Futility (10 page)

The day after was like the day before. They sat there listless—Fanny Ivanovna, Kniaz and the three sisters. The three sisters always sat in some extraordinary positions, on the backs of sofas and easy chairs, and Fanny Ivanovna and Kniaz sat in very ordinary positions. Nikolai Vasilievich alone was always absent; and I think there was a sort of feeling running through us all that he at least was busy,
doing
something. But in more sceptical moods I know I was inclined to question dubiously whether he too was
getting
anywhere for all the semblance of activity that his mysterious absence involved. I remember the silhouette of Nina’s profile at the window. I can feel the tension of the silence that hung over the room, the suspense of waiting—of indefinite waiting for indefinite things. In the hush that had crept upon us I could fancy I could sense acutely the disturbing presence of the things my eye could not behold: the gilded domes radiant in the fading sunlight, the many bridges thrown across the widespread stream; and in the stillness I was made to feel as if by instinct the throbbing pulse of Petrograd. The leaden waves splashed gently against the granite banks; and the air was full of that yearning melancholy call of life that yet reminds one—God knows why—of the
imminence of death; and in the sky there was the promise of a white night.

PETROGRAD LOOKED THOROUGHLY NASTY ON that cold November morning. There was the drizzling snow, and it was still dark as I walked home with Uncle Kostia. We had been at the Finland Station to see off two of Uncle Kostia’s nieces who were going abroad. It was the morning of the Bolshevik Revolution, and Uncle Kostia looked pessimistic. “Do you remember all those student-revolutionaries, the heroes of our young intelligentsia, who had been persecuted by the old regime? Well,”—he pointed from the bridge that we were traversing to the Bolshevik craft that had arrived from Kronstadt overnight—“
this
is more than they bargained for. More than they bargained for.”

We walked on.

“They are malcontents again—but on the other side! Truth is fond of playing practical jokes of this sort. My God! how elusive it is. It is wonderful how beneath our hastily made-up truths, the truths of usage and convenience, there runs independently, often contrariwise, a wider, bigger truth. Can’t you feel it? The pseudo-reason of unreason. The lack of reasonable evidence in reason. Issues, motives being muddled up. This ethical confusion, and the blind habitual resort to bloodshed as a means of straightening it out. More confusion. Honour is involved. Bloodshed as a solution. More honour involved in the solution. More bloodshed. That idiotic plea that each
generation should sacrifice itself for the so-called benefit of the next! It never seems to end.… Oh, how the pendulum swings! Wider and wider, and we are shedding blood generation after generation. For
what
? For
whom
?… For future generations! My God, what fools we are! Fools shedding blood for the sake of future fools, who will do as much!”

“But what are you to do?
What?
” I persisted.

Uncle Kostia was evasive. “You see,” he said at last, “subtleties of the mind, if pursued to their logical conclusions, become crudities. Let us cease our conversation at this point.”

Barricades appeared in the streets. Bridges were being suspended. Lorries of joy-riding proletarians became familiarly conspicuous, as I walked on towards the Bursanovs.

I found the household in a state of wild excitement. However, the event had no connexion with the Revolution. In fact, with continual domestic revolutions in their own home, the much ado about the political revolution appeared, particularly to the three sisters, a foolish affectation.

I learnt that Nikolai Vasilievich had just discovered that his book-keeper Stanitski, at the instigation of his house-agent, had these last five years been falsifying the books and robbing him wholesale. When the discovery was made the house-agent had vanished into the darkness whence he had emerged. But as I entered I was very nearly knocked down by Nikolai Vasilievich dashing after Stanitski, the book-keeper, as he was flying down the stairs. He caught him by the tail of his overcoat and dragged him back into his study. He had him standing, stiff and awkward and ashamed, before his desk, while he himself reclined in his arm-chair.

Nikolai Vasilievich did not shout, as Stanitski, who knew his master intimately, had, no doubt, expected him to do. He spoke quietly and even sadly; and it was the sadness of his
speech that penetrated Stanitski’s Slavic nature to the heart. “How could you have cheated me like that, Ivan Sergeiech—me who have trusted you?”

And Stanitski became emotional. “Nikolai Vasilievich!” he exclaimed with his hands joined together and the whites of his eyes turned heavenward. “Nikolai Vasilievich! God in Heaven knows I have not been helping myself to your money, as you seem to think, recklessly. But since I took a little—and I have a wife, children, dependents—I had to do what the house-agent told me. I was in his hands, at the mercy of a blackguard and a robber. Nikolai Vasilievich: I often felt I wanted to warn you of this rascal. But I was in his hands … since I took myself. But I took in measure, Nikolai Vasilievich, conscientiously, with my eyes on God.…”

The old man sobbed bitter tears. He felt that fate had dealt him a cruel blow, unjustifiably cruel, in return for his moderation.

What could be done to him? Baron Wunderhausen, who now, as Soma’s husband, lived with the family, suggested handing the man over to the Bolshevik militia. But Nikolai Vasilievich only waved his hand. I think it was the family aspect of the old man’s position that penetrated Nikolai Vasilievich to the heart. He sat there at his desk, brooding darkly, while Stanitski, gently, like a cat, felt his way out of the flat.

Fanny Ivanovna sighed conspicuously.

“An optimistic gentleman—Stanitski,” I remarked. “What a belief in the kindliness of things! What a claim on the favour of Providence!”

“And, as it happens, he is not far wrong in his calculations,” said the Baron with a bitterness which showed that he, as son-in-law, was dissatisfied with the management of the family’s finances. “I call this state of things disgraceful.”

“God have mercy upon us!” whispered Fanny Ivanovna, almost ironically.

“An optimist,” I digressed aloud, “is a fool, since he can’t see what awaits him—disillusionment. But he is wise without knowing it, since, however bad the present, he remains an optimist as to the future, and so his present seems never quite so bad to him as it really is.”

“Say it again,” breathed Nina.

“A fool,” said Nikolai Vasilievich, “is an optimist. He is optimistic about himself, optimistic about his folly.
I’m
an optimist!”

He stood up, his hands in his trouser pockets, and gazed at the window. Twilight was falling swiftly. Nina, perched up on the sofa, sat silent, her head bent.

“What’s the good of being miserable?” I said to her.

“As though I deliberately chose to be miserable!” To console herself, she took an apple.

“Optimists that we are!” sighed Fanny Ivanovna.

“Warranting considerable pessimism,” supplied the Baron.

“It is easier to hope,” said Nikolai Vasilievich, “and be disappointed, it is easier to hope knowing that one will be disappointed, than not hope at all.”

“Why don’t the writers—the novelists—why don’t they write about this, this real life,” said Fanny Ivanovna, “this real drama of life, rather than their neat, reasoned, reasonable and—oh! so unconvincing novels?”

“This philosophizing won’t help us,” jeered Nikolai Vasilievich mildly. “We ought to
do
things. I want to
do
things. This moment I am teeming over with energy. I could do and settle things to-day, square up our affairs, and start life afresh.… But …”

The Baron looked at him. “Well?”

“But—” A gesture at the window indicated the obstacle. “What can I do with
this
? What can anybody do? All is tumbling, going to ruin. In a month or so all business will stop, works will close down. The rouble will be valueless. There will be
nothing
.…” “Now don’t lose courage, Nikolai,” said Fanny Ivanovna hopefully. “We shall pull through; somehow we shall; and then on the other side of the grave we shall be safe.”

“Her most optimistic moment in life!” jeered Nikolai Vasilievich.

“It’s a surprising thing what the human soul will stand, Andrei Andreiech,” she said. “I can venture only this explanation; it is habit. You see, the cup is ever filled to the brim, but—lo! the miracle! the cup expands. No trouble. None!… And here we are.”

“Life gets you,” came from the window; “sooner or later it gets you all the same.”

“I don’t know what it’s for, why, or who wants it. It seems so unnecessary, useless, even silly. And yet I cannot think that it’s all in vain. There must be … perhaps a larger pattern somewhere in which all these futilities, these shifting incongruities are somehow reconciled. But shall we know? Shall we ever know the reason?”

“Philosophy!” jeered Nikolai Vasilievich mildly.

“Perhaps,” I said, “when we awaken on the other side of death and ask to be told the reason, they will shrug their shoulders and will say, ‘We don’t know. It is beyond us. Do
you
not know?’ … And we shall never know.
Never
.…”

“How awfully funnily your mouth moves when you speak,” said Nina, who had been listening to me attentively.

“Frightfully!”

“There is no proof,” said Baron Wunderhausen, “that death
is
the end. But there is no proof, as yet, that death is
not
the end.”

“So there is no proof of anything?” asked Nikolai Vasilievich.

“No.”

“Thank you,” said Fanny Ivanovna.

The Baron bowed.

Then Nikolai Vasilievich passed into the hall and put his coat on. As it was time for me to go, we went out together. I remember there was something hopeless about that night, a sense of dread about the political and economic chaos, that seemed to harmonize with Nikolai Vasilievich’s state of mind. I think it may be that he found a kind of ghastly pleasure in the thought that if he was miserable, if destitution stared him in the face, the whole world also seemed to be tumbling about him into decay and ruin. As we crossed the Palace Square we were challenged by a soldier who had emerged from behind a pile of firewood dumped before the Winter Palace. He stepped forward with fixed bayonet and demanded money, while pointing his bayonet at my breast; he held his finger on the trigger. He was considerably drunk. Neither of us happened to have any money. “Got any cigarettes, Comrades?” he asked.

Neither of us had cigarettes.

“And I,” explained the drunken soldier, “go about, you know, letting the guts out of the
bourgouys
.”

“That’s right, Comrade,” ventured Nikolai Vasilievich. “Kill them all, the dirty dogs!”

“I will,” said the soldier cheerily, and stalked off into the night, while we went our way.

Nikolai Vasilievich only shook his head and sighed and shook his head and sighed. He muttered something, but the wind that overtook us carried off his words. I could just catch “… my house … the mines …”

CERTAIN FRAGMENTS OF SCENE AND SPEECH come back to me with a peculiar insistence, as I write this third portion of my book. I have no hesitation in setting them down as I do, I think accurately enough, if not word for word. I remember them well because they had impressed me. That is the secret of memory. I have forgotten much, but there are scenes I cannot forget, fragments of speech that still ring in my ear, and I shall remember them always; at least, till I have finally pinned them to paper.

The Admiral and I, and a few others—interesting types, I can assure you—travelled to Siberia, where we engaged in a series of comic opera attempts to wipe out the Russian revolution. By now, “Intervention” has been relegated to the shelf of history. But I cannot but remember it, not merely as an adventure in futility, as admittedly it was, but as an ever-shifting, changing sense of being alive. For the experience of love is inseparable from its background. Alone it does not exist. It is a modulation of impressions, an interplay of “atmospheres,” a quickening of the fibres of that background into throbbing tissues of an elusive, half-apprehended beauty. It was raining heavily when we arrived in Vladivostok, and the port, as we surveyed it from the boat, looked grey and hopeless, like the Russian situation. A flat had been allotted us, a bare, unfurnished flat in a deserted house standing in a grim and desolate by-street; and there the Admiral made his temporary headquarters. It poured
all day long, and it seemed, indeed, as though the rain, playing havoc with the town, would never cease, even as the misery and blundering in Russia would never cease, and that our efforts were not wanted and could do no good.

That night I entertained General Bologoevski at dinner at the famous restaurant ‘Zolotoy Rog’—nicknamed by British sailors the ‘Solitary Dog.’ He had travelled with us all the way from England, seemingly under vague instructions from some Allied War Office, and had attached himself to our party of his own accord. As we sat down, the head waiter came up to us and respectfully informed the General that by order of the Commander-in-Chief Russian officers were not admitted into restaurants. The General protested feebly, stressing his hunger as a reason for remaining, whereon the head waiter suggested, in an undertone, that the obvious alternative was to remove the epaulets.

“What! Remove my epaulets! I, a Russian officer? Never!” he protested.

Whereon a brain-wave struck him. “I know,” said he, looking round the restaurant. It was nearly empty. And instantly he compromised by putting on his mackintosh. “Now,” said he, “in my English Burberry they will take me for an English officer. Ah!” he smiled, and then added his invariable English phrase: “It is a damrotten game, you know.” And, after a momentary contemplation: “I give dem h-h-hell!”