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FUTILITY

A Novel on Russian Themes

BY

WILLIAM GERHARDI

Preface by
Edith Wharton



NEW YORK
DUFFIELD AND COMPANY
1922



Copyright, 1922, by
DUFFIELD AND COMPANY


Printed in U. S. A.



TO
KATHERINE MANSFIELD

PREFACE

THERE are few novelists nowadays, I suppose, who will not readily acknowledge that, in certain most intrinsic qualities of the art, the great Russians are what Henry James once called Balzac, the masters of us all.

To many readers of the western world, however, there was—there still is, despite the blinding glare which the Russian disaster has shed on the national character—a recurring sense of bewilderment in trying to trace the motives of the strange, seductive and incoherent people who live in the pages of Dostoievsky, Tolstoi, and their mighty group. In Balzac, at all times, the western mind is at home: even when the presentment is obviously a caricature, one knows what is being caricatured. But there are moments—to me at least—in the greatest of Russian novels, and just as I feel the directing pressure of the novelist most strongly on my shoulder, when somehow I stumble, the path fades to a trail, the trail to a sand-heap, and hopelessly I perceive that the clue is gone, and that I no longer know which way the master is seeking to propel me, because his people are behaving as I never knew people to behave.

“Oh, no; we know they’re like that, because he says so—but they’re too different!” one groans.

And then, perhaps, for enlightenment, one turns to the western novelist, French or English or other, the avowed “authority” who, especially since the war, has undertaken to translate the Russian soul in terms of our vernacular.

Well—I had more than once so turned ... and had vainly hunted, through the familiar scenery of vodka, moujik, eikon, izba and all the rest, for the souls of the wooden puppets who seemed to me differentiated only from similar wooden puppets by being called Alexander Son-of-Somebody instead of Mr. Jones or M. Dupont.

Then I fell upon “Futility.” Some one said: “It’s another new novel about Russia”—and every one of my eager feelers curled up in a tight knot of refusal. But I had a railway-journey to make, and the book in my bag—and I began it. And I remember nothing of that railway-journey, of its dust, discomfort, heat and length, because, on the second or third page, I had met living intelligible people, Sons-and-daughters-of-Somebody, as Russian, I vow, as those of Dostoievsky or Goncharoff, and yet conceivable by me because presented to me by a mind open at once to their skies and to mine. I read on, amused, moved, absorbed, till the tale and the journey ended together.

This, it seems to me, is the most striking quality of Mr. Gerhardi’s book: that he has (even in this, his first venture) enough of the true novelist’s “objectivity” to focus the two so utterly alien races to which he belongs almost equally by birth and bringing-up—the English and Russian; to sympathize with both, and to depict them for us as they see each other, with the play of their mutual reactions illuminating and animating them all.

There are lots of other good things in the book; indeed, it is so surprisingly full of them that one wonders at the firmness of the hand which has held together all the fun, pathos and irony of the thronged sprawling tale, and guided it resolutely to an inevitable conclusion. “It takes genius to make an ending” Nietzsche said; and, perhaps partly for that reason, the modern novelist seems often to have decided that it is the trifle most conveniently dispensed with.

Mr. Gerhardi’s novel is extremely modern; but it has bulk and form, a recognizable orbit, and that promise of more to come which one always feels latent in the beginnings of the born novelist. For all these reasons—and most of all for the laughter, the tears, the strong beat of life in it—I should like to hand on my enjoyment of the book to as many other American readers as possible.

Edith Wharton.

CONTENTS

	PAGE
PART I
The Three Sisters	11
PART II
The Revolution	83
PART III
Intervening in Siberia	109
PART IV
Nina	225

FUTILITY

[The “I” of this book is not me.]

PART I

THE THREE SISTERS

I

AND then it struck me that the only thing to do was to fit all this into a book. It is the classic way of treating life. For my ineffectual return to Vladivostok is the effectual conclusion of my theme. And the harbour has been strangely, knowingly responsive. It has sounded the note of departure, and the tall stone houses of the port seem to brood as I walk below, and “set the tone.” And because of this and the sense that I am marking time till the big steamer comes and bears me home to England I am eagerly retrospective....

When the Simbirsk, of the Russian Volunteer Fleet, had at last completely vanished, carrying away the three sisters to Shanghai, I came back to my room at the hotel. I had just moved in there. It was a bare and dingy room in a small and shabby hostel. A bed was eventually provided, but in lieu of bed-sheets I was to lie on a dirty table-cloth which was to serve again as table-cloth next morning when I had my breakfast.

“Is this sheet clean?” I asked.

“Yes,” said the boy-attendant.

“Quite clean?”

“Quite.”

“Sure nobody slept on it?”

“Nobody. Only the boss.”

Big drops like tears fell on the window-pane and instantly made room for others. A ruined writing-table stood in the corner. I sat down. I fingered a typically Russian pen with a no less typically Russian nib, such as one is likely to encounter in almost any Russian government department, and dipping it repeatedly into ink that was like syrup, I made a bold beginning.

When night came I lay there on the table-cloth, hungry and worried by enormous hungry bugs that bit like dogs, and thought of Nina, Sonia, Vera, Nikolai Vasilievich and his unconventional family. In the morning the rain ceased.

I paced the country, now in the embrace of autumn. I wandered in remote places by the sea, in the abandoned park that used to be a park essentially for lovers, and thought of them. Here the foliage was more dense, the corners more secluded, the disorder more magnificent. I sat on an old bench that had names and initials cut out with a pen-knife, under the trees turning gold and auburn, and shivered in the sharp autumn wind that sent the fallen yellow leaves whirling down the alley. And the vast sea of Russian life seemed to be closing over me....

II

It was somewhat in the manner of an Ibsen drama with retrospective revelations that I was initiated into the complicated affairs of the Bursanov family. I had been asked to call by the three sisters, all speaking simultaneously—a charming bouquet, the queen among whom I recognized only too well, and I called on them one evening in mid-summer at their datcha, at a sea-side place ten versts from Petersburg, a little bashful perhaps for I had not been invited by their elders; and I was met by the “bouquet” in the hall of the little wooden structure that hung out above the sea. They sprang out to me successively, introducing themselves in order of age.

“Sonia!”

“Nina!”

“Vera!”

They were then sixteen, fifteen and fourteen. I think I had told them that day when I had first spoken to them that I could not for the life of me distinguish one from the other, and had deliberately mixed up their names. It was, of course, poor fun, but they, then almost children, had seemed grateful for it and giggled, possibly for want of anything better.

I was led into a room full of people whose relationship I did not yet comprehend. By the presiding posture over the samovar I thought that I could recognize the mother, and I walked up to her, and she put me at my ease, talking Russian, I noticed, with an unmistakably German accent.

“You don’t any of you resemble your mother very much,” I told Nina afterwards.

“She is not our mother,” Nina said. “She is ... Fanny Ivanovna.”

I should not have thought that that youngish-looking, rather short but handsome man, well dressed but somewhat sluggish in his bearing, was their father, by the negligent, almost contemptuous manner in which his daughters treated him. But Nina called out “Papa!” and he turned round, and then I saw that she had his eyes, those steel-grey eyes softened by a charming, disquieting, side-long look that was hers to give; and every now and then she would look straight into your eyes—anybody’s eyes—down into your very soul, bathing her soul in your soul, causing you to feel as though you were indeed “the only man who really mattered in the world.”

And Fanny Ivanovna pestered the life out of Nikolai Vasilievich (that was their father) by always asking silly questions, and Nikolai Vasilievich would look bored and sullen and would wave his hand at her as if she were a pestering fly and say:

“Drop it!”

Or he would imitate in an unkindly manner the preposterous way in which Fanny Ivanovna talked Russian. “Elektrichno! How often have I told you that it’s elektrichestvo?”

“It’s all the same,” said she.

Then the three sisters insisted on dancing the one-step and the hesitation-waltz, at that time just coming into vogue abroad, while Nikolai Vasilievich was ordered to play some wretched tune on the piano over and over again. And I thought to myself: What a bouquet!

The ravishing experiment over, it was suggested at dinner that we should all go to the local theatre to see Chehov’s Three Sisters.

“Very well,” said Fanny Ivanovna, “but Nikolai Vasilievich must come with us. That is the condition.”

Nikolai Vasilievich frowned.

“You’ll be too many in the box as it is.”

“We can take two boxes,” I suggested.

“There is no excuse, Nikolai,” cried Fanny Ivanovna. And a dark shadow flitted across the handsome face of Nikolai Vasilievich. But still I did not understand.

It was not till the end of the second act of the Three Sisters that I had an inkling, my first intuition, that all was not well with the Bursanov family.

You know the manner of Chehov’s writing. You know the people in his plays. It seems as though they had all been born on the line of demarcation between comedy and tragedy—in a kind of No Man’s Land. Fanny Ivanovna and the three sisters watched the play with intense interest, as if the Three Sisters were indeed their own particular tragedy. I sat behind Nina, and watched with that stupid scepticism that comes from too much happiness. To me, buoyant and impatient, the people in the play appeared preposterous. They annoyed me. They distressed me intensely. Their black melancholy, their incredible inefficiency, their paralysing inertia, crept over me. How different, I thought, were those three lovable creatures who sat in our box. How careless and free they were in their own happy home. The people in the play were hopeless.

“Good God!” I cried and grasped Nikolai Vasilievich by the arm as the curtain fell upon the second act. “How can there be such people, Nikolai Vasilievich? Think of it! They can’t do what they want. They can’t get where they want. They don’t even know what they want. They talk, talk, talk, and then go off and commit suicide or something. It is a hysterical cry for greater efforts, for higher aims—which to themselves, mind you, are vague and unintelligible—and a perpetual standstill. It’s like Faust in Gounod’s opera who takes the hand of Marguerite in prison and cries, ‘We flee! We flee!’ while making no visible effort to quit the middle of the stage. Why can’t people know what they want in life and get it? Why can’t they, Nikolai Vasilievich?”

Nikolai Vasilievich sat still and silent and very sad. He shook his head gravely and his face darkened.

“It’s all very well,” he said slowly, “to talk. Life is not so simple. There are complications, so to speak, entanglements. It cuts all ways, till ... till you don’t know where you are. Yes, Andrei Andreiech....”

He sighed and paused before he spoke again.

“Chehov,” he said at last, “is a great artist....”

I walked home with them to their datcha along the dark and muddy road—it had been raining while we were in the theatre—Nina clinging to my arm.

III

It was on one of those long, happy evenings which it had now become my custom to spend regularly at their large, luxurious flat in the Mohovaya in St. Petersburg, that I was further initiated into the domestic affairs of the Bursanov family.

They had been sitting silently for a time. Nina seemed sad; Sonia and Vera sulky. It was twilight, but no one had thought of switching on the light. No one would dance. I played the piano for a while, and then stopped.

“What is the matter, Nina?” I asked.

She was silent, and then said in her childish open manner, “Oh, Papa and Fanny Ivanovna.”

“What have they done?”

“They are always quarrelling, always, always, always.”

I paused, hating to appear intrusive.

“You know,” she said in that half humorous, half serious way she had of speaking, and then paused a little, and then decided to have it out.

“Papa and Fanny Ivanovna are not ... legally married.”

“I know,” I said.

“How did you know?”

“I suspected it.”

“Did Vera tell you?”

“I didn’t!” cried Vera in loud protest. She was fourteen, but tried to look two years older, and indeed succeeded. “I’d never dream of telling such a thing.”

She was shocked and angry at the unjust accusation so provokingly flung at her. It had seemed to me for some time past that there was no love wasted between Vera and her two elder sisters. Vera was different.

“We can’t stand this any longer,” said Sonia. “I am sick to death of their quarrelling. Day and night, day and night.... If they’d only stop at least when we have guests. But no, they are worse than ever then.”

I could bear her out there—that is, if I were really classed as a guest. For I was, rather, what Nikolai Vasilievich called “svoy chelovek,” one of the family, so to speak, and in my presence Nikolai Vasilievich and Fanny Ivanovna certainly let themselves go. They were like cat and dog. There was no mercy shown, no gallantry displayed. Nikolai Vasilievich gibed at her, imitating her murderous Russian with a malicious skill that set the room shrieking with laughter. Fanny Ivanovna, her white face flushing in patches of unwholesome pink, would writhe with pain, and, having gathered her forces, give back as good as she got. Nikolai Vasilievich would snatch out some isolated word that she had mispronounced and, adding some pepper of his own, would fling it into the audience of friends and strangers that he had asked to dinner, and so pluck out the sting at her expense.

“I’m sick of home,” Sonia said. “I shall run away.”

“How can you run away?”

“I’ll marry and run away.”

“No one will marry her,” said Vera from her perch in the far corner.

Nina sat mute, wearing her natural expression, half serious, half ironic.

“What do they quarrel about?”

Nina looked up at Sonia. “Shall I tell?”

“Of course.”

“Aha!” Vera cried maliciously. “Aha!”

“You shut up!” said Sonia.

Nina looked vaguely at the window.

“Papa wants to marry again.”

The rustle of Fanny Ivanovna’s approach was heralded through the air.

She appeared.

“Andrei Andreiech!” she cried. She always greeted me in this way, with acclamation. “How d’you do!”

“How dark! Nina! Vera! Sonia! Why don’t you light up the elektrichno!”

“How many times, Fanny Ivanovna,” said Sonia sternly, “have I told you that it is not elektrichno, but elektrichestvo?”

“Ach! It’s all the same.”

“It’s not all the same, Fanny Ivanovna.”

“Andrei Andreiech! What news?”

“None, I am afraid, Fanny Ivanovna.”

“Has Nikolai Vasilievich come?”

“You know he never comes,” said Sonia, “and yet you always keep supper waiting.”

“I’m tired of waiting for Papa,” Nina said petulantly, lying back on the sofa and swinging her pretty legs.

“He is later and later every day,” came from Vera’s perch. “Fanny Ivanovna, I’m hungry.”

Sonia was really angry. “I would rather he didn’t come at all, than just come to sleep here. Let him stay there, Fanny Ivanovna. Let him!”

“Ach! I think he might still come if we waited a little longer. Are you very hungry, Andrei Andreiech?”

“Say yes! Say yes!” cried the three sisters. I was amazed at this open display of hostility towards their own father, especially from Sonia. I understood the look in Fanny Ivanovna’s eyes.

“No, Fanny Ivanovna,” I said, “not at all.”

“Well, then we’ll wait just a little longer. He promised to come.”

There was a ring at the bell.

“It’s Nikolai Vasilievich!” cried Fanny Ivanovna.

But Nina shook her head. “Papa never rings so timidly. It must be Pàvel Pàvlovich.”

The three sisters sprang off their perches and dashed into the hall.

“Ah!” we heard Sonia’s voice.

“Who is it?... Kniaz?” shouted Fanny Ivanovna.

“No,” came the answer, “the other one.”

“Oh, the Baron. They are both Pàvel Pàvlovichi,” sighed Fanny Ivanovna as though the fact distressed her; but it was really because she disapproved of them both that she sighed.

Baron Wunderhausen as barons do in Russia, came from the Baltic Provinces, spoke Russian and German equally well, excelled in French, knew English, was polite, cunning and adaptable to any circumstances, had big calf’s eyes, was habitually somewhat over-dressed, twenty-five years of age, and had a billet in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. He came regularly every evening, made love with his eyes, and we danced....

We danced, and then had supper, having given Nikolai Vasilievich up as we gave him up regularly every evening after waiting for him for two hours. His absence annoyed everybody, for they suspected where he was.

“I am going away,” said Nina as she danced with me.

“Going away? Where?”

“To Moscow,” she said, looking up. She had a wonderful way of looking up at you when she danced. She had a charming way of speaking quietly, enigmatically, half humorously, half lovingly.

“For always?” I cried in dismay.

In answer she held up two fingers behind my head which was supposed to give me the appearance of a horned devil, and laughed. I revelled in her laughter.

“For how long?” I asked.

“Two months.”

“Why?”

“To see Mama.”

“I didn’t know you had a Mama in Moscow.”

“I have,” she made the obvious answer and I smiled, and she laughed and again held up the devil’s horns.

“What is she doing in Moscow?” I asked, and felt it was a somewhat silly question.

“Living,” she replied. And it seemed to me that she blushed. And for some reason that blush seemed to tell me that there, too, there was trouble.

“Who are you going with?”

“Vera. She is going back for good. Mama wants to keep her.”

“Aren’t you sorry?”

“No.”

“Good God!” I cried.

“I am sorry to leave Sonia.”

“But you are coming back to her?” I asked anxiously.

“Yes, but I am sorry to leave her, all the same. I am sorry to leave Fanny Ivanovna,” she added.

“And Papa?”

She reflected a little. “No,” she whispered.

“And whom else?” I persisted, smiling into her eyes and trying to press my own claims.

“I won’t tell,” she said.

“When are you going?”

“To-morrow morning. We only decided last night, Fanny Ivanovna and I,” she said quietly, “that I should go.”

“To take Vera to Moscow?”

She smiled enigmatically. We danced two rounds before she answered.

“That’s what we tell Papa.”

I looked at Sonia, as she passed us with her partner, “hesitating” marvellously. She made a moue at me and smiled. I knew that she was happy. The Baron danced with that characteristic air of his which conveyed that it gave him pleasure to give pleasure.

IV

I saw them off next morning in the desolating atmosphere of the Nicholas Station on a cold November morning. They were wrapped in heavy furs. The men had turned up the collars of their shubas against the biting frost. There was snow on the platform. We walked up and down quickly in order to warm our feet. Nikolai Vasilievich presented a pitiable sight with his pince-nez all blinded with snow, his moustache frozen, and his nose, reddened by the cold, protruding from his turned-up collar.

“Nina,” he said.

“Yes?” She turned round.

“Don’t go.”

“I must.”

“You won’t come back. She will keep you.”

She shook her head.

“Don’t go, Nina.”

“Don’t go,” I said.

She stood thoughtful, in indecision.

“Don’t, Nina,” cut in Nikolai Vasilievich.

She did not answer.

“Nina,” he said again.

“No, she must,” intervened Fanny Ivanovna. “This is all nonsense! She will go and come back quickly. Won’t you, Nina?”

“Yes,” said Nina.

She turned to me and slipped her hand under my arm. “I won’t let you go,” she said petulantly. “You’ll have to come with me.”

“You know I can’t.”

“I won’t let you go.”

“Nina,” I said.

“Yes?”

“Come here.”

I took her aside.

“Nina, will you marry me?”

She looked flippant and humorous and yet there was just a trace of seriousness in her look.

“Yes.”

I felt relieved—oddly as I might feel if I had just concluded a satisfactory business transaction.

The second whistle went, and with the other passengers they boarded the train, Nikolai Vasilievich came up to her to say good-bye and probably thought he might chance it once again.

“Don’t go, Nina. Nina!”

“I shall come back,” said Nina.

Then they all said good-bye to Vera, and no excess of emotion was displayed on either side.

“Good-bye!” was said again. Then the train moved, and they waved handkerchiefs.

V

I called on them one evening in Nina’s absence and chanced to find Fanny Ivanovna alone. Nikolai Vasilievich, as ever, was out. Sonia had gone to see a friend.

“Sit down, Andrei Andreiech,” she said. “I am always doing needlework, as you see....”

I took a chair.

“I do it.... It is extraordinary, Andrei Andreiech. I thought I would do it so as not to think, but it’s just the very work to make you think. And so I gave it up and began reading in order to forget, in order not to think, and I found, Andrei Andreiech, that I could not read because I had to think. I think all day and night. Ach! Andrei Andreiech.”

And I knew that she was going to confide in me.

“Ach! Andrei Andreiech! Andrei Andreiech! If you only knew....”

She glanced behind her at the door to make sure that nobody could hear her.

“Ach! Andrei Andreiech!”

I waited patiently for her to begin.

She said “Ach! Andrei Andreiech!” several times more and then began. She spoke in marks of exclamation.

“I suppose you know, Andrei Andreiech, that I am not Nikolai Vasilievich’s ... legal wife?”

“I know,” I said.

“How did you know?” she turned on me.

“I suspected it.”

She paused.

“Well, now that you actually know so much, I feel that I must tell you everything, if only in fairness to myself. But don’t tell the children. They would be shocked if they knew that I had told you.”

“No,” said I.

“Ach! Andrei Andreiech, you know.... You know....” She suddenly plunged into her native German, the foreign Russian tongue being inadequate to express her overflowing feelings, but now and then, quite unintentionally, she would employ some Russian word that came handy to her, that in her excitement she could not be bothered to translate as she proceeded to unload her feelings—an urgency too long deferred.

“Andrei Andreiech!” she said again and again in a kind of appeal to my sense of justice. “Sie sollen wissen that I met Nikolai Vasilievich in Switzerland, in Basel, when he was there on a cure, after he had separated from his wife. He was very handsome. He is still very handsome, ach! much too handsome. You would not think that he was fifty-three.... Ach! Andrei Andreiech, I have so much, so very much to tell you that I don’t really know where to begin....

“Well, I met him. I knew that he was married; he told me so himself from the first. He was always straight and honourable and above-board. He said that he had separated finally from his wife and expected to get a divorce, and that I was to come to Petersburg with him and wait till he got his divorce, and then we were to be married at once. You see, we loved each other.” She looked at me.

“Quite,” I said.

“I must tell you here,” she continued, “more about myself and my feelings and desires at that time. I belong (I hope you will forgive me for saying it, but it is a salient point in my tragedy) to a very proud family indeed. My father and all my brothers were officers in the German Guards. Soon after my father’s death we lost all our money. I had to set out in search of a livelihood because I, as the eldest sister, had to ensure that my sisters’ education was not interrupted and that it should be possible for my brothers to remain in the army. I had a good voice and ... I went on the stage, into musical comedy. And, Andrei Andreiech, curious, is it not, that in spite of the fact that I and I alone kept the whole of our family—my sisters, my brothers, my aged mother, my grandfather, my grandmother and two of my aunts—they were ashamed of me. You see, I became almost what you would call ‘a star.’ I don’t want you to misunderstand me. I shouldn’t have said that they were ashamed of me. That is misleading. They were ashamed of my profession, as I was myself, of course. I understood them. I revelled in my sacrifice. I was young, good-looking then. Don’t look at me now, Andrei Andreiech. I have changed through suffering and age. Then, suddenly, I was seized by a craving for decency, respectability. You see, no woman really knows what it means to be respectable until she’s had to give it up. I thought: if only I could marry a man who was respectable and rich, who would be willing to support my family! My heart craved for the title, the status, of a married woman because that title was denied me.

“And then came Nikolai Vasilievich.

“I loved him. Love was thrown into the bargain. It was unexpected, irrelevant. And then love became salient, supreme, altogether dominating; and as I realized how I loved him, so I realized that my family, my sacrifice and all that this had once meant to me, were but of secondary importance in the face of my love. Love was some greater thing—altogether greater. And Nikolai was rich. He owned a large house in Petersburg and had gold-mining concessions in Siberia. But that seemed a minor point. He was to get his divorce and then we would be married.

“We came to Petersburg and immediately got busy with the divorce. He visited lawyers. His friends and relatives all intervened and gave him advice, some in favour of a divorce and others against it. I did not at that time know what a hopeless, cruel and heart-breaking thing a Russian divorce really is. Nikolai’s wife did all she possibly could to prevent his getting a divorce. Eisenstein, the man she ran away with before Nikolai Vasilievich and I met, had no money. He was a Jew dentist, with no practice. They succeeded in proving to Nikolai Vasilievich’s satisfaction—I never quite followed the case—that if he asked for a divorce he would be compelled to plead guilty and so lose the children; and Nikolai Vasilievich was determined to keep the children. On my advice, Andrei Andreiech. I had begged of him, entreated him, insisted on it. ‘Divorce or no divorce, you must keep the children, Nikolai,’ I said. I knew that they would be spoilt, their lives marred and wasted, if they fell into the clutches of their mother and that Jew dentist. Yes, I insisted on it, Andrei Andreiech, even if it meant that there was to be no divorce. And what that cost me!...

“For I hadn’t told my people in Germany that Nikolai was married at the time. I didn’t want to add further injury to their pride. I thought it would be a matter of a few weeks and that then Nikolai and I would be married, and all would be well. How could I know? How could we know?

“We had the children—and what sweet girls they were—but no divorce. Nikolai sent money to his wife regularly every month, so as to keep the children; and so I lived with him just as if I were his wife, and indeed few people knew that I was not. We lived very happily. He sent money to my large family in Germany, regularly every month, and naturally they thought that I was married to him. How could I tell them that I was not? What did it matter after all, provided that they didn’t know? I felt that it was my duty to sacrifice my personal pride for Nikolai’s children. And such nice, tender, beautiful girls they were too, Sonia and Nina, so loving, so good, so pretty, so obedient, so well-behaved. Every one who saw them said to me: ‘Fanny Ivanovna, what nice children you have. You must be so proud of them!’ I was. And, Andrei Andreiech, I didn’t tell them, you know, that they were not my children. It may have been wrong of me; but I did not. I was really so proud of them, Andrei Andreiech, and as I had sacrificed the divorce for them ... it made me feel as if they were my own.

“Nikolai was still always sending money to his wife to keep her quiet. She always threatened to make a nuisance of herself. She wanted the money, too—badly indeed, because that man Eisenstein she lived with wasted her money in speculation on the Stock Exchange. Often she would demand money in excess, and when Nikolai refused, she would come up to Petersburg, enter our house, or go to their school and carry the children off to Moscow and keep them there with Eisenstein. Once she even threatened to bring a case against Nikolai Vasilievich on the ground that he had run away from her with me, if you please! She was tired of Eisenstein, who had spent all her money and proved a dismal failure in dentistry, and, I think, she was anxious to get back to Nikolai. I was in the way, you see. So what do you think she did? She spread stories about me. She said I was a German governess in her household and had beguiled Nikolai into running away with me. She spread this tale among our friends and relatives each time she came up to Petersburg.”

“And what about the girls?” I asked. “What did they think of Moscow and their mother?”

“Andrei Andreiech!” she pleaded with all the fervour of a woman at a disadvantage. “A mother is a mother to her children, always, whatever she has been or is. She can plead love and sympathy and unhappiness with success. But the sudden changes certainly affected the children’s characters.

“One evening on their return from Moscow, when we had guests to dinner, Nina, who was only eight, said:

“‘Do you know, Papa, Mama says that Fanny Ivanovna is just a lap-dog you cuddle on your knee for a while and then chase away.’

“How that stabbed me ... to the very heart!... But Nikolai was kind to me. I looked after him. I worshipped him. He would come to me in the evening and say:

“‘Fanny, I don’t know what I would do without you.’ And then he would think of what he could say to comfort me, and unconscious of my happiness (happiness, Andrei Andreiech, because I trusted him implicitly) he would say:

“‘When the children grow up we will get a divorce, Fanny.’

“‘Never mind the divorce,’ I would say. ‘So long as my people in Germany don’t know, it is all I want. I am happy, Nikolai, really. I know that I am your real wife. Let the children grow up first. We must think first of the children. Always, Nikolai.’

“And then I would find myself returning to the question of divorce involuntarily. You see, in my secret heart I wanted his divorce so much. And I would say again:

“‘We must not think of the divorce, Nikolai;’ just to make him repeat his promise.

“‘When the children grow up we will, Fanny. I will get a divorce then.’

“And the children, as I say, were such a pride and consolation to me. There were moments when I looked at them and thought I wanted no divorce. Those were my best moments ... when I thought that ... that I did not really care whether he got it at all. Sonia and Nina were the compensation.”

“What about Vera?” I asked.

Fanny Ivanovna paused suddenly. She looked as if she were going to reveal an unspeakable secret, but then decided not to.

“Oh, Vera ... she always lived with the mother. Nikolai Vasilievich hates her.... She is different.”

There was another pause.

“We lived like that eleven years,” she said, and stopped.

“And now?” I asked, and was horrified at my disastrous question.

“And now,” she said, her face quivering with emotion, “ ... he wants to marry ... a young girl of ... sixteen....” She burst into tears.

She sobbed hysterically, and I stood there, helpless, filled with pity and an eagerness to help, and not knowing how to do it—saying:

“Fanny Ivanovna ... Fanny Ivanovna ... don’t cry....”

Then I tried to think of what was usually done on such occasions. I rushed for a glass of water.

When she had drunk it and wiped her tear-stained face with her little lace handkerchief, she continued, breathing heavily:

“He came to me one evening in April and said:

“‘Fanny, I must talk to you very seriously.’

“‘And what might it be that you want to talk to me about so seriously, du alter Schimmel?’ I said, and followed him happily into his study, thinking that he wished to consult me about some business transaction. He often consulted me on his affairs.

“‘Sit down, Fanny,’ he said, and I was astonished at his seriousness. I sat down and he seemed to be waiting till I was comfortably settled in my chair.

“‘Fanny,’ he said, ‘—don’t be frightened—I’ve got to marry Zina.’

“Zina, Andrei Andreiech, was a girl in Sonia’s school and Sonia’s class, of Sonia’s age. Seventeen, Andrei Andreiech.

“I laughed. I could see that he was joking. I thought of the date. It was April—not the first but the twenty-first—yes, I remember perfectly.

“‘Don’t laugh,’ he said. ‘I am perfectly serious. I must. I have thought of it all. I fought against it. I have thought of every possible way that I could settle it. There is no other way. I can’t, Fanny. It is love, this time, real love. There is nothing that you can say that I have not thought of. There is nothing that you can say that will alter my decision....’

“‘Nikolai! You are mad! Du bist verrückt!’ I cried. ‘Wahnsinnich!’

“And again I tried to think that he was joking. But Nikolai is obstinate as a mule. Obstinacy runs in the family. His grandmother was like that. Nina has it from her father. Obstinacy! What a terrible vice! There is no reason, no meaning in obstinacy beyond further obstinacy. It’s a disease. There is no strength, no character about it. The weakest thing on earth is so often obstinate. Take Nikolai. A weak and sloppy man, and such a mule!” She paused. “Perhaps I like to think that it is obstinacy. I cannot bear, Andrei Andreiech, to think that it is love.

“‘Nikolai!’ I cried, and laughed. I really felt it was funny. ‘Think of yourself! Look at yourself in the glass. Romeo! Look at your grey hairs and those wrinkles! (Those dear, dear wrinkles. He had acquired them in my time, and so I had an absurd conviction that they should be mine.) ‘You’re fifty-three and she is a girl of sixteen.’

“‘Seventeen,’ he said, as though it mattered.

“‘Seventeen!’ I cried. ‘Ha! ha! ha!’ I tried to laugh, but it had no effect on him. I expect, too, that my laughter lacked real merriment. ‘O mein Gott, mein Gott, mein Gott!’

“‘It is love,’ he said very seriously. ‘It has come late, but still it has come at last, and I am proud—don’t laugh—I am proud that at my age I should be capable of such 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....’

“‘Du bist verrückt, Nikolai,’ I repeated. ‘Wahnsinnich....’

“And then I thought of my people. And then I cried....”

She fumbled for her handkerchief. She sobbed again. Again I dashed for a glass of water, this time doing the job gallantly, efficiently, as though I had been doing that sort of thing all my life.

She was bent on going on.

“I cried and he cried with me and tried to console me, but I only thought of what I could say to stop him from taking this mad, disastrous step.

“He said, ‘I know it is terrible, heart-breaking for you, Fanny, and the children....’

“The children, Andrei Andreiech—I had forgotten them! I who had sacrificed everything for them, divorce and everything else, I had never given them a thought in my disaster. I took it up, Andrei Andreiech, promptly—I even admit somewhat dishonestly—for I was thinking more of myself, of me. Me! me! me! I had lived with him for eleven years!

“‘Think of your children,’ I cried. ‘Think of your children, Nikolai. They are yours. They are not my children, and yet I have sacrificed my life and my honour for them.’

“I tried to shame him, but I had to realize that indeed nothing could shame him. I mean, he was already ashamed to his full capacity, conscious of unpardonable sin, conscious of being a bad man, the very worst man—had admitted it all to himself ... and was satisfied, as though this confession to himself had cleansed him of his wickedness and he had come out of it, clean, sanctified. That’s what I couldn’t stand, Andrei Andreiech. That he should have told himself that so good and wise and indeed well versed was he in his own wickedness, that there could be no crime, no sin, of which we others could accuse him of which he had not already in his goodness and wisdom accused himself, and so forgiven himself and started clear, afresh, with our lives all wrecked and ruined—that’s what I can’t forgive him. That’s what Nina can’t forgive him. But imagine our consternation when he tells us that he had never really expected our forgiveness when he had made up his mind to marry Zina, his mind evidently having been made up in spite of that knowledge. Why, it would be far better if he had not realized how he had sinned than to plume himself on being a sinner unavoidably and bowing to his fate so readily that you almost suspected that, after the manner of his race, he had bribed it heavily to please him. I am afraid I am overstraining this point, Andrei Andreiech. But it is, after all, the point.

“At last I sprang upon him. ‘What do you propose to do, Nikolai? What do you want us to do? Speak, tell me!’

“He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Live on as we have been living, you looking after the children. What if I am married to Zina? I can still come home every night to you and the children. It changes nothing.’

“‘Nein, besten Dank!’ I said. ‘No, thank you, blagadaru vas! I will return to Germany as soon as you give me the money—provide for me for life. I will not leave otherwise.’”

In her great tragedy she was still a sound business woman.

VI

She was silent for some time.

“Andrei Andreiech, does she love him? Cannot live without him? ‘Don’t you believe it,’ I told Nikolai Vasilievich. ‘She will leave you as soon as she has robbed you of your money.’

“‘Then I shall come back to you,’ he said.

“‘Thank you for nothing,’ I said. ‘I shan’t want you then.’

“Andrei Andreiech, it is all his money. It is really comic, but they all believe him to be preposterously rich. A house-owner in Petersburg! Gold-mines in Siberia! A millionaire! Zina’s people keep telling her, ‘Stick to him, stick to him, don’t let him go. These gold-mines in Siberia, these millions, this house in the Mohovaya!’ That’s all, in fact, they are after. Why won’t his wife give him his divorce and be done with him? Because she believes in the gold-mines. Why does Baron Wunderhausen always hang about here? Why does he run after Nina, Vera, and Sonia? The gold-mines again, and the house in the Mohovaya.”

“What of me!” I cried in horror. “I come here every evening, Fanny Ivanovna, and stay till late in the night.”

“Oh, you are different.”

“I shall have to stop coming now.”

“You may as well dismiss at once from your mind any suspicion of an ulterior motive,” said Fanny Ivanovna, rising to the occasion. “They are worth nothing, anyhow ... both the gold-mines in Siberia and the house in the Mohovaya.”

“Worthless! You don’t mean it?”

“Absolutely.”

“Do the gold-mines pay nothing?”

“Andrei Andreiech, I have lived with Nikolai Vasilievich now for over eleven years. I don’t remember their ever paying a copeck. They may have paid before my time. But I doubt it. Nikolai Vasilievich, though, is constantly pouring money into them, every month, every year, to keep them going. And this, Andrei Andreiech, what with the money he has to fork out for his wife and Eisenstein and what we spend ourselves and what he gives Zina and her people, who are very poor, and”—she blushed—“what he sends my own people in Germany, and his own sisters and cousins and several other friends and dependents ... why, Andrei Andreiech, it takes all he can scrape together....”

“But the house in the Mohovaya?”

“Precisely. He has been compelled to mortgage the house to be able to manage at all ... and keep the other thing going.”

I whistled under my breath. I remember how Baron Wunderhausen had grasped me by the arm one day as he spoke with enthusiasm of Nikolai Vasilievich.

“Rich as Crœsus,” he had said.

Well, I felt sorry for him....

I heard a little nervous cough and a rustle, and a harmless little old man, like a mouse, whom I had not noticed in the room before, rose and walked out.

I was horrified.

“Fanny Ivanovna,” I cried, “that man has heard everything you’ve said.”

“Oh, Kniaz!” she said with undisguised contempt. “He’s heard it all before.”

I felt that this startling news rather took the gilt off the confession. I had flattered myself on being the first, in fact the only one.

“He’s heard it many times,” said Fanny Ivanovna. “Every now and then I feel that I absolutely must confess it all to somebody ... no matter who it is.”

“I thought,” I said a little reproachfully, “that you had told nobody, Fanny Ivanovna.”

“Andrei Andreiech!” she cried in her tone of appeal to my sense of justice, “I haven’t spoken of it to any one for more than two weeks. If you hadn’t come here to-day, I don’t know.... I really think I should have confessed it to the hall-porter. You don’t understand.”

“I do understand,” I said, but I could not help feeling misused and mishandled. I almost begrudged her the gallantry of my dash for water—two separate dashes, to be exact—when I remembered that they must have been carried out by other men before me, the confession to-night being, of course, an exact replica of the confessions that had preceded it, Lord knows how many times, like a melodrama with its laughter and hysterics occurring always at the proper interval as it is produced each night. And I was led to revise my recently adopted theory that I was indeed a born confidant by virtue of my understanding personality, tempting strange women into thrilling, exhilarating confessions of their secrets. Rather did I feel the victim of a lengthy and tedious autobiography inflicted on me under false pretences.

I heard the sound of the outer door closing on the old Prince.

“Kniaz,” said Fanny Ivanovna, “is also one of those who live on Nikolai Vasilievich. He always comes here. Never misses a day. Sits, reads, eats, and then goes. And all without uttering a word. When he borrows money from Nikolai Vasilievich he naturally opens his mouth, and then shuts it until the next occasion.”

The old Prince was one of those quiet nonentities who enter unasked and leave unhindered almost any Russian home; and no one is likely to object to their coming because no one is likely to notice them. They have a face, a name, a manner so ordinary that you cannot remember them, ever. They are so colourless, so blank that they seem scarcely to exist at all. I think Goncharov speaks of them somewhere, but I would not be sure of it. “Kniaz” was like that. His name was some very ordinary name, and it even seemed odd that he should not have a more exclusive name for his title. But no one cared. No one, to be sure, knew what his name was. His imya otchestvo was Pàvel Pàvlovich, like the Baron’s, and so he was called by all but Fanny Ivanovna, who called him “Kniaz,” sarcastically—a Prince without a copeck to his title! I only remember that he was always very neatly dressed, shaved regularly and wore a very stiff and sharp collar which seemed to torture his dry and skinny neck.

“Kniaz has some shares,” she explained, “in a limited company, but they are worthless—always have been—and never paid any dividends. Never so long as anybody can remember.”

“Has he always lived on you, then?”

“He lived on his brother when he was alive. He had great expectations from his brother. But his brother died and left him more shares, quite a number of shares, in the same limited company. Whom the brother lived on when he was alive, Lord only knows!”

“Did they get their shares from their father?”

“Their uncle.”

“Did he get any dividends?”

“Nikolai says no. But he seems to have put all his money into them.”

“And now I suppose you invite Kniaz to come and live with you?” I asked.

“He comes of his own accord.”

“You don’t object to his coming?”

“No one would tell him even if they did. It’s not a Russian habit to object to any one who comes to your house. It isn’t much good objecting either. They’ll come anyhow. But never mind.”

“Extraordinary man,” said I. “What does he propose to do? Has he any plan?”

“He believes in the shares.”

“Have you ever tried to disillusion him?”

“I wouldn’t be so heartless,” said Fanny Ivanovna.

“And the girls?”

“For them money does not exist. They are sublimely indifferent to it.”

“And Nikolai Vasilievich?”

“Nikolai Vasilievich believes in the mines. Kniaz helps him to sustain that belief in return for Nikolai’s faith in the shares. The money Kniaz borrows from Nikolai Vasilievich he regards merely as an advance on his future dividends.”

“And does Nikolai Vasilievich regard it in that light?” I asked.

“He pretends he does. But he always says: ‘Never mind, if only the mines begin to pay all will be well, Pàvel Pàvlovich.’”

“And the ‘family,’ Fanny Ivanovna,” I cried, “I mean his wife and her family, his fiancée and her family, you and your family, his sisters and cousins, Kniaz and the others and their families—do they believe in the mines?”

“More firmly than Nikolai. If, in fact, one fine day Nikolai turned a sceptic in matters mining, they would, I am sure, suspect him of shamming poverty to prevent them from getting their legitimate share.”

“Fanny Ivanovna,” I sighed, “good night.”

“I know it is amusing,” she said. “I wish it wasn’t real life, our life, my life. Then I would find it a trifle more amusing.”

I hailed a driver who slumbered in his sleigh on the corner of the Mohovaya and the Pantilemenskaya. As I drove home across the frozen river, on which the moon spread its yellow light, I thought of the Bursanovs’ muddled life, and then Chehov’s Three Sisters dawned upon my memory.

I understood now why Nikolai Vasilievich sympathized so heartily with the people in the play.

VII

That evening I remember as an ever-deepening initiation into the very complicated affairs of the Bursanov family. It had been raining again, and the washed cobbles on either side of the street looked clean and shining as if newly polished. For once Nikolai Vasilievich was at home, but he had gone into his study, and, sitting at the piano, I could not help listening to what was said in the room.

“But Mama does want a divorce herself, Fanny Ivanovna,”—from Nina.

“She didn’t before,” said Fanny Ivanovna.

“She does now,” said Nina.

“I wonder why?”

“I don’t really think, Fanny Ivanovna, that you have any right to know that.”

“She can’t have a divorce, anyhow,” said Fanny Ivanovna. “And I have asked you to make that clear to her.”

“You see,” said the girl of fifteen, “Mama has her own point of view. She doesn’t look at things from your point of view. Why should she?”

“Why should she ...” repeated Fanny Ivanovna. And there was a long pause.

“I’ve done what you asked me,” said her ambassador, shrugging her pretty shoulders.

I stopped playing.

Nikolai Vasilievich came back and we sat down to dinner, and amongst us appeared Vera. I was to understand her presence a little afterwards. The atmosphere was tense. No doubt they had all been discussing the family tangle. No doubt Nikolai Vasilievich and Fanny Ivanovna had been shouting and blackguarding each other as usual. But silence reigned for the moment. It was as if they had all been a little overstrained by this uncanny family burden. Then there was a ring at the bell.

It was merely the postman, and the maid brought in a letter for Fanny Ivanovna. So soon as she caught sight of the envelope she got flushed and wildly excited.

“It’s from Germany,” she cried, and something about her flush, about her manner, told us that the letter was a painful reminder of her painful circumstances, rather than a joy. She tore it open, and for some reason the room grew still: all seemed to watch her in perfect silence. And then she fluttered the letter and flushed again, and cried out to Nikolai Vasilievich in a voice of deep sorrow and reproach, as a tear welled up from her eye:

“Listen.... ‘Dear Fanny ... and Nikolai!’ And Nikolai! And Nikolai!... Do you hear: And Nikolai!...”

‘Nikolai—i—i—’ echoed with pathetic insistence. It was a sound that rent the heart. Tears flushed her eyes, sobs choked her throat. And for the moment, at all events, they forgot her clumsy stupidities; they felt only how irreparably they had wronged her.

And then, like the announcement of the next act, there was another ring. We heard an unfamiliar voice inquire in the hall if Nikolai Vasilievich was at home. Then the visitor’s card was brought in by the maid.

“No!” said Nikolai Vasilievich, rising very emphatically. “I draw the line there.” And he walked away to his study.

Fanny Ivanovna, her tragedy forgotten in the excitement of the visit, snatched at the card.

“Eisenstein!” she exclaimed.

“Och!” cried the three sisters in disgust.

And then, uninvited, unannounced, Eisenstein walked into the dining-room.

He was a tall, flabby man, with prominently Jewish features, and probably good-looking as Jews of that type go.

“Nina,” he said, looking round. “I want to see Nina. I missed seeing her in Moscow.”

“Yes?” Nina said, “I am here.”

Fanny Ivanovna looked at Eisenstein with scrutiny. I think she could feel no real enmity to this man because he had, after all, run away with Nikolai Vasilievich’s wife—to all appearance a necessary preliminary to her own advent into his life. It was quite obvious that Eisenstein was not in the least seeking a tête-à-tête with Nina, but on the contrary, desired to exhibit his overflowing emotions to as large an audience as possible.

“Nina,” he said, halting in the middle of the room. And I remembered that Eisenstein had been an actor in his youth, a conjurer and ventriloquist. “Nina, she mustn’t leave me. You who have such influence over your mother must insist on that.” And sooner than any one had been prepared for it his body quivered and he wept bitter tears.

“Moesei Moeseiech,” Nina said, “you mustn’t cry. That won’t do at all.”

“Monsieur Eisenstein,” intervened Fanny Ivanovna, rising dramatically, “this is my house and I won’t allow it.”

“You leave him alone, Fanny Ivanovna,” said Nina.

“I can’t bear it, Nina,” he said, coming up to her. “Why must she leave me? Haven’t I always been very kind to her, Nina? She says I speculate. But why do I speculate? For her, Nina.”

“For her!” cried Nina in bewilderment.

But he misunderstood her intonation.

“Why, of course!”

“With her money, Moesei Moeseiech?”

“My dear child, even if it is her money, what of it? I am still doing it for her, trying to get her more. My heart bleeds for her. She has so little money. Your father in his immoral pursuits of other women has forgotten his own wife.”

“Moesei Moeseiech, leave us.”

“But why, Nina?”

“You’re ... hopeless.”

“Hopeless? And you say that, Nina. Haven’t I always been a good father to you when you came to live with us at Moscow? Haven’t I always been a good father to you? Now, have I not? Nina, Nina! You alone can stop her.”

“I’ve had too many fathers, Moesei Moeseiech, and I am not sure, if not too many mothers.” She paused. But when he opened his mouth to speak, she rose abruptly, turned on her heel and left the room.

Fanny Ivanovna rose a second time.

“Monsieur Eisenstein,” she said, “you have upset everybody. I must ask you to leave my house. I cannot have you exhibiting your domestic difficulties in this strange manner before our friends. We all have our sorrows, but we must keep them to ourselves. They are of no interest to others. Please leave us.” Again she must have thought of him as the man who had delivered Nikolai Vasilievich from his wife. She had a kind look for him, but she was a determined lady.

But for not being put out even by the most determined lady, give me a Russian Jew. Eisenstein looked round and saw Vera in the twilight, mute and hostile, perched up on the arm-chair in the corner.

“Vera! Vèrochka!” he cried. “You, my daughter——”

“S—s—s—sh!” Fanny Ivanovna hissed like a serpent. “You must not!”

“Must not, why? Why mustn’t I?” he said with that characteristically Jewish intonation. “Why should I be ashamed of my own daughter? You treat me as if I was an outsider and didn’t belong to the family. Why should my daughter be ashamed of me? She is my daughter, and you know it, Fanny Ivanovna.”