Futility

The car had pulled up.

“Good night, Andrei Andreiech, and thank you very, very much.”

“Good night,” smiled the three sisters.

The Admiral was bucked as we drove home. I knew that he was fond of young girls. On the other hand, he liked mature women. He praised the girls. I breathed to him that they had praised him.

The Admiral smiled one of his most adorable smiles.

“Fanny Ivanovna,” I said, “was struck by your appearance.”

The gallant Admiral blushed like a girl.

“There is something in having an appearance,” he said at last.

He looked out into the dark and silent night. Some minutes later he said, with conviction, “She’s a good woman, that Fanny Ivanovna.”

“Russian women are so much more interesting and fascinating,” I babbled, “than other women.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “But she’s a Boche.”

“Unfortunately,” I sighed.

The Admiral yawned. “Never mind,” he said. “I don’t mind the Germans. What I can’t stick are the dirty Bolsheviks.”

“Russian girls,” I continued, “are far more interesting and clever than other girls.”

“All girls,” the Admiral replied, “are stupid.”

IV

Much of my experiences must now appear in the nature of a farce. This is not my fault. A good deal of life is a hilarious farce, and yet, as in the case of the affiliation of Nikolai Vasilievich’s family, it all comes about in the proper constitutional way, through a string of human motives. For a week or so Nikolai Vasilievich kept on applying to the Admiral for a coupé in his train to Omsk, in the teeth of implacable refusals. Then, after much opposition from the Admiral, and a passionate, though somewhat vague attempt on the part of Nikolai Vasilievich to identify his personal misfortunes with that of “honest” Russia, and the doings of the Czechs, the miners, and the punitive expedition whose disinterestedness he had begun to doubt, with that of international Bolshevism, this was conceded. But on hearing of this step, Fanny Ivanovna at once concluded that Nikolai Vasilievich was trying to escape from her—a suspicion she always entertained—and she immediately applied to see the Admiral in person and asked for two additional coupés, to accommodate her and the three sisters. The Admiral was a sailor and a gentleman. He promised her two coupés.

I forget which wing of the family was the next to apply. I remember that every day that week our waiting-room was crowded with petitioners. The Admiral said No. He found himself saying No innumerable times each day. Now it is an intrinsic part of the Russian character that it does not accept No for No. It is constitutionally incapable of doing so. Its institutions are all a negation of that principle. And what is more, it refuses to confine that fact to within the Russian border. It regards it in the light of worldwide application, assuming that it is indeed nothing less than human nature.

The Admiral still said No. He held that it was not human nature but just Russian nature, and as an illustration of his point he meant to show that when an Englishman says No he does mean No. But none of them would understand the Admiral’s interpretation of No. They had all grown up with the idea that No meant Yes after an adequate amount of pressure and insistence. The pressure was of various kinds, according to the age, sex and nature of the applicant. There were tears, entreaties. There were questions, such as the “object” of the Allies in Siberia, since they monopolized the best trains and refused to help the Russians in their primary needs. There were direct questions which it was thought must needs shatter the impregnability of the Admiral’s No, such as, for instance: Did the Admiral wish to starve them, as he evidently did, by cutting them adrift from Nikolai Vasilievich, the bread-winner?

The Admiral still said that No was No, and would they please understand it? They all replied that No was not the point, the point being: What were they to do without Nikolai Vasilievich? Whereon the Admiral replied that when he said a thing he meant it, this being the sterling value of British character. But they persisted all the same, treating him as if he were just human like the rest of them. Then the Admiral became a little angry. It annoyed him that they should fail to understand the primary fact that an Englishman was not a Russian and that hence any laxity that held good in Russian character did not hold good in that of a native of the British Isles. But the Russians hammered on in spite of all; till the Admiral was heartily amused that they should indeed know no better than to think that he would give in just because they persisted, for, the ignorance of human nature that, he thought, such a belief implied—a quaint and childish ignorance—began to fascinate him. He looked at them and looked at them again, as they poured forth their woes ... and marvelled. Indeed, their touching innocence fascinated him so much that finally he felt he wanted to humour them, as one is inclined to humour quaint, unreasonable children who know no better. And it was by way of humouring them that the Admiral gave way. No (for once only) was to mean Yes. They thanked him cordially. He sighed and wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. The Russian character had won the day.

That night we started on our trip along the great, now pitiably disorganized Siberian track. It was a lovely night in late autumn. The Admiral’s special train had been brought over on the main line; and the General and I, both somewhat under the influence of liquor, walked arm in arm up and down the platform; and the General, in an overflow of feeling, spoke piteously of his ruined soul, his wasted life, and how he felt, and what he felt, and why he felt it. The Admiral and Sir Hugo had already settled down in the drawing-room of the coach, and were drinking. As the train moved, we too stepped into the carriage and threw ourselves back on our cushions; and the General’s hand stretched for the bottle. But I lay back musingly in the dark carriage, thinking of all things and none in particular, in that agreeable half-conscious way that is known to precede slumber, as the train rattled on its way to Omsk.

Two carriages behind us was Nikolai Vasilievich with a substantial proportion of his family, all bound for Omsk. When I closed my eyes I could see Nina, and my drowsy thoughts would linger: “She is à moi.... Tucked away in that compartment with her sisters.... À moi.... Now they were undressing for the night.... À moi.... At a handstretch. Always there. But there was no hurry. O life ... leisurely life ...!”

I was wakened by the General, and we went and joined the Admiral and Sir Hugo. It seemed that they were both what is known as “lit up.”

“You’re drunk,” the Admiral greeted me.

“And so are you,” I said.

“I know I am, damn you!”

And we were all very jolly and sang “Stenka Razin,” the Russian robber song, while the train rattled westward. And the General’s eyes were moist with tears: he was happy in his melancholy. And, tearfully emotional, he crept to the Admiral, and clinging to his neck tried to kiss him.

“Go away!” cried the Admiral in the manner of an innocent young girl about to be accosted; and then in a more manly tone:

“Damn your eyes!”

And then the General leaned back with that exaggerated leisure peculiar to his condition, and sang a Russian gipsy song. He spoke of the good old pre-war days. He sighed, sighed deeply. Now everything seemed to have gone wrong, no doubt because his wife who ran him was not here to look after him. But he expected her to come and then all would be well. If he was in a muddle, if he was in debt, as he invariably was, he merely turned to his creditors and said, “I don’t understand all this. Wait till my wife arrives. It’s a damrotten game, you know, without my wife. My wife she is a clever woman. She will put it all right with you. My wife she is a dragoon.”

In the night the train stopped at a wayside station and seemed as though it would never start again. The Admiral then sent out the General to find out what was the matter, and Sir Hugo, who attributed the cause to “bad staff work,” proffered the suggestion of “negotiating” with the station-master. But the General said he thought the station-master was a most “damrotten fellow,” in the case of which type he usually relied on “elemental” measures. Accordingly he drew out his pistol and threatened to shoot the station-master like a dog unless he cleared the line immediately. The station-master, used to these methods, took no heed of the warning, but said that he would lodge a vigorous protest through the usual channels. Whereon the General replaced the pistol in his pouch, remarking that life was a “damrotten game.”

What a trip!...

In the morning I observed the Admiral talking to Fanny Ivanovna in his deliberate manner, looking into her eyes. And the impression I received was that the Admiral thought Fanny Ivanovna was a “good fellow.” But the three sisters, bashful though they were when he spoke to them in English, had somehow overlooked him; though Nina once remarked, “How awfully funnily his mouth protrudes when he looks at you so seriously. I feel so shy because I feel he does.”

“Now with all this English influence behind him Nikolai Vasilievich ought to be able to find out something definite about his mines at Omsk,” Fanny Ivanovna confided to me. “And there is no doubt this time we’re travelling in comfort. The children are so pleased. You know, they are so childish. Any change like this amuses them.” And then, in a lowered voice: “Anything like that—love—I assure you, they know absolutely nothing about. They’re such children!”

“But Sonia’s married!” I remonstrated.

“Ach! how that angers me! And to whom, to whom! He can’t even wash his neck. It’s all that mother!”

And so we covered verst after verst, as our luxurious train, freshly painted, beautifully furnished, admirably kept, rushed through a stricken land of misery. On our choice engines we moved like lightning, or perchance stood long hours at lonely wayside stations, the glamour of innumerable electric lights within our carriages presenting to a community of half-starving refugees the gloating picture of the Admiral and his “staff” at dinner.

And so we arrived at Lake Baikal, that crystal sea imprisoned in a frame of snow-capped mountains. We stopped our train and lingered on the rocks, drank in the harmony of a strange light, glassy water, snow, fir, and perfect quietude; and when at last we said good-bye to Lake Baikal, that proudest of lakes, a gale fearful and furious had blown in upon this serenity of beauty and lashed huge waves in the inky blackness of the night.

On went the train, rushing and swaying through the windy space of the fields.

What a trip! How we argued and wrangled the long journey through! Sometimes we would almost come to blows; for the ordinary Russian does not argue: he shouts, and his opponent, to score his point, shouts louder and quicker. The Russian General combined intellectual vagueness with an emotional temperament; and, contriving to identify his country with his class, he discovered that his country had been grievously insulted by me. All was over between us. He would never speak to me again.

But that evening, after dinner, we sat together over a bottle of whisky, and the General became emotional. “You are young and foolish,” he said, “and you probably don’t know what you are talking about. I don’t. But you love Russia. Tell me you love Russia; don’t you? We both love Russia. She’s been degraded and trampled on; but she is a fine country. She will arise. She must arise. And we both love Russia.” He cried. “Tell me you love Russia. Tell me you love her. We Russians are lazy, drunken, good-for-nothing swine; but we are good people, aren’t we? It’s a holy land. It’s a holy people. Look at her.” He gazed out of the window.

I rose and stood by him, and we looked at Russia, whirling past. Then I left him. When I returned, the General was still lying on the sofa, but his melancholy had vanished and he was spitting at the ceiling, probably for want of anything better to do.

On we went. Two days before we had left Irkutsk. The train rushed and roared and rattled. It was a weather that breeds pessimists. I stood looking out upon the steppes, these immense, monotonous Siberian plains, dull and melancholy in the rain, when Zina came to me and said her mother wished to see me privately. As I entered her coupé the old lady was drinking tea. She bade me sit down.

“It’s about Uncle Kostia,” she began. She sighed, and there was a prolonged pause. “Cleverness! Wisdom!... Oh, I don’t know, Andrei Andreiech. God in heaven knows”—she crossed herself—“that we are groping in the dark and none of us know what we are about or what’s what, and I am an old ignorant, sinful woman. But if you ask me, Andrei Andreiech, I’d just as soon have a fool as a wise man. Take Uncle Kostia. Such a clever man—and what’s the good of it? I am stupid, dotty in my old age, but really I don’t see where all his cleverness is leading to. And I say it is time he did something and gave up living upon others. Zina tells me she can’t keep on asking Nikolai Vasilievich for money, and I really do think it is time Uncle Kostia began to work ... and published something. I thought perhaps you could get the Admiral to place him on some paper—propaganda of some sort. It isn’t that one is sorry to keep Uncle Kostia. He is clever, they all say. Heaven knows he has lived on his brother long enough, and one was never sorry to give him all he wanted since the man is clever, you understand, and writes. But now there is nothing to give ... since there is nothing, you see? I don’t want to appear obdurate or unfeeling; but I thought perhaps you could talk it over with Uncle Kostia. I know he likes you and he might listen to you.”

I went, promising to do what I could.

When I knocked at the door of Uncle Kostia’s coupé it was late in the afternoon. The train rushed, and the dreary monotonous steppes receded, whirling past. Twilight was falling within and without. The candles had not yet been lit. Then the door of the coupé was pulled open and revealed Uncle Kostia sitting on the sofa, laboriously rubbing his eyes. I inquired if I had disturbed him. He assured me that I had not. He sprinkled some eau de Cologne on his hands and rubbed his face—a substitute for washing—then made room for me on the sofa, and rubbing his eyes with his fists he yawned widely and looked at the window. The melancholy of the Siberian plain must have communicated itself to both of us. For a time we sat in silence, contemplating the unspeakable disorder of the coupé. I was about to frame an adequate sentence to open conversation when he preceded me.

“There!” he said, and struck his forehead with his palm. “And I am called a clever man. Andrei Andreiech, I have been thinking. I have been thinking a good deal these last days.” He stopped abruptly.

“What have you been thinking about, Uncle Kostia?” I asked.

“That’s just the trouble,” he said, “I can’t tell you.”

I waited.

“I don’t know myself,” he explained.

I still waited.

“I have been thinking of this and that and the other, in fact, of one thing and another—precious but elusive thoughts, Andrei Andreiech. Beautiful emotions. A kaleidoscope of the most subtle colours, if I may so express myself. And, Andrei Andreiech, it has taught me a great truth. It has taught me the futility of writing.”

“But now really, Uncle Kostia,” I remonstrated.

“Don’t interrupt me,” said Uncle Kostia. “It is a truth that only ten per cent, if that, of the substance of our thoughts and feelings can be transferred on paper. It can’t be done, Andrei Andreiech—and that’s all there is to it.

“And when I think what a fool I have been, writing all these years, toiling, slaving at a desk like a clerk—when I ought to have been thinking, only thinking.”

“But, Uncle Kostia——” I began.

“Andrei Andreiech, it’s no use. How can I write down what I think? The subtlety, the privacy, the exquisite intimacy, the thousand and one inexplicable impulses that prompt and make up thought and stir emotion.... Andrei Andreiech, how can I? Think! how can I? Oh, you are hopeless ... hopeless!... To-day I have been thinking. It will seem nothing to you if I tell you; it will seem nothing to me if I tell it; but, believe me, it was something infinitely deep, infinitely complex, infinitely beautiful just when I thought of it—without the labour of exertion.”

“What was it, Uncle Kostia?” I inquired.

“It was vague,” he said evasively.

“Oh, come, Uncle Kostia?”

“How can I tell? I know too much.”

I was aware of the unpleasant shrinking of ideas when set down on paper. So I persisted:

“Come on, Uncle Kostia! out with it!”

“Well,” said Uncle Kostia, and his face became that of a mystic. “I thought, for instance—I wonder if you will understand me?—I thought: Where are we all going?”

“Hm,” I said significantly.

“I thought: Why are we all moving?”

“You have not far to seek for motives,” said I. “I presume there are motives in each case.”

“Motives!” he cried. “That is the very point. There are no motives. The motives are naught. It is the consequences. Where are we going? Why are we going? Look: we are moving. Going somewhere. Doing something. The train rushes through Siberia. The wheels are moving. The engine-drivers are adding fuel to the engines. Why? Why are we here? What are we doing in Siberia? Where are we heading for? Something. Somewhere. But what? Where? Why?”

I think I must have misunderstood Uncle Kostia’s subtle thoughts. Or was it that my commission was continually in my mind? But I asked him:

“Is it that you are doomed by your sense of inutility, Uncle Kostia?”

His eyes flashed. He spoke impatiently: “My inutility! Your inutility! What the devil does it matter whose inutility? Is your Admiral very utile, may I ask? What I was saying was that we all behaved as if we were actually doing things, boarding this Trans-Siberian Express as if in order to do something at the end of the journey, while actually the journey is in excess of anything we are likely to achieve.”

But I thought I would keep him to the point, that is to say, my point. “Then would you rather not travel in this train, Uncle Kostia?”

An anxious look came into his eyes.

“Why? I like travelling in this train. I am comfortable.”

“But the futility of it?”

“Oh!” groaned Uncle Kostia at my stupidity. “Can’t you understand that it is the very fact of this physical futility that inflates me with a sense of spiritual importance?”

I looked at him with a blank expression.

“When I am at home—I mean anywhere at a standstill—I am wretched intolerably. I write and I think——” He stopped.

“What?”

“What am I writing for: what on earth am I thinking for?”

“So you have doubts?”

“Yes, at moments I am seized by misgivings: what is it all for? I ask.”

“I see.”

“Now it is different. We are moving, apparently doing something, going somewhere. One has a sense of accomplishing something. I lie here in my coupé and I think: It is good. At last I am doing something. Living, not recording. Living! Living! I look out of the window, and my heart cries out: Life! Life! and so living, living vividly, I lapse into my accustomed sphere of meditation, and then before I know exactly where I am I begin to meditate: Where are we all going to? Isn’t our journey the kernel of absurdity? And so, by contrast, as it were, I gain a sense of the importance of meditation.... That is how we deceive ourselves, Andrei Andreiech.”

“And you can do it in spite of being conscious of the deception involved?”

“I have been unconscious of it,” he said, “until you forced me into introspection.”

Then, after a pause, I was tickled into inquiring:

“Why don’t you—er—publish some of it, eh, Uncle Kostia?”

Uncle Kostia grabbed his beard into his fist and looked at me with pity rather than with scorn and made a movement as if he was going to spit out of sheer disgust, but evidently thought better of it. “You have a front of brass,” he said. “I cannot penetrate it.”

“Look here, Uncle Kostia,” I cried impatiently, “you must be reasonable and think of poor Nikolai Vasilievich. He can’t go on supporting everybody.”

“He hasn’t said anything, has he?” he asked anxiously.

“No ... but....” I paused to enable him to say the obvious.

“He wouldn’t,” said Uncle Kostia. “He is wonderful. I admire him.”

I returned to my coupé. It was evening now and the lights were lit. Dismal forests stretched over hundreds of versts. I lay back and the ideas let loose by Uncle Kostia set to work in my mind. And I thought: Where are we heading? Why? What is it all for? And then I thought of the war with its hysterical activity; I pictured soldiers boarding trains, to return to the front; the loading of ships with war matériel; the rush in the Ministry of Munitions. I thought of the Germans seething with energy in just the same way; and I contrasted in my mind this hustling activity, this strained efficiency with the pitiable weakness in the intellectual conception of the conflict, and I understood that the man had been essentially right, that our journeys were in excess of our achievements. Our life was an inept play with some disproportionately good acting in it. Then, as I dreamed away, I heard Fanny Ivanovna talking to somebody in the adjoining coupé. I pulled my door open and I could now hear her voice distinctly. I listened. I was vastly tickled. I wondered to whom it was that she was telling her autobiography. Then I heard occasional expressions of assent in Sir Hugo’s trim and careful Russian. I leaned forward, the incarnation of attention.

* * * * *

“He would come to me in the evening and say, ‘Fanny, I don’t know what I would do without you....’

* * * * *

“He came to me one evening in April and said, ‘Fanny, I must speak to you very seriously....’

* * * * *

“‘It is love, this time, real love. I thought that I had loved, I had loved, you, Fanny, but this is the love that comes once only, to which you yield gloriously, magnificently, or you are crushed and broken and thrust aside....’”

* * * * *

I felt my heart beat violently within me. I waited for Sir Hugo’s detailed cross-examination; but indeed there was little of it. Only once, when Fanny Ivanovna referred to Nikolai Vasilievich’s wife did Sir Hugo stop her with an apology, to inquire “Which wife?”

The train rushed through the autumn night; the windows now were black and revealed nothing. Interlacing with the din, squeal and rattle of the wheels, now and then my ear would catch familiar fragments of the monologue.

* * * * *

“‘Nikolai!’ I cried. ‘Du bist verrückt ... wahnsinnich! ...’

* * * * *

“I cried and he cried with me....

* * * * *

“‘Think of the children, Nikolai! They are your children....’

* * * * *

“I said to him: ‘I shall wait till you pay me off. I shall not leave otherwise.’”

* * * * *

I felt indeed I was on the summits of existence. Why should I be treated to such stupendous depths of irony? There beyond the clouds the gods were laughing, laughing voluptuously. I could not sit still. With all my heart I craved to have a peep, if only at Sir Hugo’s face. I thought I’d give my life to know what was his verdict on the situation. Noiselessly I stole into the corridor, and bending forward with infinite precaution, I peeped at the interior of the coupé. They sat next each other. Under the shaded light projected the ruddy weather-beaten face of Sir Hugo. Sir Hugo looked—how shall I describe it?—he looked as if he thought it was a case of damned bad staff work.

The train rushed on, noisily swaying through the silence of the night. I went back to my coupé, and passing Uncle Kostia’s kennel I overheard the finale of what must have been a frantic theological discussion between Uncle Kostia and the General. The General, drunk, his fundamental principles of faith all uprooted and scattered in disorder about the coupé, furious, with hair dishevelled, cried out to Uncle Kostia:

“Well, is there a God, or is there no God?”

“How do I know?” snapped Uncle Kostia angrily. “Go away!”

V

When the train arrived at Omsk, the new régime of Kolchak had been established. The Admiral was distinctly pleased with the change; for he no longer believed in granting the Russian people a Constituent Assembly because he had grounds for thinking that the Russian people, if given this opportunity, would take advantage of it and elect a government other than that of Kolchak. And the Admiral was rather fond of little Kolchak, whose interpretation of democracy was that of denying the people the choice of government until such time as by some vague, mysterious, but anyhow protracted, system of education he hoped their choice would fall upon his own administration. We lived in our train, a verst or thereabouts from the station—a thoroughly unwholesome place; and the Admiral diverted most of his time by throwing empty tobacco tins at the pigs that dwelt in the ditches around the train. “You have no conception what a pig a pig really is,” he said, “till you see an Omsk pig.”

“Splendid!” said Sir Hugo. “Splendid!”

“There she goes again!” yelled the Admiral, and hit an old big sow with a Navy Cut tobacco tin.

“Splendid effort!” said Sir Hugo. “Splendid effort!”

“I give dem h-h-hell!” roared General Bologoevski. “Damrotten pigs!” But, as usual, his threat remained an empty one.

But while most of us were very much at sea as to why exactly we had arrived at Omsk, Nikolai Vasilievich seemed immune from doubt. Nikolai Vasilievich, suspicious of the punitive expedition, had arrived at the seat of the anti-Bolshevik Administration to seek redress and compensation in regard to his gold-mines. I think it was chiefly for my British uniform that Nikolai Vasilievich asked me to accompany him on his visit to the General at the General Staff, before whom he was going to lay his case. I noticed that Nikolai Vasilievich had always had a curious habit of establishing some connexion between his personal grievance and some powerful outside influence, as, for example, the general question of Allied intervention; and he insisted that he and we and intervention were really all one affair, and that hence a favourable solution of his financial difficulties was all part and parcel of that scheme which aimed at the defeat of Bolshevism.

We entered a large dirty waiting-room where crowds of petitioners awaited their turn with a patience that bordered on spiritual resignation: after the Russian manner they all desired to see the head man personally, whose life was consequently spent in interviews. A nasty dirty little woman with a nasty dirty little child, pointing at me with a dirty finger, was saying to her howling offspring, in an attempt to pacify her next-of-kin, “Is that your daddy, is he? Is that your daddy?”

The General was an elusive person, a wily man, a master in the art of compromise. He was the idol of the Allies. He was one of those few who could so wangle things, so balance favours, as to please at once all the multitudinous Allies and even curry favour with a large majority of Russians. His habitual procedure was this. If an Ally asked him, for example, for the allotment of a certain building, he always promised without reserve. Then the Russian organization in possession of that building would at once cry out in protest; and he immediately assured them that they would be allowed to keep the building: the whole matter, he explained, was a mere misunderstanding. Then the Russian organization stayed, and when the Ally came to take the building over they referred the Ally to the General. And when the Ally came to him and asked for explanation, the General, with a charming smile, would say, “Well, you see that building is not really suitable for your use. I will find you a better one.” Then the Ally waited. He must have time, the General said; and actually he played on time, on “evolution.” And in the meantime there was a coup d’état; or the Russian organization went bankrupt; or the particular Allied representative who had been worrying him was replaced by another, with whom the General would begin again at the beginning; or the Allied troops were about to be withdrawn; or the city was recaptured by the Sovets; or there was a fire and the correspondence was buried in the flames. He was a man who had no use whatever for “free will” and played entirely on “predestination.”

The General listened to Nikolai Vasilievich’s emotional narrative in a friendly manner, and smiling pleasantly he rose and shook hands, as if to show that the interview was at an end, saying, “You may rest assured that it will be quite all right. Call again one of these days.”

Nikolai Vasilievich went out, beaming. “Well,” he said, “it seems settled.” I tendered my heartiest congratulations.

Then “one of these days” we called upon the General a second time. Nikolai Vasilievich laid great stress on the dastardly action of the Czechs—that nation just then being out of court with the government at Omsk—but the General merely said, “Wait till the Supreme Ruler returns from Perm. I can do nothing without the Supreme Ruler.”

Nikolai Vasilievich then waited for the return of the Supreme Ruler; and presently we called again. The General’s manner, as he received us, was considerably less sunny than it had been on the two previous occasions. “You have been here before,” he greeted Nikolai Vasilievich. “You must have patience and wait.”

“Wait?” asked Nikolai Vasilievich in a tone of secret terror, the terror of a man who had been doing naught else all his life—and knew its meaning.

“Yes, I advise you to wait. Have patience.”

“How long?” asked Nikolai Vasilievich.

“How do I know?” the General replied. “Wait—and you will see.”

Now, was it that Nikolai Vasilievich had waited long enough and seen nothing? Was it that in the circumstances he thought it sounded too much like a mockery? Or was it the explosion of that brewing restlessness that he had gathered in the years of intermittent waiting: the last puff of ineffectual remonstrance before his final sinking into hopeless resignation? But suddenly Nikolai Vasilievich went wild. I had never seen him in that state before. He abused the General in immoderate terms. He accused him first of turning honest people into Bolsheviks; then of being in the pay of Moscow. He threatened to lead a rebellion against the Kolchak State. Nikolai Vasilievich ceased to be a man and became an incarnation: Man having lost his patience: Humanity gone wild in the waiting. He thundered forth at the adversary, and his ruined hopes were the woes of Humankind. Then, coming to the end of his intellectual resources, but far from having yet exhausted his spiritual wrath, he made reference to the Day of Judgment. The door into the chancery flew open, and the Chief of Staff, the Aide-de-camp, and heads of various departments dashed upon the scene, wondering what on earth had happened; and shouting loudly Nikolai Vasilievich hurled abuse upon the Chief-of-Staff, the Aide-de-camp, and the heads of various departments. And then in the waiting-room he went for a stray Admiral, a petitioner like himself, and hurled abuse at him as well.

“All right,” the General said at length. “All right. If you won’t be reasonable, I shall have to resort to the recognized procedure. Guard!” And he ordered them to take Nikolai Vasilievich away. Nikolai Vasilievich still raged and fluttered, and the guards came up to him with signs of deference and indecision. “Come on, sir,” they persuaded him, “he really means it.” And taking him each under one arm, they dragged him out into the open.

We walked back to the train.

“What those people will not realize,” I took it up to humour him, “is that you can’t live on nothing. Waiting doesn’t feed you, and waiting doesn’t clothe you; and when you have a family——”

“Of course, one can borrow,” said Nikolai Vasilievich.

“Yes, of course,” I agreed.

Fanny Ivanovna greeted him with “Well, Nikolai, is it all arranged?”

A fiendish look came on his face, as though he said, “The hell it is!” and all the more fiendish because he did not say it.

She sighed conspicuously. And her sigh gave him a nervous shudder. A look of hate came into his steel-grey eyes. “She even sighs offensively,” he said to me, “as though she meant to charge me with the necessity of doing so.”

“Nikolai!” she cried, “don’t let yourself go before strangers. What will Andrei Andreiech think of you! You know I am not to blame because the mines won’t pay. And you ought to remember that I advised you to sell them long ago, and if you had listened to me then we shouldn’t have been in this plight. Well, well, it’s no use quarrelling now. We’ve got to wait, that’s all.”

The ironic fascination of the situation at this point proved irresistible. “There’s an English proverb,” I supplied: “‘All things come to him who waits.’”

“Hm!” said Nikolai Vasilievich.

“And there’s another one: ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day.’”

“Excellent proverbs!” he said dryly.

Kniaz popped his head out from behind the paper, like a mouse, and added, “There’s our own Russian proverb, too: ‘The slower you drive the farther you get.’”

“You, Kniaz, had better read your paper,” retorted Nikolai Vasilievich acidly. “What does it say in there?”

I stood at the window of the stationary train and watched the sinking landscape dissolve in the gathering gloom about us. Why did the winter air seem so acutely strange, as if charged with something, a kind of tenderness, a warm, transfiguring love ...? Nikolai Vasilievich came to my side and watched, his hands in his trouser pockets.

“Pigs in the ditches,” he brooded, “pigs in offices, everywhere.... A town of pigs. That General ... oh! what a pig....”

VI

The “affiliation” of Eisenstein into our “society” was a tribute to his own unflagging perseverance. It so happened that while in Vladivostok the Admiral had been in urgent need of a dentist, and quite by accident he tumbled against Eisenstein, who had set up a practice there. The Admiral, though he loathed all Jews, was yet favourably impressed by Eisenstein because on his first visit to him he heard Eisenstein engage in a vigorous cursing of his Chinese servant. He liked to see a man who knew how to put “these people” in their places, a man who knew how to assert his own authority, a man who did not talk about “equality” and such-like tosh (discordant with his sentiment), “utopia,” “socialism,” and that sort of thing, you know, that has made the world, etc. etc. There was altogether too much Bolshevism abroad, and the vigorous action of the dentist with his Chink appealed to him unspeakably.

“This clamouring for allowing men from below to come up to the top and not imposing individuals of the old governing class from above,” he said. “All damned well to talk like that, but in the meantime is anarchy to be allowed to continue unchecked? Apparently so.”

“Orright! Orright!” said Eisenstein.

This seemed the only word he knew in English. But it did not baffle him in the least; indeed he preferred to converse in English by means of its continual solitary use to any reasonable conversation in Russian; and when the Admiral spoke Russian to him he still replied, “Orright! Orright!” The Admiral had found him an amazing dentist. The Admiral’s teeth and dentistry seemed the subject he was least interested in of all. He talked politics and finance. At intervals strange men and women of a strong Hebrew strain would run into the room, and Eisenstein, leaving the Admiral with his mouth wide open and cotton-wool stuck under his tongue, would exchange queries in a quick and agitated manner with these dark intruders. The Admiral would hear such phrases as “What is the yen to-day? How much is the dollar?” And if the Admiral chanced to touch the question of finance, Eisenstein would pounce upon him with inquiries: “Do you want dollars? How many dollars? Or can I sell you francs?” Or suddenly he would ask the Admiral to recommend his being made a British subject. Where was the difficulty? He could always change his name Eisenstein to Ironstone, which, he believed, sounded jolly well in English.

In a crisis he would suddenly drop his instruments on the floor and rely upon his naked hands, which by the way, he never washed between his clients. He was always one of two things: either extremely optimistic, when he said that the most violent pain was nothing; or very pessimistic, when he said that nothing could be done to alleviate the pain. Sometimes he was extremely indolent and said that nothing was required to be done and all was well; and sometimes violently enthusiastic for huge undertakings, for the most drastic and sweeping reforms, for extracting all the remaining teeth in the Admiral’s mouth and substituting gold all over, and all sorts of crowns and bridges of his own invention that ran into four-figure dollars and were evidently going to hang loose in the Admiral’s mouth. All the while he would talk and inflict his own political views on his clients, which were that the English were both fools and clever knaves: the apparent contradiction did not disturb him in the least; and if the Admiral showed any inclination to contradict some amazing insinuation, he would just press the needle a little and manipulate it on the nearest nerve in the tooth and so silence all opposition. He would talk of the exchange at Vladivostok and of how easy it was to make money, and when asked how to do it he would say you had only to turn one currency into another, whether yen, dollars, sterling or roubles, and a vast fortune was assured you, evidently quite irrespective of the order of turnover, or the particular currency, or the amount employed, or the rate at which the transactions were being effected. He would talk all the while, never stopping the whole time the client was there; and then at the finish stick a piece of saturated cotton-wool into any hole in any tooth, take no heed of your protests, and tell you to come again any time, any day—when he would keep you waiting for whole hours at a stretch. He would see you out, shouting in the passage in reply to any question you might have put: “Orright! Orright!” as he closed the door upon you; and then turn to the next patient.

He attended to the Admiral’s teeth twice in Vladivostok, and then hearing through a third person that the Admiral was not quite satisfied with the finality of his work, he left the coast and joined the Admiral on his own initiative at Omsk (in order to evade military service at the Base), and now stated that he was a member of the Admiral’s party. He was followed by Baron Wunderhausen, now a second lieutenant in Kolchak’s Army, who arrived in Omsk and asked the Admiral to take him on as his interpreter. This was conceded. The young Baron, who said that he was anxious to help, displayed a curious lack of judgment, or if his aim was flattery, a curious ignorance of the art. He held that Russia was a “feminine” nation, which should be controlled and directed by a “masculine” nation like England; and that Great Britain should raise, equip, and officer an army of Buriats, Khirghiz, Kalmucks, and other native races in order to conquer Russia. As for himself, the Baron wanted to wash his hands of the whole business, to get into the British Army, to renounce his Russian nationality, and get a post somewhere in Persia or Mesopotamia. It seemed more and more as one lived longer that to get White Russia on her legs was like trying to get a featherbed to stand on end.

Occasionally we would visit the front, and the Admiral would interfere in everything. He would look and shake his head: the pace and method of extermination would appear to him thoroughly inadequate. We stood behind a gunner who kept on firing at a tree, as such; apparently for no other reason.

“What are you firing at?” the Admiral asked.

The man pointed at the tree.

“Are there any Reds behind?”

The man shrugged his shoulders. The question to him seemed immaterial.

“Have you got a telephone there?”

The man shook his head.

“But what are you aiming at?”

He pointed at the tree.

It transpired that four regiments composing the division had gone over to the enemy that very morning. Of the division there remained just fourteen men, the Commander and his divisional headquarters, comprising about three hundred officers. We saw the Commander in his office and asked him what he thought he would do. He said that he would wait; he thought the men might return.

“Who are you counting on,” said the Admiral sarcastically, “God?”

“Yes, Your Excellency,” sighed the Commander, “we have no one else to count upon.”

And the Admiral felt shamed.

But the men, it seems, did not return. They ran as fast as their legs would carry them over to the Bolshevik lines, and the Bolsheviks, thinking that they were being attacked by overwhelming numbers, fled in disorder....

The Admiral was gloomy. The wind cut us in the face in our rapid drive. Slowly and gradually afternoon evolved into evening.

“That Peking and Tientsin News,” I broke the silence, “seems to be somewhat pro-Bolshevik.”

“It’s always pro-Something,” the Admiral grunted.

He looked out of the window of the car on the vast snow-covered plains stretching all around us and brooded darkly.

“Some people,” said he, “think snow beautiful. I think it idiotic.”

Although technically the presence of Nikolai Vasilievich’s family on our train was but a temporary measure, yet it was recognized by all, through that deeper human instinct that defies illusion, that there was an element of permanence about it that would give points to the oak tree. Of course, the Admiral could always have cleared his train of the family by subjecting them to a prolonged machine-gun fire; but, as with soldiers, diplomats and politicians, the personal morality of sailors is much above their national morality. Need I say that they remained? The motive of their journey was that Nikolai Vasilievich was perpetually compelled to see some General in some town along the line about his gold-mines, for his gathering suspicions concerning the integrity of the punitive expedition had now been amply justified. And then, as time went on, the motive, as motives do, dissolved into a habit. But the relations between the Zina-Uncle Kostia wing and that of Fanny Ivanovna and the three sisters, and similarly, the relations between Fanny Ivanovna and Magda Nikolaevna, were far from satisfactory. At wayside stations and impromptu halts in fields and glades and valleys, when we all left the train and hastened to take exercise, there had been awkward situations; and when the three sisters had occasion to pass Zina or any of her little sisters they never failed to put out their tongues at them—presumably as a sign of disapproval of Nikolai Vasilievich’s approval of them.

We parted with them as we got back to Vladivostok; but they continued coming to our parties; and the rumour spread that Fanny Ivanovna was, as they say, bien vue at the Admiral’s “Court.” Only once, the very haughty wife of an insignificant officer, newly landed at the port, sounded the alarm: “A Problem has arisen in Society! Can we receive a German, or can we not?” But the problem, like so many problems, died its death without solution.

VII

It was the day after General Gaida’s unsuccessful rising. “They’ve gone out for a walk with those three American naval officers,” Fanny Ivanovna told me when I called. “Just the two of us, as usual,” she added somewhat bitterly. Kniaz, seated in the corner, audibly confirmed her statement, as it were, by sucking sweets. There was an acute scent of eau-de-Cologne in the room.

“How charming!” I exclaimed, bending forward to examine a tiny little jumper that she was knitting.

“Oh, that’s for my godchild.”

“Who?”

“Oh, the little girl I christened. Madame Olenin’s little daughter. She’s just three weeks old to-day. A dear little thing.”

“Another niece for Uncle Kostia, what! They do turn them out in that family. Zina has more cousins than any girl alive!”

“Well,” said Fanny Ivanovna, “the little thing can’t help being her cousin. And Madame Olenin is really very nice. What does it matter after all if she’s her aunt? I respect her all the same, and she did so want me to be the godmother, and the little girl is called Fanny after me.”

The canary hopping to and fro punctuated the swift movement of her accustomed fingers.

“My dear Andrei Andreiech,” she burst out in answer to my question as to when Nikolai Vasilievich would be back, “there was a time when I knew all about his movements. But that time is over. I feel more and more as we live longer that my hold on him is weakening. And I feel with every day it’s getting weaker and weaker, and he is slipping away from me, and I am powerless to stop him. And soon I shall cease to bother altogether. He can stay there all night if he pleases.”

“I’ve seen Zina lately. She looks quite grown up.”

“Oh, what a headache I have!” She dipped her folded handkerchief into a bowl of eau-de-Cologne and pressed it to her forehead. “If I hadn’t Nina to console me—Oh, you have no idea what a tender, loving heart our Nina has.”

“Nina tender?”

“You don’t know her. Do you remember that day you arrived here, and I was so anxious to know where she had been? Well, she wouldn’t tell me then because ... she thought it might upset her plan. Afterwards she told me. She had been to see her mother.”

“Is that all?”

“Well, it seems her mother wants to make it up with me—wants, in fact, that we should start a business together. Hats.”

“And won’t you?”

She thought for a time. “I don’t think I could,” she said at last, “after what she’s said about me.”

There was a pause of silence, which the canary, though, did nothing to observe. “But if I do, it will be solely for Nina’s sake. Poor child, she so wants to make our peace.”

“But doesn’t Sonia, as the eldest sister, ever take the lead?”

“Sonia?” She laughed. “Why, look at Sonia. We have a nickname for her—‘Miss Moon.’ It suits her admirably. And Sonia is deceitful. Yesterday she lied to me. She said that they had been to see their mother, but as a matter of fact Nina told me afterwards that they had gone to a dance on the American cruiser with Mr. Ward and White and Holdcroft.”

“What, again!”

“Yes, I am very much against it,” she confided. “I was furious. I said to Nina: ‘Andrei Andreiech and your father had nearly lost their lives looking for you everywhere during the firing.’ But all she said was, ‘There was no need to.’”

“They had been on the American Flagship ... on the American Flagship....” My mind could not digest the news. Yesterday when the firing had begun, Nikolai Vasilievich rushed in, panic-stricken, and said that the three sisters had been lost in the upheaval. I had been sitting in the little office with Sir Hugo, who was writing to a Czech Colonel of his acquaintance to apologize for mis-spelling the Colonel’s name in a recent letter. This done, Sir Hugo looked through some old minutes of past meetings to see if there was any matter which had not been quite thoroughly thrashed out. He thought he was about to find such a matter, when a rifle report echoed sharply through the air, and was immediately followed by a multitude of others. We rose and looked out of the window. The projected coup had broken out.

There was a continuous rattle of machine-gun fire. The station building and the square before it were being attacked by Gaida’s men and defended by British-trained cadets from Russian Island School. A fearless cadet in British khaki lay on the bridge that traversed the rails, fully exposed to view, and rattled off his machine-gun; then he lay still. Several bodies were already lying on the square, some dead, others wriggling with pain.

Most of the remaining family had been removed to an empty barracks near the station before fighting had become desperate. But it was not till we had launched into the streets that we asked ourselves how we proposed to set about our task. On we walked, looking in at stray houses, inquiring at private flats; but I think at heart we realized that our action was more by way of satisfying our consciences, for we had not a ghost of an idea where to look for them. Returning, we perceived the two mothers lamenting bitterly the death of the same children (which they had been quick to take for granted)—but still not on speaking terms with each other. A window had been knocked out by a stray shell.

Firing subsided and then resumed and grew in intensity, as darkness descended upon the town. A drizzling November snow now fell upon the wrangling troops. The station changed hands more than once. Some wounded men had been picked up and dragged into a hospital rigged up in the barracks, and were heard moaning and groaning the long night through, while the city shook under fire of field-guns.

The morning unveiled a gruesome picture. The snow that had fallen in the night, and was still falling, now covered the ground and its dead bodies some inches deep. The square, the streets, the yards, the rails, and sundry ditches betrayed them lying in horrid postures, dead or dying. Those that were not dead, when discovered were finished with the bayonet by the “loyal” troops, amid unspeakable yells. Then they lay still and stiff in horrible attitudes. Men and women would stoop over them, gaze and wonder. Perhaps there is nothing that brings home so clearly the conviction of the temporary nature of human things as the sight of a dead body. What a moment since had been a human being with a life and purpose of his own was now an object, like a stone or a stick....

“I shall not forget that night,” said Fanny Ivanovna, “nor what I saw this morning. The faces of the prisoners, some almost green from fright, as they stood with their hands up in the cold grey light of the morning, and the babyish face of that Cossack subaltern—a veritable mother’s darling—as he detailed them into two parties. And then that other boy of about the subaltern’s own age, awfully good looking, who had been hiding in the chimney all night and was forgotten and only remembered as the prisoners had been marched off to the station to be killed. Then came that terrible rattle of machine-guns from within. He was hurried up to the boyish subaltern who motioned in an off-hand manner in the direction of the station; and then a soldier ran across with him—the soldier in front, the boy following—hastening to be in time for the firing-party. But the firing had just that moment come to an end. The boy fumbled in his pocket and gave some folded paper to the soldier; then vanished into the station. And some moments afterwards there came those three solitary shots.”

“When I entered the station,” I said, “I saw piles of dead bodies lying on the steps on which rich red blood trickled down all the way; and on top of all that handsome boy, with the back of his scalp blown off. They were shot at by machine-guns as they were being driven down the stone staircase in the station, and their boots had been removed and appropriated by their executioners. One man three hours afterwards was still breathing heavily. He lay on the steps, bleeding, and covered by other bleeding bodies. Another man in the pile was but slightly hit. He lay alone in the pile of dead, with a curious mob and sight-seeing soldiery walking about him, shamming death. After three hours he rose and walked away, but was caught and shot.”

“Horrible!” she said. “It’s shameful! The Whites kill the Reds, the Reds kill the Whites ... and nobody is any the farther. If people would only realize that killing is the first thing they shouldn’t do.”

“The proposition would appear self-evident. But it seems as if the one idea of the Kolchakites is bloodshed to suppress bloodshed; and that this also happens to be the idea of the Bolsheviks; and that the Kolchakites are shocked at it.”

“Why can’t human beings settle things by conference?”

“They must be human beings for that, Fanny Ivanovna.”

“Sir Hugo surely——”

“Sir Hugo’s chief preoccupation at a conference is to commit another allied gentleman into saying ‘Yes’ on any given point, and then by a series of masterful, elaborate and elusive thrusts of speech to commit him into saying ‘No’; and then to point out the contradiction. It is what Sir Hugo calls ‘displaying the good old fighting spirit.’ His attention is essentially devoted to the careful recording of documents that find their way into our office accidentally, documents which in themselves he regards as inessential and unimportant. And the Admiral hates Sir Hugo’s love of detail and exactitude which seems bent on proving to him very clearly and precisely the uncertainty and vagueness of his own position.”

She sighed.

“It is a consolation,” said she, “to think that there are other useless people in the world besides ourselves....”

The snow still fell in heaps as I walked home, and it grew markedly colder, and one felt the onset of winter; while prisoners, it was said, were being killed in prison—noiselessly—out of consideration for the Allies in the city.

VIII

Who can convey at all adequately that sense of utter hopelessness that clings to a Siberian winter night? Wherever else is there to be found that brooding, thrilling sense of frozen space, of snow and ice lost in inky darkness, that gruesome sense of never-ending night, and black despair and loneliness untold, immeasurable? Add to this the knowledge of a civil war fumbling in the snow, of people ill-fed, ill-clothed and apathetic, lying on the frozen ground, cold and wretched and diseased. A snowstorm is blowing furiously; the wooden house groans and yells in the night; the tin roof squeals in agony, fearful lest it be cast to the winds; and the storm now howls like a beast, now sobs like a child, now dies away, gathering for another outburst....

The house was lit and warm and comfortable. It was the Admiral’s house. But the Admiral was away, and in his absence I had conceived it possible to give a dinner-party. The arrangement of the guests at table had been a delicate but delicious business. I had placed Fanny Ivanovna at the side of Magda Nikolaevna. I had seated Nikolai Vasilievich side by side with Eisenstein. I had sprinkled some of Zina’s sisters amongst the three sisters. And there was Sir Hugo, who talked in French about the Russian situation to Zina’s mother (who feared God, and knew no French); and it was evident, moreover, as he talked that his daily paper was not the Daily Herald but rather the Morning Post.

The table was littered with bottles of the very best wine, procured from the Admiral’s private cellar, and the expression of my guests became, as they do become under the influence of wine, more impulsive and less amenable to the control of the will. Their will seemed, as the feast proceeded, to become less and less amenable to the authority of the conscience. Kniaz had been drinking cocktails wholesale. He had never tasted one before, and found that his life had been wasted. “They are exquisite,” he said.

“They are,” Sir Hugo said. “They induce one to forget their price.... Oh, no, no! I didn’t mean it in that way, Prince. Do have another cocktail.”

I sat still among my guests, strangely flushed, and the vast sea of Russian life seemed to be closing over me. I saw Fanny Ivanovna talking to Magda Nikolaevna, somewhat timidly perhaps and with undue reserve, but still talking! Eisenstein was gleaming with silent satisfaction as he surveyed “the family.” He felt, I think, that he was one of it at last, and now he was all right. Nikolai Vasilievich on more than one occasion addressed Eisenstein as “Moesei Moeseiech” in an amiable if not familiar sotto voce. Zina’s mother spoke very eagerly to Sir Hugo about the persecution of the Russian priesthood by the Bolsheviks, but much of her eloquence was lost upon him. Sir Hugo’s knowledge of her language, in spite of his long residence in Russia, was inexplicably remote. When he was asked if he could talk Russian well, he would say “Moderately.” But, as a matter of fact, his ability to express himself in Russian was, I think, confined to hailing a cab in that language by crying out the word “Izvozchik,” and then, seated therein, muttering the word “Poshol!” which he usually mispronounced as “Push off”—both words happily meaning literally the same thing and so adequately similar in sound as to serve his purpose.

General Bologoevski, on my left, was holding forth on the situation.

“Looks pretty hopeless,” I remarked.

“Not a bit of it,” rejoined the General.

“But they are retreating everywhere.”

“On purpose,” said the General.

“But whatever for?”

“Well, there was a conference of generals ... I presume ... who have decided it. I think it a good thing myself.”

“Why?”

“Well ... we’ll entrap them.”

“I am most pessimistic.”

“I am perfectly optimistic—quite certain of victory.”

“Why, General?”

“Denikin.”

“He is advancing very slowly.”

“Ah, but he is about to enter Great Russian territory.”

“Well, what’s there in that?”

“Why,” he explained, “the Great Russians are the only real decent Russians. I am a Great Russian myself.”

I nodded with significance, as if to indicate that this made all the difference in the situation.

Then, once again, Fanny Ivanovna sat silent. Perhaps she thought of her position, insecure and unconventional, disused, no longer wanted; and of her instincts so discordant with her life, her instincts that had always been on the side of respectability, the purity of home life, the sanctity of marriage, and the very things, in fact, that had always been denied her: so much so that in her unstable, questionable position she had yet been stringently insistent on this aspect of their life, and always in her heart was reminded that she had no title to enforce that law, no claim, beyond a doleful craving for the decencies of usage and convention. Perhaps the presence of Nikolai Vasilievich’s two other wives had served to remind her of the painful irony of her life; perhaps the wine affected her with melancholy as it had affected me. Perhaps she pondered on her broken life, her sacrifices that had gone unnoticed; or pictured to herself her eventual return to Germany, the cruel astonishment of those for whom she too had sacrificed her life. And it may have occurred to her, as a belated after-thought in life, that possibly she had been “sat upon” too often and too much.

But no; it was not quite that. There was something fatalistic, and yet almost defiant, in her look. A blend of optimistic resignation. What was it? What was she discovering? Why that smile? It was as though in desperation she had given him full rein and found, to her amazement, that he did not seem to pull as hard as when she held him tight.

I perceived that my dinner-party promised well. I caught Fanny Ivanovna’s eye and raised my glass; and instantly I had her glass refilled. My head began to swim. I discovered an agreeable warmth in my body, and the expression that had come on my face seemed to be getting out of my control. “Fanny Ivanovna,” I cried, “never mind my expression: I know it is stupid. It has come on of its own accord, and I cannot quite remove it, though I feel that a smile may develop of itself at any moment.”

“Look,” Nina said to Sonia, “how awfully funnily his face changes from smile to seriousness. Look!”

I smiled a drunken smile.

“Look: there again!”

I should have explained here that I had a passion for that white and pasty substance that Russians eat at Easter—paskha, and when I was in Russia I made it my habit to eat it in and out of season. I had a pyramid of considerable dimensions locked up in the safe.... And now, at the close of dinner, the secret was betrayed. A dash was made for it. The guests armed themselves with knives, forks, and spoons and dug into the substance and cleared it away in less than twenty minutes. They then lay moaning and suffering not a little from its effect on their abounding stomachs.

We were jolly, exuberant, self-centred and sentimental. I felt distinctly pleased with myself. I knew not why; that is the secret of good wine. Some people laughed, others after the manner of the Slav were fain to weep; and outside there raged the snowstorm of a Siberian winter night.

Fanny Ivanovna, Magda Nikolaevna, Čečedek, Eisenstein, Nikolai Vasilievich, reclined on sofas and arm-chairs, smoked and sipped liqueurs; and Sonia, Nina, Vera, Zina and her sisters and Baron Wunderhausen made a noise in the adjoining rooms and did wild things with the furniture.

Uncle Kostia stood on the hearth-rug, dazed and very red in the face, and held forth at great length: his Russian soul a reservoir of overflowing feeling. “I feel positively strange,” he said. “I swear I never felt like this before. I nodded, do you know, to some point in an argument with which at the time I happened to agree, and to my great embarrassment I somehow kept on nodding quite in spite of myself, and keep on nodding—do you see me, Fanny Ivanovna?—though the portion of the argument with which I had expressed agreement long died in oblivion. I know it is the wine. It is good wine, and—to make a long story short—I am drunk. But I don’t care. This is an exceptional night. It is a memorable night. Fanny Ivanovna and Nikolai Vasilievich and Magda Nikolaevna, Moesei Moeseiech, Zina, Sonia, Nina, Vera, Kniaz: I swear I never felt so near to you as I do feel to-night. I feel beastly sentimental. I feel that I could howl aloud. I feel that presently I will go round and kiss each one of you in turn. Look into your own hearts. What is the use of pretending? We are all one family and Nikolai Vasilievich, our dearly beloved, much-respected Nikolai Vasilievich, is our parent and guardian. He stood by us well in our hour of need. His task has been an uphill task; but has he complained of us? Not once. He has borne the burden of many families without a sigh of protest. Speaking for myself, we men of letters have to lean for our support on stalwart men like Nikolai Vasilievich, and it is indeed largely on their generous help that art and literature must depend. As you know, we men of letters are no business men, but if as a writer and a student of life and human nature I may presume to give advice: don’t lose courage, Nikolai Vasilievich. Remember, we are all behind you; we shall follow you, if need be, to the end of the earth. Courage, Nikolai Vasilievich! Keep hard at it! Keep hard at it!”

We became agitated. We all spoke at once, perhaps for no other reason than that we had been deprived of speaking for so long. And then, suddenly, we subsided, for on the floor above us, occupied by a Russian family, some one was playing the piano. It was Chopin. We listened to the music and grew still, and our souls were all music as though he had touched their strings. And the house seemed charmed, and the gruff Siberian night looked in through the window and listened in silence.... For his is the grace and sweet melancholy of romance, and his the laughter of silver trumpets, and tears as bright as the dew at dawn. His sorrows are no graver than the sorrow of the gold-red sunset, and his sobs are the sobs of the sea, the echo of the waves weeping on the rocks. And it has all been to him a dream in music, and when we hear it we dream with him....