professor Metchnikoff trotted homeward through the sombre streets. The night was warm and humid. By the street lamps I could see their faces. When she was silent Nina looked so wise. Perhaps she seemed wiser than she actually was. All this—the war, the revolution—she had overlooked: and it did not exist. Scriabin—she had overlooked him. And he did not exist. But she was there, watchful....
The day after was like the day before. They sat there listless—Fanny Ivanovna, Kniaz and the three sisters. The three sisters always sat in some extraordinary positions, on the backs of sofas and easy chairs, and Fanny Ivanovna and Kniaz sat in very ordinary positions. Nikolai Vasilievich alone was always absent; and I think there was a sort of feeling running through us all that he at least was busy, doing something. But in more sceptical moods I know I was inclined to question dubiously whether he too was getting anywhere for all the semblance of activity that his mysterious absence involved. I remember the silhouette of Nina’s profile at the window. I can feel the tension of the silence that hung over the room, the suspense of waiting—of indefinite waiting for indefinite things. In the hush that had crept upon us I could fancy I could sense acutely the disturbing presence of the things my eye could not behold: the gilded domes radiant in the fading sunlight, the many bridges thrown across the widespread stream; and in the stillness I was made to feel as if by instinct the throbbing pulse of Petrograd. The leaden waves splashed gently against the granite banks; and the air was full of that yearning melancholy call of life that yet reminds one—God knows why—of the imminence of death; and in the sky there was the promise of a white night.
IV
Petrograd looked thoroughly nasty on that cold November morning. There was the drizzling snow, and it was still dark as I walked home with Uncle Kostia. We had been at the Finland Station to see off two of Uncle Kostia’s nieces who were going abroad. It was the morning of the Bolshevik Revolution, and Uncle Kostia looked pessimistic. “Do you remember all those student-revolutionaries, the heroes of our young intelligentsia, who had been persecuted by the old régime? Well,”—he pointed from the bridge that we were traversing to the Bolshevik craft that had arrived from Kronstadt overnight—“this is more than they bargained for. More than they bargained for.”
We walked on.
“They are malcontents again—but on the other side! Truth is fond of playing practical jokes of this sort. My God! how elusive it is. It is wonderful how beneath our hastily made-up truths, the truths of usage and convenience, there runs independently, often contrariwise, a wider, bigger truth. Can’t you feel it? The pseudo-reason of unreason. The lack of reasonable evidence in reason. Issues, motives being muddled up. This ethical confusion, and the blind habitual resort to bloodshed as a means of straightening it out. More confusion. Honour is involved. Bloodshed as a solution. More honour involved in the solution. More bloodshed. That idiotic plea that each generation should sacrifice itself for the so-called benefit of the next! It never seems to end.... Oh, how the pendulum swings! Wider and wider, and we are shedding blood generation after generation. For what? For whom?... For future generations! My God, what fools we are! Fools shedding blood for the sake of future fools, who will do as much!”
“But what are you to do? What?” I persisted.
Uncle Kostia was evasive. “You see,” he said at last, “subtleties of the mind, if pursued to their logical conclusions, become crudities. Let us cease our conversation at this point.”
Barricades appeared in the streets. Bridges were being suspended. Lorries of joy-riding proletarians became familiarly conspicuous, as I walked on towards the Bursanovs.
I found the household in a state of wild excitement. However, the event had no connexion with the Revolution. In fact, with continual domestic revolutions in their own home, the much ado about the political revolution appeared, particularly to the three sisters, a foolish affectation.
I learnt that Nikolai Vasilievich had just discovered that his book-keeper Stanitski, at the instigation of his house-agent, had these last five years been falsifying the books and robbing him wholesale. When the discovery was made the house-agent had vanished into the darkness whence he had emerged. But as I entered I was very nearly knocked down by Nikolai Vasilievich dashing after Stanitski, the book-keeper, as he was flying down the stairs. He caught him by the tail of his overcoat and dragged him back into his study. He had him standing, stiff and awkward and ashamed, before his desk, while he himself reclined in his arm-chair.
Nikolai Vasilievich did not shout, as Stanitski, who knew his master intimately, had, no doubt, expected him to do. He spoke quietly and even sadly; and it was the sadness of his speech that penetrated Stanitski’s Slavic nature to the heart. “How could you have cheated me like that, Ivan Sergeiech—me who have trusted you?”
And Stanitski became emotional. “Nikolai Vasilievich!” he exclaimed with his hands joined together and the whites of his eyes turned heavenward. “Nikolai Vasilievich! God in Heaven knows I have not been helping myself to your money, as you seem to think, recklessly. But since I took a little—and I have a wife, children, dependents—I had to do what the house-agent told me. I was in his hands, at the mercy of a blackguard and a robber. Nikolai Vasilievich: I often felt I wanted to warn you of this rascal. But I was in his hands ... since I took myself. But I took in measure, Nikolai Vasilievich, conscientiously, with my eyes on God....”
The old man sobbed bitter tears. He felt that fate had dealt him a cruel blow, unjustifiably cruel, in return for his moderation.
What could be done to him? Baron Wunderhausen, who now, as Sonia’s husband, lived with the family, suggested handing the man over to the Bolshevik militia. But Nikolai Vasilievich only waved his hand. I think it was the family aspect of the old man’s position that penetrated Nikolai Vasilievich to the heart. He sat there at his desk, brooding darkly, while Stanitski, gently, like a cat, felt his way out of the flat.
Fanny Ivanovna sighed conspicuously.
“An optimistic gentleman—Stanitski,” I remarked. “What a belief in the kindliness of things! What a claim on the favour of Providence!”
“And, as it happens, he is not far wrong in his calculations,” said the Baron with a bitterness which showed that he, as son-in-law, was dissatisfied with the management of the family’s finances. “I call this state of things disgraceful.”
“God have mercy upon us!” whispered Fanny Ivanovna, almost ironically.
“An optimist,” I digressed aloud, “is a fool, since he can’t see what awaits him—disillusionment. But he is wise without knowing it, since, however bad the present, he remains an optimist as to the future, and so his present seems never quite so bad to him as it really is.”
“Say it again,” breathed Nina.
“A fool,” said Nikolai Vasilievich, “is an optimist. He is optimistic about himself, optimistic about his folly. I’m an optimist!”
He stood up, his hands in his trouser pockets, and gazed at the window. Twilight was falling swiftly. Nina, perched up on the sofa, sat silent, her head bent.
“What’s the good of being miserable?” I said to her.
“As though I deliberately chose to be miserable!” To console herself, she took an apple.
“Optimists that we are!” sighed Fanny Ivanovna.
“Warranting considerable pessimism,” supplied the Baron.
“It is easier to hope,” said Nikolai Vasilievich, “and be disappointed, it is easier to hope knowing that one will be disappointed, than not hope at all.”
“Why don’t the writers—the novelists—why don’t they write about this, this real life,” said Fanny Ivanovna, “this real drama of life, rather than their neat, reasoned, reasonable and—oh! so unconvincing novels?”
“This philosophizing won’t help us,” jeered Nikolai Vasilievich mildly. “We ought to do things. I want to do things. This moment I am teeming over with energy. I could do and settle things to-day, square up our affairs, and start life afresh.... But....”
The Baron looked at him. “Well?”
“But——” A gesture at the window indicated the obstacle. “What can I do with this? What can anybody do? All is tumbling, going to ruin. In a month or so all business will stop, works will close down. The rouble will be valueless. There will be nothing....”
“Now don’t lose courage, Nikolai,” said Fanny Ivanovna hopefully. “We shall pull through; somehow we shall; and then on the other side of the grave we shall be safe.”
“Her most optimistic moment in life!” jeered Nikolai Vasilievich.
“It’s a surprising thing what the human soul will stand, Andrei Andreiech,” she said. “I can venture only this explanation; it is habit. You see, the cup is ever filled to the brim, but—lo! the miracle! the cup expands. No trouble. None!... And here we are.”
“Life gets you,” came from the window; “sooner or later it gets you all the same.”
“I don’t know what it’s for, why, or who wants it. It seems so unnecessary, useless, even silly. And yet I cannot think that it’s all in vain. There must be ... perhaps a larger pattern somewhere in which all these futilities, these shifting incongruities are somehow reconciled. But shall we know? Shall we ever know the reason?”
“Philosophy!” jeered Nikolai Vasilievich mildly.
“Perhaps,” I said, “when we awaken on the other side of death and ask to be told the reason, they will shrug their shoulders and will say, ‘We don’t know. It is beyond us. Do you not know?’ ... And we shall never know. Never....”
“How awfully funnily your mouth moves when you speak,” said Nina, who had been listening to me attentively.
“Frightfully!”
“There is no proof,” said Baron Wunderhausen, “that death is the end. But there is no proof, as yet, that death is not the end.”
“So there is no proof of anything?” asked Nikolai Vasilievich.
“No.”
“Thank you,” said Fanny Ivanovna.
The Baron bowed.
Then Nikolai Vasilievich passed into the hall and put his coat on. As it was time for me to go, we went out together. I remember there was something hopeless about that night, a sense of dread about the political and economic chaos, that seemed to harmonize with Nikolai Vasilievich’s state of mind. I think it may be that he found a kind of ghastly pleasure in the thought that if he was miserable, if destitution stared him in the face, the whole world also seemed to be tumbling about him into decay and ruin. As we crossed the Palace Square we were challenged by a soldier who had emerged from behind a pile of firewood dumped before the Winter Palace. He stepped forward with fixed bayonet and demanded money, while pointing his bayonet at my breast; he held his finger on the trigger. He was considerably drunk. Neither of us happened to have any money. “Got any cigarettes, Comrades?” he asked.
Neither of us had cigarettes.
“And I,” explained the drunken soldier, “go about, you know, letting the guts out of the bourgouys.”
“That’s right, Comrade,” ventured Nikolai Vasilievich. “Kill them all, the dirty dogs!”
“I will,” said the soldier cheerily, and stalked off into the night, while we went our way.
Nikolai Vasilievich only shook his head and sighed and shook his head and sighed. He muttered something, but the wind that overtook us carried off his words. I could just catch “ ... my house ... the mines....”
PART III
INTERVENING IN SIBERIA
I
CERTAIN fragments of scene and speech come back to me with a peculiar insistence, as I write this third portion of my book. I have no hesitation in setting them down as I do, I think accurately enough, if not word for word. I remember them well because they had impressed me. That is the secret of memory. I have forgotten much, but there are scenes I cannot forget, fragments of speech that still ring in my ear, and I shall remember them always; at least, till I have finally pinned them to paper.
The Admiral and I, and a few others—interesting types, I can assure you—travelled to Siberia, where we engaged in a series of comic opera attempts to wipe out the Russian revolution. By now, “Intervention” has been relegated to the shelf of history. But I cannot but remember it, not merely as an adventure in futility, as admittedly it was, but as an ever-shifting, changing sense of being alive. For the experience of love is inseparable from its background. Alone it does not exist. It is a modulation of impressions, an interplay of “atmospheres,” a quickening of the fibres of that background into throbbing tissues of an elusive, half-apprehended beauty.
It was raining heavily when we arrived in Vladivostok, and the port, as we surveyed it from the boat, looked grey and hopeless, like the Russian situation. A flat had been allotted us, a bare, unfurnished flat in a deserted house standing in a grim and desolate by-street; and there the Admiral made his temporary headquarters. It poured all day long, and it seemed, indeed, as though the rain, playing havoc with the town, would never cease, even as the misery and blundering in Russia would never cease, and that our efforts were not wanted and could do no good.
That night I entertained General Bologoevski at dinner at the famous restaurant ‘Zolotoy Rog’—nicknamed by British sailors the ‘Solitary Dog.’ He had travelled with us all the way from England, seemingly under vague instructions from some Allied War Office, and had attached himself to our party of his own accord. As we sat down, the head waiter came up to us and respectfully informed the General that by order of the Commander-in-Chief Russian officers were not admitted into restaurants. The General protested feebly, stressing his hunger as a reason for remaining, whereon the head waiter suggested, in an undertone, that the obvious alternative was to remove the epaulets.
“What! Remove my epaulets! I, a Russian officer? Never!” he protested.
Whereon a brain-wave struck him. “I know,” said he, looking round the restaurant. It was nearly empty. And instantly he compromised by putting on his mackintosh. “Now,” said he, “in my English Burberry they will take me for an English officer. Ah!” he smiled, and then added his invariable English phrase: “It is a damrotten game, you know.” And, after a momentary contemplation: “I give dem h-h-hell!”
I ordered chicken soup. The General talked loosely about the Siberian situation. About five minutes after I had ordered soup the waiter returned without being called and very amiably volunteered the information that the soup would be served immediately. When, three-quarters of an hour later, I asked the waiter about the soup, he repeated “Immediately,” but the word now somehow failed to inspire in us the same confidence. The General talked of the Siberian situation for about an hour and a quarter, when we observed that the soup had not been served. I again called the waiter.
“What about that soup?” I asked.
“I am afraid, sir,” said the waiter, “you will have to wait a while, for soup is a troublesome thing to prepare nowadays.”
“How long?”
“About three-quarters of an hour.”
General Bologoevski then continued about the situation. I gathered that there was a General Horvat who had formed an All-Russia Government, and that there was also a Siberian Government, defying General Horvat on the one hand and the Bolsheviks on the other, and that there were various officer organizations grouped about this or the other government, and some rather inclined to be on their own, all looking forward to a possible intervention by the Allies. After an hour or so had elapsed I interrupted General Bologoevski by observing that the soup had not yet been served, and I called a waiter who was passing and told him to fetch the waiter who had been serving us.
“He has gone to bed,” came the answer, “and I am on the night shift.”
“Oh!” And I inquired about the soup.
“Soup?” said the new waiter, evidently disowning all responsibility for his predecessor, and after some hesitation he promised us some soup in about three-quarters of an hour. General Bologoevski then continued about the situation. He spoke for an intolerably long time, stopping only once or twice to inquire about the soup and whether it was coming. The clock in the corner chimed midnight, and then one. I was now devilishly hungry, and the General looked misused and maltreated. I shouted for the waiter, who with eyes closed slumbered in a standing posture in the distant corner of the room. “What about that soup?” I repeated in excited tones when the waiter showed signs of recovering consciousness.
“Soup?” he asked. “Well, you see you can’t have soup nowadays ... unless you choose to wait——”
“Wait!” I said.
“Three-quarters of an hour or so,” he said.
Whereupon the General rose. He rose in a threatening manner. It seemed to me that the General’s manner of rising was deliberately remonstrative, a protest undisguised.
“General!” I shouted, as he ran across to his hat and sword. “Come back and have something. A chicken cutlet. General!”
But he was gone. I sat alone at my table and waited for the cutlet. As I looked before me I observed sitting at a distant table a man with a familiar face. I could not believe it. My heart leapt within me. I dashed from my chair.
“Nikolai Vasilievich!”
“Andrei Andreiech!”
“Is it possible? Is it really you?”
Nikolai Vasilievich was kissing me on both cheeks, in confirmation of his identity.
“Well, I never thought that you were here! I never thought that you could be here, Nikolai Vasilievich.”
“I am here,” said Nikolai Vasilievich sadly.
“And who else is here, who else, Nikolai Vasilievich?”
“All,” sighed Nikolai Vasilievich.
“All! How do you mean all?”
“All.”
“Fanny Ivanovna here?”
“Yes, she is here.”
“Nina?”
“Yes, she is here.”
“And Pàvel Pàvlovich?”
“Yes, both Pàvel Pàvlovichi are here.”
“And Eberheim?”
“Yes, he is here too ... they’re all here.”
“You don’t say so!... And Čečedek?”
“All here—all.”
“And Vera?”
“Yes.”
“And Sonia?...”
“Yes, all—my wife and all.”
“Which wife, Nikolai Vasilievich?”
“How do you mean? I only have one—Magda Nikolaevna.”
“Oh, you haven’t married Zina then?”
“No, but she is here. They are all here—all her family ... Uncle Kostia ... all.”
“How are they all? Tell me, Nikolai Vasilievich ... the grandfathers dead, I suppose?”
“Oh no, both here. But I don’t think—nobody thinks—they can last very long now, either of them.”
“Oh, they’re alive. That’s good.... And so Magda Nikolaevna is here too—with Čečedek, of course.”
“Yes, and Eisenstein.”
“She has married Čečedek?”
“No, she has married no one—except me, of course. But I expect it won’t be very long now till I get a divorce.”
My voice dropped to a confidential whisper. “Why are they all here, Nikolai Vasilievich?” I asked.
“Andrei Andreiech, don’t ask me. Why is it that they followed me here all the way from Petrograd? And when I had to go over to Japan just for a fortnight on a matter of business ... well, they all followed me there ... all ... every one of them!... You see, they are, so to speak, economically dependent on me. That is why I suppose they follow me about wherever I go. We are inseparable—financially. We are a chain. Russia being what she is to-day—disjointed, with neither railway nor postal communication that you can rely on, they simply have to be where I am if they are to get money out of me. I quite understand their position. So they follow me, you see....”
“Nikolai Vasilievich!” And I shook him long and warmly by the hand.
We sat together long into the morning, and Nikolai Vasilievich complained of his lot. The mines, it seemed, were still the chief deterrent to his happiness. His family, he said, had decided to leave Petrograd and go east because their house, which, strictly speaking, belonged to them no longer, had, since the Bolshevik revolution, been invaded by a host of undesirable people and there was hardly a room left in the house that they could call their own. Another reason which prompted them to leave the capital was that the Bolshevik authorities had restricted individuals from drawing on their current accounts in the banks; and what was more important still, Nikolai Vasilievich had really nothing left in the bank to draw upon. So he had naturally turned to his other source of income—the gold-mines in Siberia. He had poured considerable money into these gold-mines in the past, in the hope that some day they would make him very wealthy. For years and years they had a way of ever being on the eve of making him wealthy, yet always some minor, unforeseen incident occurred which temporarily postponed the realization of his hopes. The gold-mines were about to begin to pay, when war broke out and temporarily affected the output. Then in the war he perceived the opportunity of placing them on a military footing. The governor, a friend of his, had promised to assist him, when unhappily the revolution came and the governor was arrested and dismissed. Kerenski’s time was the most trying time of all. For then the miners began to call committee-meetings and talk as to what they would do when they seized the mines; but they confined their revolutionary schemes to a violent expression as to what they would do, in the meantime doing nothing, either in the taking over of the mines or in the working of them. With the Bolshevik revolution things began to move, and the men seized the mines. At first the news was a great shock to Nikolai Vasilievich, for he knew that there were many families dependent on him. Then he perceived that he could actually buy the gold from the men at exactly the same price as it had cost him to produce it. He was much relieved, and for the first time in his life he was actually doing good business.
It was then that they decided to leave Petrograd for Siberia, and his families, dependents and hangers-on naturally all followed him. He travelled with Fanny Ivanovna, Sonia, Nina, Baron Wunderhausen, Kniaz, Eberheim and the book-keeper Stanitski. His wife was in the same train, but in a different carriage, and she insisted on having Vera with her, for she was not well, and Čečedek was merely a man. Eisenstein followed her. At times it seemed as if he had lost sight of them; but he invariably turned up by the next train in every town they halted. Eberheim was a great trouble. He suffered terribly. At several wayside stations they had to take him out and put him into hospital. Sometimes there was no hospital, only a doctor. Sometimes there was no doctor, and Zina’s father attended to him as best he could. Eisenstein too was helpful. On more than one occasion Zina’s family—the largest family of all—and Magda Nikolaevna’s party, had gone on not knowing that Nikolai Vasilievich’s party had remained behind; and Nikolai Vasilievich thought that he would never see them again. But they had discovered his absence and waited for him in the next town along the line, before proceeding farther. The two old grandfathers stood the journey very well on the whole, considering their advanced age and the hardships of the trip. What made it very unpleasant for Nikolai Vasilievich was that the various parties who were financially dependent on him were not on speaking terms with one another. He was besieged with notes requesting private interviews, and there were violent disputes which he was called upon to settle. When at length he had arrived at the headquarters of his gold-mines, he learnt that the Czecho-Slovak troops in their recent offensive against the Bolsheviks had recaptured the mines, shot the miners’ leaders, imprisoned many other miners, and then handed the mines back to his manager; whereon the miners killed the manager and refused to resume work. Mr. Thomson, his consulting-engineer, despairing of the situation, had returned to England. And Nikolai Vasilievich perceived that his recent scheme of purchasing the gold from the men had been completely knocked on the head.
He was now considering another scheme that had been suggested to him by a number of financiers in the Far East, which involved the active co-operation of two influential generals—to organize and dispatch a punitive expedition to the gold-mines in order to compel the miners to restart work. This somewhat complicated scheme had necessitated a trip to Tokio to interest another Russian general who was there in the scheme; and all the families, no doubt thinking that he was trying to escape from his responsibilities, followed him to Tokio, thus unnecessarily increasing his expenses. He had had great difficulty in finding accommodation for his family in Vladivostok; but for Fanny Ivanovna, Sonia, Nina, Vera, Baron Wunderhausen and himself he had procured the ground floor of a little house. All the others had also settled down in Vladivostok. And the Baron would, no doubt, find it difficult to evade military service.
“And how are you?” asked Nikolai Vasilievich. “I wondered if you would be coming with the Admiral. We half expected that you would. Well, what do you think of it?”
“Think of it!” I said. “Why, we are the men of the hour. You should have seen the deputations, proclamations, speeches, hailing him as the new Lafayette. He said to-day, jokingly of course, that he would have to work out a time-table for seeing people. Dictators, say, from 7 to 10; supreme rulers between 10 and 1; prime ministers could be admitted between 2 and 5. Then till seven he would be free to cabinet ministers of the rank and file. Supreme commanders-in-chief could come from 8 to 1. And so forth, down to common general officers commanding. Yes, it was hardly an exaggeration....”
Nikolai Vasilievich smiled one of his kindly smiles. “Do you think it will be all right?” he asked.
“Rather!” I replied irrelevantly. “It’s the climax of his career. He has been called upon by four joint deputations representing, I think, four separate All-Russia Governments whose heads conferred on him the title of ‘Supreme Commander-in-Chief of All the Armed Military and Naval Forces operating on the Territory of Russia,’ or something of this sort. And he made a speech to them; said that Foch was wrong and Douglas Haig was wrong, and all those muddle-headed politicians! The war was to be won on the Eastern Front.”
“I too think it will be won on the Eastern Front,” said Nikolai Vasilievich. “It ought to, anyhow.”
“Why?”
“Well, because the Eastern Front has unquestionably the greater resources in mineral wealth. The gold-mines ought to be cleared of the enemy before anything else if you want to win the war.”
“Yes,” said I with an assumed and exaggerated pensiveness, “that is unquestionably the case.”
We arranged to meet again to-morrow, as we descended arm in arm the shabby flight of steps, and it was decided that Nikolai Vasilievich should call for me and drive me home to see the family.
The rain had ceased. We parted at the cross-roads.
When I turned into my bedroom I beheld the Admiral and a little dark-haired man, aquiline featured, sitting on my bed and talking like two conspirators. The dark-haired little man then rose with the precision common to Russian officers, and shook hands. He was, I learnt afterwards, Admiral Kolchak.
It was very late that night when I fell asleep. I was thinking of my meeting on the morrow with the family, with Nina. I pictured to myself her image as I last remembered it. And, interlacing with these thoughts, there was the thought of the gallant Admiral in the bedroom opposite, tucked away between his heavy blankets, his teeth in a glass of water on the table at his side—no presentable sight!—seeing visions of a Napoleonic ride athwart the great Siberian plain, at the head of his vast new armies marching onward to take their stand on the re-established Eastern Front.
Then in the small hours of the morning he was wakened by the noise of a dog that ran through the half-open door of his bedroom in pursuit of a cat. I heard the Admiral strike a match, then jump out of bed and fumble with his stick under the bed and cupboards and chest of drawers, evidently looking for the animals. I went in to him and offered my services in the chase.
“Can you see the dog?” came the Admiral’s sturdy voice from under a cupboard.
“I’m looking for the cat, sir.”
“Cat! Where did that come from?”
“I saw it run into your room after a rat.”
“Nonsense!”
“I did, sir, and the dog ran in after the cat.”
We fumbled with our sticks.
“I don’t believe there was a rat,” said the Admiral.
“There was, sir. I saw it myself.”
“I don’t mind the dog so much. Cats I hate. But I can’t stick the rat. Why did you tell me?”
I did not answer this.
“Can’t find them, sir,” I said, rising.
“They’ve gone, I hope,” said the Admiral.
“They’ve hidden themselves somewhere, I think.”
“Damn them! I shan’t be able to sleep all night.”
“Good night, sir,” said I.
The Admiral could not sleep. I heard him get out of bed and fumble with his stick beneath the furniture. I think the uncertainty of the whereabouts of the animals disturbed his peace of mind. Then I heard him creep into bed, and all was still. I could just hear the rain drum against the window-pane; and I thought that by now the cat had probably eaten up the rat.
II
Nikolai Vasilievich was to call for me after lunch. At lunch there were many guests, and the conversation was necessarily political. I was impatient, for Nikolai Vasilievich might call at any moment; and the entire scheme of “Intervention” seemed to me, in my mood of acute expectancy, singularly unimportant. I watched the Admiral who in his serious, deliberate way looked straight into his principal guest’s eyes and listened very earnestly and nodded with approval, while the guest, a Russian General, was talking arrant nonsense. In that stiff and martial attitude common to a certain type of Russian officer (who assumes it as it were in proof of grim determination) the guest was saying: “All these complaints about arrests and executions by the loyal troops—I decline to take them seriously. In the present wavering state of mind of the population you can’t guarantee that there won’t be people who will complain because the sun shines in the daytime only and not at night as well.”
The Admiral gave an emphatic nod; and at a glance I could see that he had classed his guest as a “good fellow.” The Admiral, I may explain, divided the world into two big camps: the humanity that he called “good fellows,” and the humanity that he called “rotters”—and there you are! Simple. (As a matter of fact, he used a substitute for this last word, but I am afraid the original is unprintable.) But while the guest was being engaged by General Bologoevski, a quiet silver-haired British Colonel took the opportunity of telling the Admiral in his quiet silvery manner the conclusion he in his quiet silvery mind had quietly arrived at after interviewing for many months innumerable Russian officers. “I am afraid,” said he, “that whenever you come to examine very carefully a Russian officer’s scheme for the restoration and salvation of his country, it invariably boils down to giving him a job.”
And at a glance I could see that the Admiral had classed the fellow as a “rotter.”
I forget the substance of the conversation of that lunch, which stands out in my memory merely on account of its coincidence with the day on which I met the family; but I remember how a remark of General Bologoevski’s, that he understood the Bolshevik commissaries never washed, lit up the Admiral’s face with ominous glee, and one could guess at sight that he condemned the Bolshevik commissaries.
About two o’clock Nikolai Vasilievich called for me. We drove uphill, the driver flogging his two horses with unwarranted zeal. The day was bright, but the roads were muddy from the flood overnight. As we arrived, another cab drove up at the porch, and from it emerged Fanny Ivanovna and Kniaz. Kniaz made an insincere attempt to pay the cabfare; but when Fanny Ivanovna said “It’s all right, I have some money,” Kniaz said “Very well,” and replaced the empty purse in his pocket....
And for the next few minutes the three-roomed lodging of the little house was the scene of a happy reunion.
Nina alone was absent from the household. Fanny Ivanovna was much annoyed and tackled Sonia on the subject.
“How do I know where she is?” Sonia remonstrated. Then she smiled and I felt that she knew all right; and then immediately she grew angry, and I felt that after all, perhaps, she did not know.
“We have no means of knowing, Fanny Ivanovna,” said Baron Wunderhausen.
“Pàv’l Pàvlch,” she said, “please don’t annoy me. You annoy me with your inconsequent talk, and I have asked you not to meddle ... and to wash your neck.”
“He’s like Uncle Kostia!” Vera cried. “Has a bath once a year—whether clean or dirty.” She was pretty, growing prettier.
Baron Wunderhausen only shrugged his shoulders.
Then the door opened and Nina slipped into the room. I was staggered by her looks. To my mind she was irresistible. When she saw me she stopped dead.
“Where have you come from?” she asked.
I explained confusedly, and a minute later she dismissed me and my arrival as a thing entirely commonplace, and turned to the others.
“Nina,” said Fanny Ivanovna sternly, “where have you been? I insist on your telling me.”
“And I won’t tell,” said Nina curtly.
“Nina,” I took it up, jokingly but with a sneaking sense of secretive authority resting on our “engagement” of four years ago, “where have you been? I too insist on your telling me.”
She looked at me with the expression that comes over people who are about to put out their tongue at you, and said:
“And I won’t tell.”
“And how do you find us?” Fanny Ivanovna asked. “Have we grown older? I think I have grown older. And Nikolai Vasilievich, too. And Kniaz.”
“No,” I lied. And assuredly the lie pleased her.
“And the children are just the same?”
“The children are just the same,” I agreed. “A bouquet. Three pretty kittens.”
Vera purred like one.
“But you haven’t much room here, have you?” I observed.
“What can we do?” she asked. “The town is packed with refugees. We can’t find anything better.”
“À la guerre comme à la guerre,” remarked the Baron.
“Still, it is more comfortable than living in an hotel. Sonia, Nina and Vera sleep here on the sofa and the bed we drag out from the other room. The adjoining room is Nikolai Vasilievich’s and mine. The third is Pàv’l Pàvlch’s, the Baron’s. The others have remained at the hotel—I mean Kniaz and Eberheim. I don’t care what Magda Nikolaevna does, but I think she has now found a house. And Uncle Kostia and the rest of them will probably settle at his sister’s, the Olenins. Kniaz comes here for his meals and spends the day with us ... though lately”—she smiled—“he has been going out hunting.”
“Hunting!” I exclaimed, looking at the Prince’s well-shaved chin.
Kniaz passed his fingers between his skinny neck and his stiff collar in a nervous gesture and giggled feebly.
“He’s bought a gun,” said Nina.
“You should see the gun!” Vera cried.
Fanny Ivanovna smiled; and as we settled down to tea Nikolai Vasilievich chaffed Kniaz in his timid, deferential manner. “I went out hunting with him once. It’s a comedy! We see a hare. Kniaz pulls the trigger once—misfire. Pulls at it again—misfire. Pulls at it a third time—and the gun misfires for the third time. When he had pulled the trigger a fourth time there was a terrible explosion; a blaze of fire burst forth from the muzzle; the butt end hit him violently in the shoulder. And when the smoke had gradually dispersed we saw that the hare had evidently escaped undamaged. His instrument of murder was the only victim; and there I saw Kniaz looking at his gun: the trigger and most of the front piece had blown off in the concussion. But there he stood, still holding the instrument in his hands, puzzled beyond words.”
Nikolai Vasilievich looked at Kniaz and smiled kindly, as though to make up by it for any pain that his recital may have caused him.
Nina stretched a plate of sweets to me.
I looked at her interrogatively.
“With your tea,” she said.
“There is no sugar,” said Nikolai Vasilievich apologetically.
“I want to speak to you very seriously,” said Baron Wunderhausen, “about transferring to the English Service.”
“Now that Andrei Andreiech has arrived,” said Fanny Ivanovna gaily, “we shall be able to get sugar and everything from the English.”
“The English are all right,” said Nikolai Vasilievich. “I always did have confidence in the English. If the English once begin a job you may be sure they’ll see it through. And if the first step is taken and the mining area is liberated, the war will soon be over.”
“I want to speak to you about my special qualifications for transferring to the English Service. I was born and educated——”
“Pàv’l Pàvlch,” cried Fanny Ivanovna, “please don’t interrupt. I want you, Andrei Andreiech, to translate an English letter Nikolai Vasilievich has received from his former mining-engineer, Mr. Thomson. Our English is not quite sufficient, though I’ve understood parts of it.”
I took the letter. Mr. Thomson, writing from an obscure address in Scotland, stated that the afterwar conditions prevailing in the west of Europe had frankly disappointed him, and solicited an invitation to be reinstated in his former post as consulting-engineer in Nikolai Vasilievich’s gold-mines.
“It’s such a pity,” Fanny Ivanovna sighed. “Mr. Thomson is such a nice man. And now it seems he is so badly off. It must be terrible for his wife and children.”
“Well,” said Nikolai Vasilievich, “I say this: it’s no use Mr. Thomson coming out here at present, while the mines are still in Bolshevik hands. And I don’t want to hold out false hopes to Mr. Thomson, for one can never quite be sure what may happen in Siberia yet. But between ourselves, I may tell you that now that the English have arrived and—well, that this punitive expedition to the mines has been arranged, we have good reason to feel optimistic.”
“Well, let’s hope, let’s hope,” said Fanny Ivanovna.
But the three sisters looked as if they didn’t care a hang about Mr. Thomson, the English, the mines or anybody else.
“Are you going to the dance?” said Nina.
“Which dance?”
“The Russian one—at the Green School.”
“But it will be Russian dances all the time.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Russian music, too.”
“We can dance fox-trots to krokoviaks, one-steps to march music, slow waltzes to anything you like. You must come.”
I knew I was going, but I liked to be asked, and I resisted lingeringly, to prolong the pleasure.
Of course I was going. Who could have resisted this sliding side-long look; this shining semicircle of white teeth that revealed itself with each full smile; this lithe, sylphine young body?
The three sisters affected a stationary fox-trot.
The passions were aroused.
“Nikolai Vasilievich! Papa!”
He was dragged, like a resisting malefactor, struggling, to the piano, and made to play his one and only waltz. The Baron claimed Vera. Nina came automatically into my arms. I recaptured some of her familiar fragrance, as we danced between the sofa and round the table, dodging sundry chairs. Sonia stood demurely at the wall, abandoned by her husband in favour of a younger sister, but affecting an unconvincing moue of mirth. Then, owing to the shortness and simplicity of the tune, Nikolai Vasilievich’s technique broke down.
“I want to talk to you on this very serious question of transferring to the English Service.” The Baron had come up to me again. And I resorted to the classic answer of doubting whether there was “any vacancy.”
“It doesn’t matter where,” he said. “In Persia, or perhaps in Mesopotamia. I can’t serve here any longer.”
We sat silent in the heated room of the little wooden house creaking in the wind, and I felt lost and hidden amid all this sun and fir and solitude around us. Nikolai Vasilievich drank his tea and wondered if the Bolsheviks would hand him back his house and money at the bank, and if the Czechs, as obviously they ought, would compensate him for his loss on the gold-mines. He had great hopes, he said, of the punitive expedition; but there was one aspect—a moral one—that disturbed him greatly. He wondered whether the punitive expedition would turn out to be quite honest and would not do him out of his interests in the gold-mines altogether.
Afterwards he came up to me and said in a weary undertone: “You know, it will be very dull to-night—nothing but Russian dance music. Honestly, it would only spoil your evening if you went.”
“Don’t take any notice of him,” cried the three sisters simultaneously. “It will be very jolly. He’s only thinking of himself.”
“Nikolai!” cried Fanny Ivanovna. “What nonsense! You’ve already promised me to come. You’re their father and it’s your duty to take your children out. I refuse to go alone with them.”
As I entered the brilliantly illuminated ball-room, the three sisters, each claimed by an Allied officer, were fox-trotting, in defiance of the congregation. Nikolai Vasilievich, wearing a dinner-jacket, looked very angry, very lonely and very bored; and Fanny Ivanovna looked ominously triumphant.
“Poor Nikolai Vasilievich!” I said when Fanny Ivanovna and I were alone. “That dinner-jacket of his looks miserable and frightened as though it felt the outrage of being dragged into this mock festivity. It seems to say: ‘What have I done?’”
“Doesn’t matter. He is better where he is.
“He would only be with that girl of his if I had not insisted on his coming with us,” she added by way of after-thought.
“Zina?”
“Ach! Andrei Andreiech! It makes me so ill, so angry to think of it.”
Then Nikolai Vasilievich, ludicrously festive, strolled up to us.
“Well,” he muttered, yawning into his white-cuffed hand.
“Jolly dance,” I said.
“For those who dance,” he retorted in a voice as though I had foully and grievously betrayed him.
Then the music ceased abruptly. The three sisters, scantily and deliciously attired, glided up, and were met with an involuntary critical examination from the eyes of Fanny Ivanovna, who effected a few, to all appearance needless, pulls at their evening-gowns.
“I could hardly recognize Nina with her hair like this,” I remarked aloud.
With sylphine litheness, she slid between me and Baron Wunderhausen to the drawing-room.
“Really, I don’t like the way you’ve done your hair,” I said. “There’s nothing at the front.”
Instantly she vanished to the dressing-room; and in her absence the Baron tackled me again about a billet in Persia or Mesopotamia. I expressed a mild surprise. “Have we not come here to help the Russian national cause?” I asked. “Is that then of no interest to you?”
“You know,” he said nonchalantly, “nothing will come of it.”
“Why?”
“The Czechs are such awful swine. They’re all Bolsheviks.”
And then added, “And the Americans, too, are Bolsheviks. President Wilson. Nothing will come of it all.”
And, involuntarily, the conversation at lunch surged back to my mind. I thought this equalled it in point of sheer “constructive statesmanship.” And then Nina, now in her original coiffure, returned.
We sat under dusty imitation palm-trees, my sleeve every now and then touching her shapely naked girlish arms; till Nikolai Vasilievich came up and gave us supper, insisting on paying for it all himself. I thought of the poor, long-suffering mines who would eventually have to square all this, as I surveyed the debris on the table-cloth, while Nikolai Vasilievich paid the waiter.
When the music, after the due interval, broke out into a resounding waltz, we all flocked back into the ball-room.
General Bologoevski, who had turned up at the eleventh hour, stood at my side, and we admired Nina, who now fulfilled a carelessly contrived engagement. “What eyes! What calves! What ankles!” he was saying. “Look here, why in heaven don’t you marry her?...”
Driving through the dark and muddy streets, I sat on the folding seat; the car was packed with members of the family. Tucked away in the corner opposite, like a purring kitten, was Nina. We began to part provisionally at their gate; but they asked me to come in. We had cold ham and tinned salmon and tea with sweets. There was a certain subdued agitation about my presence in the household at this hour, and once I heard Fanny Ivanovna’s shrill voice from the adjoining room explain excitedly to Sonia: “You needn’t drag the bed into the drawing-room till Andrei Andreiech is gone.”
I had been going for an hour or so. We had said “good night” innumerable times. Nina clung to me whimsically, ignoring Nikolai Vasilievich’s desire to be rid of me. They all came out into the tiny hall and added to the difficulty of my withdrawal. Nina fastened my great sheepskin overcoat, which appealed to her by reason of its many straps. I was to come again to-morrow night to supper, and the day after, and every, every day....
III
My tangled memories of Siberia come to me to-day largely as a string of dances, dinners, concerts, garden-parties, modulated by the atmosphere of weather and the seasons of the year, with the gathering clouds of the political situation looming always in the background. And I remember, in particular, the Admiral’s first thé dansant. As he ran through my provisional list of guests he frowned and growled a little. “What are all these women?” he asked.
“You should see them, Admiral,” smiled General Bologoevski.
“Good-looking?”
The General kissed his finger-tips.
“And who is Fanny Ivanovna?”
“A German.”
A shadow came across his face. “I’m damned if I want any Huns in my house,” he growled; but gave in grudgingly.
Through inadvertence on somebody’s part, the officers of the U.S. Flagship arrived half an hour before time—an incident which taxed my capacity for consuming liquor to the utmost pitch. They had also overdone their kindness by sending us two jazz bands instead of one, with the result that their almost simultaneous employment in the two adjoining rooms reserved for dancing proved an experience unsatisfactory to the ear. As the Hawaian string-band flowed and quivered in a languid, plaintive waltz, the adjoining brass-band fairly knocked sparks out of it by bursting into an intoxicating one-step.
Some two hours earlier I had met Vera in the street. She had been to see their dressmaker about the frock in which now, radiant but bashful, she appeared. Almost immediately, the family was followed by the Zina-Uncle Kostia wing, and by Magda Nikolaevna and Čečedek. But they would not speak to one another. Nikolai Vasilievich had been to see me in the morning about bringing Zina; and now he tried to dance with her. But both were awkward and bashful, and the experiment proved unsatisfactory; while Fanny Ivanovna looked on at them sarcastically. Nina whispered to me as we one-stepped: “After them! Go after them!” her triangular, fur-bordered hat bobbing up into my face in the excitement. And as we overtook them: “Oh, my God!”
Stepping like a duck, Zina would not turn unless warned beforehand, and even then only half the circle; and Nikolai Vasilievich, exasperated by his futile efforts, asked impatiently: “Are you dancing in goloshes? Have you rubber soles on your shoes? Or what is it?”
They gave it up at last and stood by the wall, in everybody’s way, shamefaced and pitiful; and Zina looked as though she regretted her insistence on coming to this dance.
“Will you dance?” said I.
“I’ve never danced before,” said she. “But I don’t mind trying.” She looked up at her lover. Evidently their experiment did not count. Nikolai Vasilievich smiled feebly.
And, as a preliminary, she stepped on my toe....
My next dance was with Magda Nikolaevna, a beautiful woman enough, but so delicate and with such an elaborate concoction of accessories by way of dress that the chief sensation yielded from the dance with her was one of infinite precaution.
As a pièce de résistance, I danced with a little niece of Uncle Kostia, Olya Olenin. She was stout and round, like a football, and we banged into people and against walls carelessly and with the harmlessness of a football.
“To-day I have grown ten years older,” confided Nikolai Vasilievich, as I came up to him. “I shall not forget it.”
“You take it much too seriously,” I said.
“I blame myself for being such a fool as to have listened to her. I didn’t want to come.”
“Nikolai Vasilievich, really!”
“Oh, please don’t take it that way. It was charming of you to ask us. I like your Admiral ... and that other officer, his assistant, who says ‘Splendid! Splendid!’”
“Sir Hugo,” I supplied.
Then Uncle Kostia, spectacled, and with the air of a profound philosopher taking stock of his impressions, joined us. “I’ve been talking to your Admiral,” he said.
“Well?”
“Fine-looking man. Combines the manner of Napoleon I with the mind, I think, of Napoleon III. Wants to get to Moscow. But what he’ll do when he gets there (if he gets there), curiously enough doesn’t seem to have occurred to him! The simplicity of the scheme is touching. All right, let’s assume he gets there and plants a constitutional Russian government and retains an Allied army to support it. Will he keep the Allied troops there indefinitely? And when at last they go, what’s to prevent the government from collapsing like a pack of cards at the hands of a population inevitably resentful of foreign interference? Then there’s your country. You think your country will support you. But it will be divided.”
“I disagree,” said Nikolai Vasilievich. “I’d much rather, for example, the gold-mining area was occupied by English troops, or even by the Japanese, than by the Russians. I know what I am talking about. I am a typical Russian myself. There are honest men in Russia, and there are clever men in Russia; but there are no honest clever men in Russia. And if there are, they are probably heavy drinkers.”
Uncle Kostia “pooh-poohed” this sweeping charge; but Nikolai Vasilievich continued:
“To take my book-keeper Stanitski. Andrei Andreiech knows him. Dishonest as you make them. And still I am obliged to keep him on. Why? Because if I took an honest man he would make such a hash of all the books that I wouldn’t know where I was at all.”
“But do you know where you are with a dishonest book-keeper, Nikolai Vasilievich?” said Uncle Kostia with that keen spasmodic interest that highly abstract men have of taking, periodically, in practical affairs, almost as a relief from themselves. “I am a man of letters, no business man in any sense; still it would seem to me——”
“To be candid,” said the other, “it doesn’t matter much either way just now. Till we can get the gold-mines back there is no doing any business. I get money in advance occasionally. He sees to the paying of the interest, which is paid out of the same money, and puts it down in the books. For the present that is all.”
“Hm!... Still, I should do something about that,” said Uncle Kostia, “if I may presume to give advice in these matters.”
“When we get the gold-mines there will be time enough to act,” Nikolai Vasilievich answered somewhat gruffly. “I only mentioned it as an illustration of the political situation we have to contend with. The foreigners here must laugh at our methods!”
“Why? They’re only muddling up our issues.”
“The idea,” I attempted to amend Uncle Kostia’s proposition, “is that the Allied troops should help to raise and train Russian cadres and so lay the foundation for a new Russian Army which, in its turn, would make it possible to rebuild the State. It’s not an invasion by foreign troops. You may rest your mind in peace on that point.”
“Oh!... Oh!... If that’s the idea,” said Uncle Kostia in augmented tones, “then I am doubly alarmed; for I can guess the elements which will form the backbone of this new White Russian Army—monarchists altogether too brainless to realize that theirs is a lost cause.”
“Most of them, I think, would favour a Constitutional Monarchy,” proffered Nikolai Vasilievich.
“A constitutional monarchy in Russia,” retorted Uncle Kostia, “would invariably be more monarchical than constitutional.”
“Anyhow,” I said, “do have a drink.”
I could see Sir Hugo’s ruddy, weather-beaten face, as he served Fanny Ivanovna with her ice-cream; and as I came up to her I overheard her say to him in German: “I think the Bolsheviks are bound to be beaten soon because it is impossible to do any trade while they are in power.”
“Splendid!” said Sir Hugo somewhat inconsequently. “Splendid!”
“We simply can’t recover our mines, and Nikolai Vasilievich——”
She stopped....
She danced heavily; and as I turned her each time, revolved a few times of her own momentum. She sought to direct me by sheer strength of will. “Who is steering, Fanny Ivanovna? You or me?” I asked in exasperation.
“I am sorry, Andrei Andreiech,” she answered. “I do it unintentionally.”
The Baron asked me for the third time about Persia or Mesopotamia; but the Admiral’s approach frightened him away.
We watched Kniaz, who was shaking hands cordially with everybody as he took his leave. “That Kniaz of yours looks as if one day he’d been unspeakably astonished—and remained so ever since.”
“Look at General Bologoevski, sir, dancing with that painted woman.”
The Admiral’s face drew out and darkened. “That man,” said he, “is the biggest fool in the Russian Army.” He pondered. “The Russian men are no damned good. But the women are splendid! What about that Czech concert to-night? You can bring your women if you like into the box. Don’t want the men. Ha! ha! ha! Look at old Hugo talking to the young girls!”
“I’ll ask the three sisters....”
“Those three there sitting on the window-sill?”
“Yes.... And Fanny Ivanovna,” I added.
“All right. Let’s have the Hun.
“Well, Nikolai Vasilievich,” he turned to his guest. “I hear you know English very well. Where have you picked it up?”
“No, no,” blushed Nikolai Vasilievich; and said in Russian, “Your English spelling is so difficult. In English you spell a word ‘London’ and pronounce it ‘Birmingham.’”
“Ha! ha! ha! ha!” laughed the Admiral loudly, but with dignity; and then asked, “Are you comfortable in Vladivostok? Can you get all the food you want for your family? I hope you will tell me if there is anything I can do?”
“I am very grateful,” bowed the Russian.
“Now mind you don’t forget to ask....”
Nikolai Vasilievich, as things went, did not forget; nor did he wait to be asked twice. On the spot he said that he understood the Admiral was shortly travelling by special train up-country, and all he, Nikolai Vasilievich, requested was one modest coupé in that special train, as it was urgent that he should see a certain Russian general at Omsk, relative to the forthcoming punitive expedition to his gold-mines.
The Admiral returned the classic answer: “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Will you kindly introdooce me to the young lady yonder?” said a very smart, stiff-collared U.S. naval officer. He looked in the direction of the window-sill.
“Which one?”
The next moment he was dancing with Nina.
“Who’s that officer?” asked General Bologoevski.
“Ward.”
“What eyes! What calves! What ankles!” he sighed again. “Look here, really, why in the world don’t you marry her?”
“And now,” said I, “it’s my turn,” as the waltz subsided on the last three beats.
“Tell me,” whined Nigger voices, “why nights are lonesome,” and the cymbals beat the pulse; “tell me why days are blue....” And we moved rhythmically to the incantation, stooping, jerking gently, swaying smoothly, like plants in the water. When the song ceased it was immediately encored. And when the bands went, a handful of us, those who had enjoyed it most, lingered for a while. I and Nina, the Baron and his painted lady, Vera and Holdcroft, danced to the husky gramophone; and Sonia sat on the window-sill and stared at Holdcroft with unmitigated admiration.
And in the evening I called for them in our car and took them to the concert. We arrived a little late because at a point in the journey our progress had been impeded by a car that blocked the road. Inside was a drunken gentleman who was being urged by the chauffeur to pay his fare. “Don’t want to pay,” the gentleman responded.
“Then get out!”
“Don’t want to get out.”
“Get out, you——”
“Who’re you talking to?” came from within. “Don’t you know I’m an officer?”
“Officer. There’s a lot of you here, we know your kind.... Get out!”
“Don’t want to get out.”
“Then kindly pay your fare.”
“Don’t want to pay.”
At length our chauffeur succeeded in disentangling our car. “I’m always so frightened for the children. Awful language these drunkards use,” said Fanny Ivanovna.
The theatre, as we entered the box, was a gallery of distinguished generals, admirals and Allied high commissioners; and the orchestra was sending forth the plaintive strains of the familiar Czecho-Slovak marching song.
I sat next to Nina, and the Admiral was in the other corner, half screened from the public view by the dusty curtain. To the great delight of Sonia and Fanny Ivanovna, there was the Overture to Tannhäuser; and as the initial pilgrims’ chorus was being repeated in its last resort, the conductor urging the executants to ever greater efforts, and the trombones blazed away their utmost perturbation, a chuckle of glee and satisfaction spread over the Admiral’s fine-set face. “There’s more discipline in an orchestra like this,” said he, “than in a battalion of Marines,” and clapped his hands uproariously.
The concert over, the Admiral dispatched me first in his car with the family and waited for me to return for him. Driving home through the warm and starry night, Fanny Ivanovna praised the immaculate politeness of Sir Hugo; but added afterwards, “He’s frightfully nervous, and keeps fiddling with something or other all the time.”
“And keeps saying ‘Splendid! Splendid!’” added Nina.
“There’s something curious about his mind, too,” she said.
“Ah! you’ve discovered that!” I laughed. “It’s a grasp of the inessential, a passion for detail and exactitude unexcelled in creation. You don’t know him. To-day, for instance, I met him on the landing, before lunch. ‘Hello!’ he said. ‘Full of work?’ Now it had seemed to me that he said ‘Full of drink?’ and naturally enough I said, ‘No, not at this hour, sir.’ ‘At what hour do you start, pray?’ he began, and thinking he was talking about cocktails, I said, ‘Oh, just before dinner.’ ‘Hm!’ he said. ‘Just before dinner. I shall have to look into that.’ ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ I said, ‘I think I must have heard you wrong. Do you mind telling me again what you said?’ ‘Hm!’ he said, ‘I’ve been talking to you on this landing for the last three minutes on the basis of my original inquiry, and you now ask me what it was I said. I said—I think these were the exact words I used—I said: “Hello!” I said. “Full of work?”’ ‘Full of work?’ I cried, ‘and I thought you said “Full of drink.’ ‘Full of drink,’ he said, ‘full of drink indeed. Good morning to you!’ And he went his way.”