Futility (8 page)

I dashed down the staircase. I stood beneath the porch. But where in heaven was “Professor Metchnikoff”?

And I beheld where he was.

I had often seen our wily Tartar coachman Alexei shake his little head, as I lavished praise on the shape of “Professor Metchnikoff,” and heard him say that the animal was “unreliable.” I had never believed him. Well, did I now?

I beheld a curious spectacle. The little wily Alexei, big-bottomed in accordance with the best traditions, sat helpless
on his soft broad box-seat and flapped his reins in a hopeless fashion, producing with his lips an entreating but ineffectual sound, as Professor Metchnikoff, composed and dignified, retreated backward toward the tramlines at the cross-roads.

I ran to his rescue, and taking Professor Metchnikoff by the bridle I led him forward. I looked up as I did so. Thank God, Nina was not at the window. I then left Professor Metchnikoff, who stood quite quiet, and stepped into the carriage. No sooner had I done so than Professor Metchnikoff resumed his steady and dignified retreat. The coachman, strapped tightly in his cushioned clothes, was helpless as a doll. I glanced at the house, and lo! on the balcony above Nina’s window there stood Sonia, Nina, Vera, Kniaz, Fanny Ivanovna, Nikolai Vasilievich, and Baron Wunderhausen, looking down at me and laughing.

I glanced up at them and crimsoned, and then in a fury I leant forward and hit Professor Metchnikoff across the back with my walking-stick. Professor Metchnikoff halted for a moment, as if considering what to do, and then decided in favour of a retirement. And, seated in the open carriage, I retreated steadily to the accompaniment of laughter from the balcony. Despite the coachman’s frantic efforts to the contrary, I vanished backward very slowly out of sight—when suddenly the fiendish nag jerked forward and trotted home as though nothing had ever been the matter.

HOW OFTEN THEN I DREAMED OF THOSE WHITE nights of Petersburg, those white mysterious sleepless nights.…

Fanny Ivanovna was alone, and we sat together on the open balcony and talked about her troubles in the white night. We sat listless. We felt a strange tremor. We waited for the night, for twilight; but they were not. Heaven had come down over earth. It was one splash of humid, milk-white, pellucid mist. We could see everything before us clearly to the minutest detail. The street with its tall buildings tried hard to fall asleep, but could not: it, too, suffered from insomnia; and the black window-panes of the sleepless houses were like tired eyes of great monsters. Now and then a man would pass beneath us, his steps resounding sharp and loud upon the pavement. Curiously, he had no shadow. Then he was gone, and there was not a soul in the street.

A horrible dream crept over us.… And to rouse ourselves from its increasing domination, we talked. Talking with her, as ever, meant listening. “I have passed the tragic stage, Andrei Andreiech,” she said. “Now I don’t care. I am almost accustomed to my position.”

I tried to put a word in. “I suggest, Fanny Ivanovna, that you all break loose, disentangle yourselves from one another, and then begin at the beginning.”

But she talked on into the night, heedless of my remarks.

“I am only waiting till Nikolai Vasilievich can pay me off; then I shall return to Germany. I am indeed quite optimistic. I am now at the laughing stage. You see, our life can hardly be called a comedy, for if it were produced on the stage no one would believe it was real. No real people could be so silly. It is a farce, Andrei Andreiech. You were right when you made a farce of it then with your chart and diagram and things, do you remember?”

“I honestly wished to help,” I remonstrated.

But she laughed appreciatively, as if to say that she had noted with approval my attempt to pull her leg.

She talked in fragments. “Yes, Andrei Andreiech, you will find—it is indeed a curious thing—that girls who are brought up in such unnatural surroundings as you would think scarcely contributive to the development of the moral virtues, are often the very girls who have the strictest possible conception of morality. What they have seen around them has only had the effect of putting them upon their guard. They are morally inoculated. I haven’t the slightest hesitation in allowing them to read any books they like. They can read Verbitskaya and Artsibashev and Lappo-Danilevskaya and the rest of them if they please. You in England are fortunate indeed. You have serious, moral writers who think of the good of the race and really teach you something positive, constructive and worth while. You have Byron and Oscar Wilde.…”

Like so many other people in Russia, Fanny Ivanovna believed that England has three great outstanding writers: Byron, Shakespeare, and Oscar Wilde.

“
Ach!
Andrei Andreiech! I have had a terrible row with Čečedek. It’s all that Baron Wunderhausen. He made love to Nina.…”

I remember that at these words I sat up in my chair.

“… in French, Andrei Andreiech!

“ ‘I hate talking of
such
things in Russian,’ he said, thinking he would impress her. But she wouldn’t listen.”

My body relaxed in the chair.

“If there’s one thing that Nina simply cannot stand, it is being made love to … above all in French! He came to me after that and said:

“ ‘Fanny Ivanovna, it came over me like that … overnight!…’

“ ‘Oh, then it will go out overnight,’ I said. ‘Pàvel Pàvlovich, please don’t talk of it to me.’ But he turned to me and said in a secretive whisper:

“ ‘Fanny Ivanovna, if you will help me to win her heart I will be your greatest friend on earth.’ And then, after the manner of a doctor, ‘And now tell me all your troubles. We’ll see what we can do.’

“ ‘Pàvel Pàvlovich,’ I cried,
‘Sie sind verrückt
. My troubles are my private affairs and concern no one but myself. Good night.’

“So he complained of me to Magda Nikolaevna; and, would you believe it! she sent Čečedek to tell me that she will not allow me to hamper her daughters’ happiness, that she doesn’t want them to die old maids, like me—me! if you please—that I am unfit to look after them, and so on, and so on. Andrei Andreiech, they are sixteen, fifteen and fourteen! But I can guess the true cause. She wants to marry Čečedek and she naturally doesn’t want her daughters to live with her as this would make her appear her own age, to say nothing of the danger of his falling in love with one of them. They are so pretty.”

“But why need they live with her at all?”

“Ah,” said Fanny Ivanovna. “She said emphatically that she will not have them live with their father if that’s the way he carries on. She is afraid it will corrupt their morals.”

“But doesn’t she continue to draw an allowance from Nikolai Vasilievich?”

“She does. But ever since she met Čečedek, who is preposterously rich, she has lost her faith in Nikolai Vasilievich’s mines—indeed says so openly. This distresses Nikolai very much indeed. I don’t know why it is that he attaches such importance to her faith in the mines, unless it is because he acquired those gold-mines in her time. Of course, she is anxious
for her daughters’ future. She feels that their chances are getting spoiled with her own life and that of Nikolai Vasilievich becoming muddled up. I don’t doubt that she loves her daughters and means well.

“So now our Baron is again after Sonia, but really after the mines, if you ask me.” She laughed a little, privately, to herself, and then said, “I wish he’d wash his neck.…

“Soon, very soon, Andrei Andreiech, I shall leave them. It will be hard … intolerably hard. But my mind is made up. I am not such a fool, Andrei Andreiech, as not to know when my time is up. And then I have a little pride still left in me. It is now merely a matter of the mines. I am ready. I have begun to pack. I have written home to Germany. But I couldn’t post the letter. Not yet.… Andrei Andreiech: what have I to live for? Will you tell me:
what
?… Only when I am gone from them perhaps the children will say: ‘She has been good to us. She has loved us like a mother’… and then, perhaps, I shall not have lived in vain.…”

I went home by the silent river. The Fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul was like a weary watchman. The Admiralty Needle seemed lost in the white mist. I sat down on a stone seat of the embankment and rested. The broad milky river was so mysteriously calm in the granite frame of the quays. I sat and wondered; then my thoughts began to drift; and I was lost in this half light, this half dream, this unreal half existence.…

THEN I WENT TO OXFORD, AND WHEN THE WAR broke out I joined the Navy. But just before the revolution, Admiral Butt, who had gone on a special mission to Russia, applied for my ‘Anglo-Russian’ services.

I still remember very vividly the morning following on my arrival in Petrograd, when I had to meet the Admiral for the first time at the British Embassy. I ascended the broad staircase with its worn red carpet to the Chancery. Very perfect young men, very perfectly dressed, were conversing in very perfect intonations about love among monkeys. It struck me as delightfully human for diplomats. When I descended, the Admiral had not yet arrived. I talked to Yuri, the hall-porter, a clean-shaven individual of uncertain nationality, violently pro-British, and speaking several languages all very badly. Every now and then the great heavy door would open—it was snowing heavily outside—and some man or woman would come in and inquire if this was the Military District Staff. “It is the British Embassy,” replied Yuri proudly. And he explained the error. The Military District Staff was 4 Palace Square; the Embassy 4 Palace Quay. In peace-time people did come in occasionally and inquire if this was the Military District Staff; but since war had been declared they seemed to be doing little else. I pondered over the possibility of Yuri, unable one day to withstand the increasing pressure of inquiries, going mad and
holding forth on this subject to his brother inmates henceforth indefinitely in a lunatic asylum.

Helping me on with my coat, Yuri was suddenly seized by a strange panic. He dropped the coat on the floor and dashed to the door. I followed him, thinking it was the revolution. I was rewarded for my exertion. The Ambassador’s car drove up, and sitting in it were Sir George Buchanan and the French Ambassador. Yuri sprang up and pulling off his cap opened the door of the vehicle and stood still in a paroxysm of reverence and awe. But the two great men within continued talking, the Frenchman in that agitated, agile manner that Frenchmen have, the Englishman with a fine superiority of distinction. The Ambassadors of the two friendly powers sat talking, evidently unaware that they had arrived. Yuri held the door open, still bareheaded, the incarnation of servility and devotion. Then they entered. Yuri made a dash for Sir George’s feet, and began hastily to unbuckle his felt goloshes, while the great diplomat with his fur collar still up to his temples and his round fur cap cocked over one ear stood panting in his great fur coat. I had an absurd idea that something great must be happening on the political horizon.

Finally the Admiral arrived. He was a tall, imperious figure. His movements were powerful and sweeping. He had the air of a man engaged in winning the war while everybody else about him was obstructing him in his patriotic task. His voice was the voice of such a man. His look seemed specially selected to match his voice. That war-winning quality was clearly manifest in his personality, but his actual work towards that end was all very obscure.…

Then one morning, as I was about to cross the Troitski Bridge to meet the Admiral, I was stopped by the police and was compelled to go home and change into uniform. When I
returned the revolution had already broken out. The Admiral had just witnessed the sacking of the Arsenal by a disorderly crowd. Regiment after regiment was going over to the revolution. Solitary shots, and now and then machine-gun fire, were heard from various quarters of the city. The Admiral and I stood at the window and watched. Lorry after lorry packed with armed soldiery and workmen, some lying in a “ready” attitude along the mudguards, went past us in a kind of wild and dazzling joy ride, waving red flags and revolutionary banners to shouts of “Hurrah!” from the crowds in the street. The Admiral stood with his hands folded on the window-sill, unable to withhold his enthusiasm. It was a clear, bright day, I think, and very cold.

That evening following the outbreak of the revolution was vividly impressed upon my memory. During the day I had listened to innumerable speeches, some of a Liberal loftiness; others of a menacingly proletarian character, threatening death to capital and revolution to the world at large. There was a tendency to flamboyant extravagance and exaggeration. “Down with Armies and Navies!” shouted one speaker hysterically. “Down with militarism! Through red terror to peace, freedom and brotherhood!” There were placards and banners and processions. “Land and Liberty!” was a popular watchword. Red was the dominant colour, and the opening bars of the Marseillaise were a kind of recurring
Leitmotif
in the tumult. Crossing a bridge I passed a company of soldiers newly revolted. They marched alert and joyous to the sound of some old familiar marching song till they came to the words “for the Czar.” Having sung these words they stopped somewhat abruptly and perplexed. “
How
for the Czar?” one of them asked. “
How
for the Czar?” they repeated, looking at each other sheepishly. Then they marched on without singing. There were peasants
who did not know the word “revolution” and thought it was a woman who would supersede the Czar. Others wanted a republic with a czar. And there were others still who interpreted the word republic as “rieszshpublicoo,” thinking that it meant “cut up the public.” In the Troitski Square I was stopped by a young enthusiastic Russian officer who, attracted by my British uniform, spoke to me in English, his eyes glittering with excitement. “Sir,” he said, “you now will have more vigorous Allies.” And then in the Nevski I passed a procession of Anarchists who are regarded by the Bolsheviks with about the same degree of unmitigated horror as the Bolsheviks are regarded by the
Morning Post
. They marched with a gruesome look about their faces, bearing their horrible colours of black, crested with a human skull and cross-bones. And somewhat later in the day I sat at dinner with Zina’s people on the Petrograd side, and the presence of a score of students, male and female, an engineer, a lawyer, and a journalist or two, all of that revolutionary intelligentsia, probably accounted for the Liberal atmosphere that prevailed. Yesterday they had been revolutionaries; to-day they were contented Liberals, hailing Lvov and Miliukov as the heroes of the day. The engineer drank to the future: “The old world is dead: long live the new world!”