Futility (24 page)

“There!” I went on protestingly, “I chuck Oxford, come all the way to Vladivostok, spend three months on the journey … because … because I love you, and you—”

“You have a speck of soot on your nose,” she remarked.

“Nina!” I cried laughing, my heart all weeping tears. “Nina!”

“Go and wash your face,” she said, “and then come back again. I’ll wait for you here.”

I gave it up. We sat together, saying nothing, and something about the autumn sun, the wind that came defiant from the roaring sea and harassed the fallen yellow leaves at our feet, suggested that I was late in the season with my love—perhaps too late.
Tristan
became a thing alien and remote, and I felt that I was singing in an altogether different opera.

WE DID NOT GO HOME. SHE SAID, “I’M TIRED OF seeing Papa, Fanny Ivanovna and Kniaz. They always quarrel, always quarrel.… Kniaz is the best of the lot.” Instead we went to the Olenins who lived in a remote
datcha
by the sea. It was a place scarcely accessible by night, for there was not a light and the roads were pools of mud. The environment concentrated all the angry dogs and robbers in the town.

We found Sonia and Vera there chatting with the three American boys, now known as the “three brothers.” The hostess seated at the piano was sending forth sounds of syncopated music, and then the three sisters with their corresponding “brothers” jazzed, while I was left alone with my sense of the three months’ journey east gnawing at my heart.… The fact of the matter was that I failed to see exactly where
I
came in in this combination.

I strolled into the dining-room with its familiar pictures in gilt frames, poorly furnished. Colonel Olenin, now out of work, was playing cards with a brother officer, also out of work, and with Zina’s father, while a Japanese paying guest was looking on, picking his teeth the while. Madame Olenin, little Fanny clinging to her skirt, came up and stood, a little bored, and with that look of hers as though she could have loved a lot.

“You do not dance?” the paying guest inquired on our being introduced. “Why?”

“Andrei Andreiech is smitten,” said Madame Olenin.

“Ah!… Iz zas so … zzz …?”

“Has lost his heart to Nina.”

The paying guest chuckled and picked his teeth. “Ah!… Iz
zas so?” he said and sucked his breath in “… zzz …” as Japanese do in their politeness. “Ah!… Very nice! Very nice!”

“Andrei Andreiech wants to marry her,” continued Madame Olenin.

“Ah!… Iz zas so?… zzz.… Very nice! Very nice!”

“But she doesn’t want to,” I said.

“Ask her,” she said.

“I have asked her. She won’t.”

“Well, you ask her again.”

“How many times?”

“Never mind how many times. Go on asking her. If you go on at it long enough any woman will give way. You go on asking her. Or else marry our little Olya, our little football. You’ll suit each other well.”

The paying guest chuckled loudly and picked his teeth.

She was trifling, trifling with a serious question, and I smiled, as one smiles on these occasions—an economic and reluctant smile.

I learnt that one of the veteran grandfathers had died a month ago; the other was alive. He sat and frowned before him, and little Fanny seemed to shun his frown each time she passed him in the dining-room. I spoke to him and found that he would not admit that any revolution had ever taken place in Russia. “Nonsense,” he kept saying. “Nonsense. In France there has been a revolution. But this is Russia. This is not France.”

“But—but what of the Bolsheviks?” I asked.

The antiquated veteran suddenly relapsed into a fit of anger. “I’ll show these Bolsheviks!” he threatened. “I’ll make them dance! I’ll stand no nonsense! Not I! They’ll soon see the man they’ve got to deal with! They’ll get short shrift from me, I can tell you! I’ll show these Bolsheviks! I’ll make them sing!…” The feeble old man was seized by a violent fit of coughing. His
body shook and reeled, and his vain threats only emphasized the wretched impotence, the piteous weakness of his senility. Madame Olenin came to his rescue and beat him on the back to alleviate his coughing and prayed him not to talk of the wicked Bolsheviks as it was injurious to his health, but even through his coughing, choking hopelessly, he threatened angrily: “I’ll show these Bolsheviks! I’ll make them sing!… these Bolsheviks! I’ll make them dance!” and then again relapsed into a violent fit of senile coughing.

Uncle Kostia, as I went to him, was sitting on the sofa, unshaven and unkempt, in the dim and dreary light of early evening. An empty glass of tea stood on the table. “They are dancing,” he said, with a strange gleam in his eye. “Let them dance. They think I am useless. Let them think. They’ve been complaining of me?”

“Who, Nikolai Vasilievich?”

“No, he wouldn’t. I respect him. The
others
. I know they have. It’s life’s own joke that its superior humanity is not good enough for their inferiors. To the superior humanity the provocation is past a joke, I can tell you; to the inferior, the situation is just a matter of fact; so whose is the joke unless it is life’s own? Life is like that. Here am I—writing away unselfishly. Heaven only knows if what I write will be published in my lifetime. Then, years afterwards, they will read my books; they will think of me, wonder how I looked and spoke and felt. And I won’t know.…”

“Yes. But to dwell prematurely on the sadness of one’s death to others, Uncle Kostia, is like asking for money in advance. It’s commercially unsound.”

Then, as our talk continued, I became aware of awful symptoms of Uncle Kostia’s condition. Uncle Kostia assured me positively that he had never had a father: that he was the son of his
grandfather. And when I pointed out that the omission seemed to me to err a little on the side of the extravagant, he replied quite earnestly that he did not “see it.”

SUCH PITIFUL, HEARTRENDING SCENES AS THIS became a frequent occurrence. Each of the three sisters walked arm in arm with each of the “three brothers,” and I trailed alone behind them, a kind of tutor, with a heinous sense of my three months’ voyage ripening into a grievance. A poor thing, sir, but mine own! The three sisters, escorted safely home, would cry out from the house steps, “Good night, Brothers!” The “three brothers” then would answer, “Good night, Sisters!” I alone said nothing. I felt that an additional “brother” might spoil the symmetry of the arrangement. The fact of the matter, as you will see, was that I was not one of the “three brothers.” That settled it.

A very similar situation would ensue at dances, those delightful dances of the American Red Cross. We, that is, the three sisters, the “three brothers” and I (the odd number), would drive down in an American Service limousine, rolling gently through the dark and gruesome streets, the mellow moon shining feebly on the muddy road. Next we entered that long draughty room in the Naval Barracks taken over by the American Red Cross. In a little while the three sisters reappeared in the room, looking the bouquet that they were, that big nigger band would blurt out its syncopated music, and they would slide away in the embrace of the “three brothers”
and vanish in a paraphernalia of Allied uniforms, while I was reduced to being a “wall-flower,” or else to dance with plump and heavy women, which after my experience with Nina felt very much like moving heavy chairs about the floor. It was idiotic to have travelled sixteen thousand miles to do this sort of thing!… That settled it.

I dare say it was my fault—but my somewhat inartistic intrusions on a party that was otherwise complete, began to tire Nina. She asked me to give up “pursuing” her. I resolved not to pursue her. I told her so. I kept telling her so. My passionate explanations of my aloofness began to anger her. My vehement assurances of resignation to my lonely lot struck her as discordant and dishonest. And she conferred on me the sentence which in love is hardest of all sentences to bear—the sentence of indifference. Now there is but one way to combat indifference in love, and that is by a feud. You tell yourself: She may think of the quarrel at times, perhaps regret the loss, or be annoyed, or feel hostile. There is then some link between you and her. However small, that is at least something. Indifference is simply nowhere. Acting on these lines, my three months’ journey always in my mind, I developed a grievance that outraged my soul. I swore there and then to myself that never again, so long as I lived, would I go to see Nina. That settled it.

I found myself going there that same afternoon, it seemed in spite of myself and partly under the influence of the wine that I had consumed at lunch. The day was a peculiarly sunny and friendly kind of day and the blue sky and the clear air and even the shops themselves seemed to beckon to me not to be a fool, not to stand upon my silly dignity; and so I discovered, as I walked along till I could see their house beckoning to me in the distance, that her indifference, even if confirmed (and I now refused to confirm it), had the overlooked advantage of
admitting me of being in her presence. But when I returned I found I had innumerable occasions to revert to my original interpretation of indifference.

And feeling that my affairs were in a bad way I made a bold
coup
to regain my tottering prestige. I appeared furiously, almost indecently intellectual, talked in quick succession of Turgenev, Goethe, Dostoevski, Chekhov, Flaubert, Shakespeare and Tolstoy. It impressed nobody. She hardly listened to me. So I tried Wagner, Scriabin, Debussy and Richard Strauss. Nothing doing. I tackled Ibsen, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Shaw, Bennett, Chesterton and H. G. Wells; quoted them. It cut no ice. She showed that this sort of thing “did not go down with her” at all. Clearly she wasn’t “having any.” And the great men, I fear, looked small beneath her scornful look.

I met her once in the street. It had been snowing in the night, prematurely for the season; now the snow was thawing and the ground was muddy. The sun was yellow, honey-coloured, and her sidelong look seemed warmer in the sunshine.

“Will you marry me?” I said.

“No.” She shook her head. “I am tired of you.”

“I know that,” I replied, and walked silently beside her.

“If I were really tired of you I wouldn’t tell you.”

“Then why do you tell me?” I took it up, hungering for something positive, however small.

“I don’t always say what I think,” was the answer.

We walked on.

“We are leaving in any case,” she said.

“When? Where?”

“Next month … for Shanghai. Mama is going to start a business there. Hats. We have to do
something
.… We shall have a good time in Shanghai.”

“Ah, you won’t!” I said.

She looked at me.

“What of your ‘three brothers’?” I gloated.

“Their ship is going there next month. Aha! Do you think Mama would get us to come otherwise?”

“Good riddance!” I said.

“What’s happened?”

“Go!” I cried. “But for heaven’s sake go. Off with you! I haven’t time to waste. I want to get back. I am missing my examination!”

“You can go back now if you like. I’m not keeping you.”

“What’s the matter with you?”

“What’s the matter with
you
?”

“I shall see you off first,” I said, “and then I’ll go.”

AND THEN I ONLY WISHED THAT THEY WOULD GO, and that I could return at once to England. The date of sailing was put off from week to week because of passport difficulties and dearth of accommodation in the steamers of the Russian Volunteer Fleet. I was frightened lest they should not be able to get away. For if they stayed, my soul was ruined.

And then, thank heaven, they were going.

Fanny Ivanovna and Nikolai Vasilievich preferred to part with them in their own rooms. It was, I think, because they would rather hide their emotion from the people who they knew were sure to come to see the girls off on the boat, and too, I think, because the relations with Magda Nikolaevna were not entirely satisfactory.

Yesterday I had met them in the Aleutskaya as they returned from the restaurant ‘Zolotoy Rog,’ where they now always went to lunch: the cooking arrangements in the rooms were thoroughly inadequate. Nikolai Vasilievich in his mackintosh and bowler hat looked markedly older and more worn than he had looked two years ago. Perhaps it was the shrewd light of the afternoon that scrutinized his features. There was a curious, mysterious, Mona Lisa look about the face of Fanny Ivanovna: as if she knew a thing or two: as if she had grounds for reassurance. And had she not? The partnership with Magda Nikolaevna was an engaging proposition. The only two deterrents to her going into partnership with Magda Nikolaevna were those two unfortunate words that had not lost their sting for her—“governess” and “lapdog.” She told me she might overlook the “governess”: the suggestion had not a shadow of foundation and could be forgiven—at a pinch. But the “lap-dog”—never! Henceforth, as in the past, their destiny hung on the mines, and Fanny Ivanovna’s ideas as to their recovery were somewhat mixed. But the Japanese were now in possession of the Province, and if Nikolai Vasilievich got back his mines she said she would be able to return to Germany. She hated Vladivostok. And yet, she told me privately this morning, they had been so long together, had gone through so much misery together, that she doubted if she could ever leave him. And even if the mines materialized, she thought—there was that suspicion in her heart and consequently that look of reassurance in her face, that youthful ease about her manner—that the passion between Nikolai and Zina was wearing off. And—nothing ever happens.…

They were both visibly perturbed. Nikolai Vasilievich walked up and down the room, obviously to hide his emotion. The luggage had already been removed to the boat, and the
three sisters, dressed for the voyage, had sat down before the final parting. Kniaz read his paper to himself, and we talked inconsequently of anything and everything, and incidentally I learnt that Uncle Kostia, in pursuance of a logical analysis of his position as an author, had arrived at the conclusion that it was futility to get up at all, and of late conformed to his discovery.