All this may be fantastic enough, I only know that it was sufficiently real to me during that winter of 1916 to be ever at the back of my mind; and I believe that some sense of that kind had in all sober reality something to do with that strange weight of uneasy anticipation that we all of us, yes, the most unimaginative amongst us, felt at this time.
Upon this afternoon when I went to pay my call on Vera Michailovna, the real snow began to fall. We had had the false preliminary attempt a fortnight before; now in the quiet persistent determination, the solid soft resilience beneath one’s feet, and the patient aquiescence of roofs and bridges and cobbles one knew that the real winter had come. Already, although it was only four o’clock in the afternoon, there was darkness, with the strange almost metallic glow as of the light from an inverted looking-glass that snow makes upon the air. I had not far to go, but the long stretch of the Ekateringofsky Canal was black and gloomy and desolate, repeating here and there the pale yellow reflection of some lamp, but for the most part dim and dead, with the hulks of barges lying like sleeping monsters on its surface. As I turned into Anglisky Prospect I found stretched like a black dado, far down the street, against the wall, a queue of waiting women. They would be there until the early morning, many of them, and it was possible that then the bread would not be sufficient. And this not from any real lack, but simply from the mistakes of a bungling, peculating Government. No wonder that one’s heart was heavy.
I found Vera Michailovna to my relief alone. When Sacha brought me into the room she was doing what I think I had never seen her do before, sitting unoccupied, her eyes staring in front of her, her hands folded on her lap.
“I don’t believe that I’ve ever caught you idle before, Vera Michailovna,” I said.
“Oh, I’m glad you’ve come!” She caught my hand with an eagerness very different from her usual calm, quiet greeting. “Sit down. It’s an extraordinary thing. At that very moment I was wishing for you.”
“What is it I can do for you?” I asked. “You know that I would do anything for you.”
“Yes, I know that you would. But—well. You can’t help me because I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”
“That’s very unlike you,” I said.
“Yes, I know it is—and perhaps that’s why I am frightened. It’s so vague; and you know I long ago determined that if I couldn’t define a trouble and have it there in front of me, so that I could strangle it—why I wouldn’t bother about it. But those things are so easy to say.”
She got up and began to walk up and down the room. That again was utterly unlike her, and altogether I seemed to be seeing, this afternoon, some quite new Vera Michailovna, some one more intimate, more personal, more appealing. I realised suddenly that she had never before, at any period of our friendship, asked for my help—not even for my sympathy. She was so strong and reliant and independent, cared so little for the opinion of others, and shut down so closely upon herself her private life, that I could not have imagined her asking help from any one. And of the two of us, she was the man, the strong determined soul, the brave and self-reliant character. It seemed to me ludicrous that she should ask for my help. Nevertheless I was greatly touched.
“I would do anything for you,” I said.
She turned to me, a splendid figure, her head, with its crown of black hair, lifted, her hands on her hips, her eyes gravely regarding me.
“There are three things,” she said, “perhaps all of them nothing.... And yet all of them disturbing. First my husband. He’s beginning to drink again.”
“Drink?” I said; “where can he get it from?”
“I don’t know. I must discover. But it isn’t the actual drinking. Every one in our country drinks if he can. Only what has made my husband break his resolve? He was so proud of it. You know how proud he was. And he lies about it. He says he is not drinking. He never used to lie about anything. That was not one of his faults.”
“Perhaps his inventions,” I suggested.
“Pouf! His inventions! You know better than that, Ivan Andreievitch. No, no. It is something.... He’s not himself. Well, then, secondly, there’s Nina. The other night did you notice anything?”
“Only that she lost her temper. But she’s always doing that.”
“No, it’s more than that. She’s unhappy, and I don’t like the life she’s leading. Always out at cinematographs and theatres and restaurants, and with a lot of boys who mean no harm, I know—but they’re idiotic, they’re no good.... Now, when the war’s like this and the suffering.... To be always at the cinematograph! But I’ve lost my authority over her, Ivan Andreievitch. She doesn’t care any longer what I say to her. Once, and not so long ago, I meant so much to her. She’s changed, she’s harder, more careless, more selfish. You know, Ivan Andreievitch, that Nina’s simply everything to me. I don’t talk about myself, do I? but at least I can say that since—oh, many, many years, she’s been the whole world and more than the whole world to me. Our mother and father were killed in a railway accident coming up from Odessa when Nina was very small, and since then Nina’s been mine—all mine!”
She said that word with sudden passion, flinging it at me with a fierce gesture of her hands. “Do you know what it is to want that something should belong to you, belong entirely to you, and to no one else? I’ve been too proud to say, but I’ve wanted that terribly all my life. I haven’t had children, although I prayed for them, and perhaps now it is as well. But Nina! She’s known she was mine, and, until now, she’s loved to know it. But now she’s escaping from me, and she knows that too, and is ashamed. I think I could bear anything but that sense that she herself has that she’s being wrong—I hate her to be ashamed.”
“Perhaps,” I suggested, “it’s time that she went out into the world now and worked. There are a thousand things that a woman can do.”
“No—not Nina. I’ve spoilt her, perhaps; I don’t know. I always liked to feel that she needed my help. I didn’t want to make her too self-reliant. That was wrong of me, and I shall be punished for it.”
“Speak to her,” I said. “She loves you so much that one word from you to her will be enough.”
“No,” Vera Michailovna said slowly. “It won’t be enough now. A year ago, yes. But now she’s escaping as fast as she can.”
“Perhaps she’s in love with some one,” I suggested.
“No. I should have seen at once if it had been that. I would rather it were that. I think she would come back to me then. No, I suppose that this had to happen. I was foolish to think that it would not. But it leaves one alone—it—”
She pulled herself up at that, regarding me with sudden shyness, as though she would forbid me to hint that she had shown the slightest emotion, or made in any way an appeal for pity.
I was silent, then I said:
“And the third thing, Vera Michailovna?”
“Uncle Alexei is coming back.” That startled me. I felt my heart give one frantic leap.
“Alexei Petrovitch!” I cried. “When? How soon?”
“I don’t know. I’ve had a letter.” She felt in her dress, found the letter and read it through. “Soon, perhaps. He’s leaving the Front for good. He’s disgusted with it all, he says. He’s going to take up his Petrograd practice again.”
“Will he live with you?”
“No. God forbid!”
She felt then, perhaps, that her cry had revealed more than she intended, because she smiled and, trying to speak lightly, said:
“No. We’re old enemies, my uncle and I. We don’t get on. He thinks me sentimental, I think him—but never mind what I think him. He has a bad effect on my husband.”
“A bad effect?” I repeated.
“Yes. He irritates him. He laughs at his inventions, you know.”
I nodded my head. Yes, with my earlier experience of him I could understand that he would do that.
“He’s a cynical, embittered man,” I said. “He believes in nothing and in nobody. And yet he has his fine side—”
“No, he has no fine side,” she interrupted me fiercely. “None. He is a bad man. I’ve known him all my life, and I’m not to be deceived.”
Then in a softer, quieter tone she continued:
“But tell me, Ivan Andreievitch. I’ve wanted before to ask you. You were with him on the Front last year. We have heard that he had a great love affair there, and that the Sister whom he loved was killed. Is that true?”
“Yes,” I said, “that is true.”
“Was he very much in love with her?”
“I believe terribly.”
“And it hurt him deeply when she was killed?”
“Desperately deeply.”
“But what kind of woman was she? What type? It’s so strange to me. Uncle Alexei... with his love affairs!”
I looked up, smiling. “She was your very opposite, Vera Michailovna, in everything. Like a child—with no knowledge, no experience, no self-reliance—nothing. She was wonderful in her ignorance and bravery. We all thought her wonderful.”
“And she lovedhim?”
“Yes—she loved him.”
“How strange! Perhaps there is some good in him somewhere. But to us at any rate he always brings trouble. This affair may have changed him. They say he is very different. Worse perhaps—”
She broke out then into a cry:
“I want to get away, Ivan Andreievitch! To get away, to escape, to leave Russia and everything in it behind me! To escape!”
It was just then that Sacha knocked on the door. She came in to say that there was an Englishman in the hall inquiring for the other Englishman who had come yesterday, that he wanted to know when he would be back.
“Perhaps I can help,” I said. I went out into the hall and there I found Jerry Lawrence.
He stood there in the dusk of the little hall looking as resolute and unconcerned as an Englishman, in a strange and uncertain world, is expected to look. Not that he ever considered the attitudes fitting to adopt on certain occasions. He would tell you, if you inquired, that “he couldn’t stand those fellows who looked into every glass they passed.” His brow wore now a simple and innocent frown like that of a healthy baby presented for the first time with a strange and alarming rattle. It was only later that I was to arrive at some faint conception of Lawrence’s marvellous acceptance of anything that might happen to turn up. Vice, cruelty, unsuspected beauty, terror, remorse, hatred, and ignorance—he accepted them all once they were there in front of him. He sometimes, as I shall on a later occasion, show, allowed himself a free expression of his views in the company of those whom he could trust, but they were never the views of a suspicious or a disappointed man. It was not that he had great faith in human nature. He had, I think, very little. Nor was he without curiosity—far from it. But once a thing was really there he wasted no time over exclamations as to the horror or beauty or abomination of its actual presence. There was as he once explained to me, “precious little time to waste.” Those who thought him a dull, silent fellow—and they were many—made of course an almost ludicrous mistake, but most people in life are, I take it, too deeply occupied with their own personal history to do more than estimate at its surface value the appearance of others... but after all such a dispensation makes, in all probability for the general happiness....
On this present occasion Jerry Lawrence stood there exactly as I had seen him stand many times on the football field waiting for the referee’s whistle, his thick short body held together, his mouth shut and his eyes on guard. He did not at first recognise me.
“You’ve forgotten me,” I said.
“I beg your pardon,” he answered in his husky good-natured voice, like the rumble of an amiable bull-dog.
“My name is Durward,” I said, holding out my hand. “And years ago we had a mutual friend in Olva Dune.”
That pleased him. He gripped my hand very heartily and smiled a big ugly smile. “Why, yes,” he said. “Of course. How are you? Feeling fit? Damned long ago all that, isn’t it? Hope you’re really fit?”
“Oh, I’m all right,” I answered. “I was never a Hercules, you know. I heard that you were here from Bohun. I was going to write to you. But it’s excellent that we should meet like this.”
“I was after young Bohun,” he explained. “But it’s pleasant to find there’s another fellow in the town one knows. I’ve been a bit at sea these two days. To tell you the truth I never wanted to come.” I heard a rumble in his throat that sounded like “silly blighters.”
“Come in,” I said. “You must meet Madame Markovitch with whom Bohun is staying—and then wait a bit. He won’t be long, I expect.”
The idea of this seemed to fill Jerry with alarm. He turned back toward the door. “Oh! I don’t think... she won’t want... better another time...” his mouth was filled with indistinct rumblings.
“Nonsense.” I caught his arm. “She is delightful. You must make yourself at home here. They’ll be only too glad.”
“Does she speak English?” he asked.
“No,” I answered. “But that’s all right.”
He backed again towards the door.
“My Russian’s so slow,” he said. “Never been here since I was a kid. I’d rather not, really—”
However, I dragged him in and introduced him. I had quite a fatherly desire, as I watched him, that “he should make good.” But I’m afraid that that first interview was not a great success. Vera Michailovna was strange that afternoon, excited and disturbed as I had never known her, and I could see that it was only with the greatest difficulty that she could bring herself to think about Jerry at all.
And Jerry himself was so unresponsive that I could have beaten him. “Why, you’re duller than you used to be,” I thought to myself, and wondered how I could have suspected, in those days, subtle depths and mysterious comprehensions. Vera Michailovna asked him questions about France and London but, quite obviously, did not listen to his answers.
After ten minutes he pulled himself up slowly from his chair:
“Well, I must be going,” he said. “Tell young Bohun I shall be waiting for him to-night—7.30—Astoria—” He turned to Vera Michailovna to say good-bye, and then, suddenly, as she rose and their eyes met, they seemed to strike some unexpected chord of sympathy. It took both of them, I think, by surprise; for quite a moment they stared at one another.
“Please come whenever you want to see your friend,” she said, “we shall be delighted.”
“Thank you,” he answered simply, and went.
When he had gone she said to me:
“I like that man. One could trust him.”
“Yes, one could,” I answered her.
I must return now to young Henry Bohun. I would like to arouse your sympathy for him, but sympathy’s a dangerous medicine for the young, who are only too ready, so far as their self-confidence goes, to take a mile if you give them an inch. But with Bohun it was simply a case of re-delivering, piece by piece, the mile that he had had no possible right to imagine in his possession, and at the end of his relinquishment he was as naked and impoverished a soul as any life with youth and health on its side can manage to sustain. He was very miserable during these first weeks, and then it must be remembered that Petrograd was, at this time, no very happy place for anybody. Bohun was not a coward—he would have stood the worst things in France without flinching—but he was neither old enough nor young enough to face without a tremor the queer world of nerves and unfulfilled expectation in which he found himself. In the first place, Petrograd was so very different from anything that he had expected. Its size and space, its power of reducing the human figure to a sudden speck of insignificance, its strange lights and shadows, its waste spaces and cold, empty, moonlit squares, its jumble of modern and mediaeval civilisation, above all, its supreme indifference to all and sundry—these things cowed and humiliated him. He was sharp enough to realise that here he was nobody at all. Then he had not expected to be so absolutely cut off from all that he had known. The Western world simply did not seem to exist. The papers came so slowly that on their arrival they were not worth reading. He had not told his friends in England to send his letters through the Embassy bag, with the result that they would not, he was informed, reach him for months.
Of his work I do not intend here to speak,—it does not come into this story,—but he found that it was most complicated and difficult, and kicks rather than halfpence would be the certain reward. And Bohun hated kicks....
Finally, he could not be said to be happy in the Markovitch flat. He had, poor boy, heard so much about Russian hospitality, and had formed, from the reading of the books of Mr. Stephen Graham and others, delightful pictures of the warmest hearts in the world holding out the warmest hands before the warmest samovars. In its spirit that was true enough, but it was not true in the way that Bohun expected it.
The Markovitches, during those first weeks, left him to look after himself because they quite honestly believed that that was the thing that he would prefer. Uncle Ivan tried to entertain him, but Bohun found him a bore, and with the ruthless intolerance of the very young, showed him so. The family did not put itself out to please him in any way. He had his room and his latchkey. There was always coffee in the morning, dinner at half-past six, and the samovar from half-past nine onwards. But the Markovitch family life was not turned from its normal course. Why should it be?
And then he was laughed at. Nina laughed at him. Everything about him seemed to Nina ridiculous—his cold bath in the morning, his trouser-press, the little silver-topped bottles on his table, the crease in his trousers, his shining neat hair, the pearl pin in his black tie, his precise and careful speech, the way that he said “Nu tak... Spasebo... gavoreet... gariachy...” She was never tired of imitating him; and very soon he caught her strutting about the dining-room with a man’s cap on her head, twisting a cane and bargaining with an Isvostchick—this last because, only the evening before, he had told them with great pride of his cleverness in that especial direction. The fun was good-natured enough, but it was, as Russian chaff generally is, quite regardless of sensitive feelings. Nina chaffed everybody and nobody minded, but Bohun did not know this, and minded very much indeed. He showed during dinner that evening that he was hurt, and sat over his cabbage soup very dignified and silent. This made every one uncomfortable, although Vera told me afterwards that she found it difficult not to laugh. The family did not make themselves especially pleasant, as Henry felt they ought to have done—they continued the even tenor of their way. He was met by one of those sudden cold horrible waves of isolated terror with which it pleases Russia sometimes to overwhelm one. The snow was falling; the town was settling into a suspicious ominous quiet. There was no light in the sky, and horrible winds blew round the corners of abandoned streets. Henry was desperately homesick. He would have cut and run, had there been any possible means of doing it. He did not remember the wild joy with which he had heard, only a few weeks before, that he was to come to Petrograd. He had forgotten even the splendours ofDiscipline. He only knew that he was lonely and frightened and home-sick. He seemed to be without a friend in the world.
But he was proud. He confided in nobody. He went about with his head up, and every one thought him the most conceited young puppy who had ever trotted the Petrograd streets. And, although he never owned it even to himself, Jerry Lawrence seemed to him now the one friendly soul in all the world. You could be sure that Lawrence would be always the same; he would not laugh at you behind your back, if he disliked something he would say so. You knew where you were with him, and in the uncertain world in which poor Bohun found himself that simply was everything. Bohun would have denied it vehemently if you told him that he had once looked down on Lawrence, or despised him for his inartistic mind. Lawrence was “a fine fellow”; he might seem a little slow at first, “but you wait and you will see what kind of a chap he is.” Nevertheless Bohun was not able to be for ever in his company; work separated them, and then Lawrence lodged with Baron Wilderling on the Admiralty Quay, a long way from Anglisky Prospect. Therefore, at the end of three weeks, Henry Bohun discovered himself to be profoundly wretched. There seemed to be no hope anywhere. Even the artist in him was disappointed. He went to the Ballet and saw Tchaikowsky’s “Swan Lake”; but bearing Diagilev’s splendours in front of him, and knowing nothing about the technique of ballet-dancing he was bored and cross and contemptuous. He went to “Eugen Onyegin” and enjoyed it, because there was still a great deal of the schoolgirl in him; but after that he was flung on to Glinka’s “Russlan and Ludmilla,” and this seemed to him quite interminable and to have nothing to do with the gentleman and lady mentioned in the title. He tried a play at the Alexander Theatre; it was, he saw, by Andréeff, whose art he had told many people in England he admired, but now he mixed him up in his mind with Kuprin, and the play was all about a circus—very confused and gloomy. As for literature, he purchased some new poems by Balmont, some essays by Merejkowsky, and André Biely’sSt. Petersburg,but the first of these he found pretentious, the second dull, and the third quite impossibly obscure. He did not confess to himself that it might perhaps be his ignorance of the Russian language that was at fault. He went to the Hermitage and the Alexander Galleries, and purchased coloured post-cards of the works of Somov, Benois, Douboginsky, Lançeray, and Ostroymova—all the quite obvious people. He wrote home to his mother “that from what he could see of Russian Art it seemed to him to have a real future in front of it”—and he bought little painted wooden animals and figures at the Peasants’ Workshops and stuck them up on the front of his stove.
“I like them because they are so essentially Russian,” he said to me, pointing out a red spotted cow and a green giraffe. “No other country could have been responsible for them.”
Poor boy, I had not the heart to tell him that they had been made in Germany.
However, as I have said, in spite of his painted toys and his operas he was, at the end of three weeks, a miserable man. Anybody could see that he was miserable, and Vera Michailovna saw it. She took him in hand, and at once his life was changed. I was present at the beginning of the change.
It was the evening of Rasputin’s murder. The town of course talked of nothing else—it had been talking, without cessation, since two o’clock that afternoon. The dirty, sinister figure of the monk with his magnetic eyes, his greasy beard, his robe, his girdle, and all his other properties, brooded gigantic over all of us. He was brought into immediate personal relationship with the humblest, most insignificant creature in the city, and with him incredible shadows and shapes, from Dostoeffsky, from Gogol, from Lermontov, from Nekrasov—from whom you please—all the shadows of whom one is eternally subconsciously aware in Russia—faced us and reminded us that they were not shadows but realities.
The details of his murder were not accurately known—it was only sure that, at last, after so many false rumours of attempted assassination, he was truly gone, and this world would be bothered by his evil presence no longer.
Pictures formed in one’s mind as one listened. The day was fiercely cold, and this seemed to add to the horror of it all—to the Hoffmannesque fantasy of the party, the lights, the supper, and the women, the murder with its mixture of religion and superstition and melodrama, the body flung out at last so easily and swiftly, on to the frozen river. How many souls must have asked themselves that day—“Why, if this is so easy, do we not proceed further? A man dies more simply than you thought—only resolution... only resolution.”
I know that that evening I found it impossible to remain in my lonely rooms; I went round to the Markovitch flat. I found Vera Michailovna and Bohun preparing to go out; they were alone in the flat. He looked at me apprehensively. I think that I appeared to him at that time a queer, moody, ill-disposed fellow, who was too old to understand the true character of young men’s impetuous souls. It may be that he was right....
“Will you come with us, Ivan Andreievitch?” Vera Michailovna asked me. “We’re going to the little cinema on Ekateringofsky—a piece of local colour for Mr. Bohun.”
“I’ll come anywhere with you,” I said. “And we’ll talk about Rasputin.”
Bohun was only too ready. The affair seemed to his romantic soul too good to be true. Because we none of us knew, at that time, what had really happened, a fine field was offered for every rumour and conjecture.
Bohun had collected some wonderful stories. I saw that, apart from Rasputin, he was a new man—something had happened to him. It was not long before I discovered that what had happened was that Vera Michailovna had been kind to him. Vera’s most beautiful quality was her motherliness. I do not intend that much-abused word in any sentimental fashion. She did not shed tears over a dirty baby in the street, nor did she drag decrepit old men into the flat to give them milk and fifty kopecks,—but let some one appeal to the strength and bravery in her, and she responded magnificently. I believe that to be true of very many Russian women, who are always their most natural selves when something appeals to the best in them. Vera Michailovna had a strength and a security in her protection of souls weaker than her own that had about it nothing forced or pretentious or self-conscious—it was simply the natural woman acting as she was made to act. She saw that Bohun was lonely and miserable and, now that the first awkwardness was passed and he was no longer a stranger, she was able, gently and unobtrusively, to show him that she was his friend. I think that she had not liked him at first; but if you want a Russian to like you, the thing to do is to show him that you need him. It is amazing to watch their readiness to receive dependent souls whom they are in no kind of way qualified to protect—but they do their best, and although the result is invariably bad for everybody’s character, a great deal of affection is created.
As we walked to the cinema she asked him, very gently and rather shyly, about his home and his people and English life. She must have asked all her English guests the same questions, but Bohun, I fancy, gave her rather original answers. He let himself go, and became very young and rather absurd, but also sympathetic. We were, all three of us, gay and silly, as one very often suddenly is, in Russia, in the middle of even disastrous situations. It had been a day of most beautiful weather, the mud was frozen, the streets clean, the sky deep blue, the air harshly sweet. The night blazed with stars that seemed to swing through the haze of the frost like a curtain moved, very gently, by the wind. The Ekateringofsky Canal was blue with the stars lying like scraps of quicksilver all about it, and the trees and houses were deep black in outline above it. I could feel that the people in the street were happy. The murder of Rasputin was a sign, a symbol; his figure had been behind the scenes so long that it had become mythical, something beyond human power—and now, behold, it was not beyond human power at all, but was there like a dead stinking fish. I could see the thought in their minds as they hurried along: “Ah, he is gone, the dirty fellow—Slava Bogu—the war will soon be over.”
I, myself, felt the influence. Perhaps now the war would go better, perhaps Stunner and Protopopoff and the rest of them would be dismissed, and clean men... it was still time for the Czar.... And I heard Bohun, in his funny, slow, childish Russian: “But you understand, Vera Michailovna, that my father knows nothing about writing, nothing at all—so that it wouldn’t matter very much what he said.... Yes, he’s military—been in the Army always....”
Along the canal the little trees that in the spring would be green flames were touched now very faintly by silver frost. A huge barge lay black against the blue water; in the middle of it the rain had left a pool that was not frozen and under the light of a street lamp blazed gold—very strange the sudden gleam.... We passed the little wooden shelter where an old man in a high furry cap kept oranges and apples and nuts and sweets in paper. One candle illuminated his little store. He looked out from the darkness behind him like an old prehistoric man. His shed was peaked like a cocked hat, an old fat woman sat beside him knitting and drinking a glass of tea....
“I’m sorry, Vera Michailovna, that you can’t read English....” Bohun’s careful voice was explaining, “Only Wells and Locke and Jack London....”
I heard Vera Michailovna’s voice. Then Bohun again:
“No, I write very slowly—yes, I correct an awful lot....”
We stumbled amongst the darkness of the cobbles; where pools had been the ice crackled beneath our feet, then the snow scrunched.... I loved the sound, the sharp clear scent of the air, the pools of stars in the sky, the pools of ice at our feet, the blue like the thinnest glass stretched across the sky. I felt the poignancy of my age, of the country where I was, of Bohun’s youth and confidence, of the war, of disease and death—but behind it all happiness at the strange sense that I had to-night, that came to me sometimes from I knew not where, that the undercurrent of the river of life was stronger than the eddies and whirlpools on its surface, that it knew whither it was speeding, and that the purpose behind its force was strong and true and good....
“Oh,” I heard Bohun say, “I’m not really very young, Vera Michailovna. After all, it’s what you’ve done rather than your actual years....”
“You’re older than you’ll ever be again, Bohun, if that’s any consolation to you,” I said.
We had arrived. The cinema door blazed with light, and around it was gathered a group of soldiers and women and children, peering in at a soldiers’ band, which, placed on benches in a corner of the room, played away for its very life. Outside, around the door were large bills announcing “The Woman without a Soul, Drama in four parts,” and there were fine pictures of women falling over precipices, men shot in bedrooms, and parties in which all the guests shrank back in extreme horror from the heroine. We went inside and were overwhelmed by the band, so that we could not hear one another speak. The floor was covered with sunflower seeds, and there was a strong smell of soldiers’ boots and bad cigarettes and urine. We bought tickets from an old Jewess behind the pigeon-hole and then, pushing the curtain aside, stumbled into darkness. Here the smell was different, being, quite simply that of human flesh not very carefully washed. Although, as we stumbled to some seats at the back, we could feel that we were alone, it had the impression that multitudes of people pressed in upon us, and when the lights did go up we found that the little hall was indeed packed to its extremest limit.
No one could have denied that it was a cheerful scene. Soldiers, sailors, peasants, women, and children crowded together upon the narrow benches. There was a great consumption of sunflower seeds, and the narrow passage down the middle of the room was littered with fragments. Two stout and elaborate policemen leaned against the wall surveying the public with a friendly if superior air. There was a tremendous amount of noise. Mingled with the strains of the band beyond the curtain were cries and calls and loud roars of laughter. The soldiers embraced the girls, and the children, their fingers in their mouths, wandered from bench to bench, and a mangy dog begged wherever he thought that he saw a kindly face. All the faces were kindly—kindly, ignorant, and astoundingly young. As I felt that youth I felt also separation; I and my like could emphasise as we pleased the goodness, docility, mysticism even of these people, but we were walking in a country of darkness. I caught a laugh, the glance of some women, the voice of a young soldier—I felt behind us, watching us, the thick heavy figure of Rasputin. I smelt the eastern scent of the sunflower seeds, I looked back and glanced at the impenetrable superiority of the two policemen, and I laughed at myself for the knowledge that I thought I had, for the security upon which I thought that I rested, for the familiarity with which I had fancied I could approach my neighbours.... I was not wise, I was not secure, I had no claim to familiarity....
The lights were down and we were shown pictures of Paris. Because the cinema was a little one and the prices small the films were faded and torn, so that the Opera and the Place de la Concorde and the Louvre and the Seine danced and wriggled and broke before our eyes. They looked strange enough to us and only accented our isolation and the odd semi-civilisation in which we were living. There were comments all around the room in exactly the spirit of children before a conjurer at a party.... The smell grew steadily stronger and stronger... my head swam a little and I seemed to see Rasputin, swelling in his black robe, catching us all into its folds, sweeping us up into the starlight sky. We were under the flare of the light again. I caught Bohun’s happy eyes; he was talking eagerly to Vera Michailovna, not removing his eyes from her face. She had conquered him; I fancied as I looked at her that her thoughts were elsewhere.
There followed a Vaudeville entertainment. A woman and a man in peasants’ dress came and laughed raucously, without meaning, their eyes narrowly searching the depths of the house, then they stamped their feet and whirled around, struck one another, laughed again, and vanished.
The applause was half-hearted. Then there was a trainer of dogs, a black-eyed Tartar with four very miserable little fox-terriers, who shivered and trembled and jumped reluctantly through hoops. The audience liked this, and cried and shouted and threw paper pellets at the dogs. A stout perspiring Jew in a shabby evening suit came forward and begged for decorum. Then there appeared a stout little man in a top hat who wished to recite verses of, I gathered, a violent indecency. I was uncomfortable about Vera Michailovna, but I need not have been. The indecency was of no importance to her, and she was interested in the human tragedy of the performer. Tragedy it was. The man was hungry and dirty and not far from tears. He forgot his verses and glanced nervously into the wings as though he expected to be beaten publicly by the perspiring Jew.
He stammered; his mouth wobbled; he covered it with a dirty hand. He could not continue.
The audience was sympathetic. They listened in encouraging silence; then they clapped; then they shouted friendly words to him. You could feel throughout the room an intense desire that he should succeed. He responded a little to the encouragement, but could not remember his verses. He struggled, struggled, did a hurried little breakdown dance, bowed and vanished into the wings, to be beaten, I have no doubt, by the Jewish gentleman. We watched a little of the “Drama of the Woman without a Soul,” but the sense of being in a large vat filled with boiling human flesh into whose depths we were pressed ever more and more deeply was at last too much for us, and we stumbled our way into the open air. The black shadow of the barge, the jagged outline of the huddled buildings against the sky, the black tower at the end of the canal, all these swam in the crystal air.
We took deep breaths of the freshness and purity; cheerful noises were on every side of us, the band and laughter; a church bell with its deep note and silver tinkle; the snow was vast and deep and hard all about us. We walked back very happily to Anglisky Prospect. Vera Michailovna said good-night to me and went in. Before he followed her, Bohun turned round to me:
“Isn’t she splendid?” he whispered. “By God, Durward, I’d do anything for her.... Do you think she likes me?”
“Why not?” I asked.
“I want her to—frightfully. I’d do anything for her. Do you think she’d like to learn English?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Ask her.”
He disappeared. As I walked home I felt about me the new interaction of human lives and souls—ambitions, hopes, youth. And the crisis, behind these, of the world’s history made up, as it was, of the same interactions of human and divine. The fortunes and adventures of the soul on its journey towards its own country, its hopes and fears, struggles and despairs, its rejections and joy and rewards—its death and destruction—all this in terms of human life and the silly blundering conditions of this splendid glorious earth.... Here was Vera Michailovna and her husband, Nina and Boris Grogoff, Bohun and Lawrence, myself and Semyonov—a jumbled lot—with all our pitiful self-important little histories, our crimes and virtues so insignificant and so quickly over, and behind them the fine stuff of the human and divine soul, pushing on through all raillery and incongruity to its goal. Why, I had caught up, once more, that interest in life that I had, I thought, so utterly lost! I stopped for a moment by the frozen canal and laughed to myself. The drama of life was, after all, too strong for my weak indifference. I felt that night as though I had stepped into a new house with lighted rooms and fires and friends waiting for me. Afterwards, I was so closely stirred by the sense of impending events that I could not sleep, but sat at my window watching the faint lights of the sky shift and waver over the frozen ice....
We were approaching Christmas. The weather of these weeks was wonderfully beautiful, sharply cold, the sky pale bird’s-egg blue, the ice and the snow glittering, shining with a thousand colours. There began now a strange relationship between Markovitch and myself.
There was something ineffectual and pessimistic about me that made Russians often feel in me a kindred soul. At the Front, Russians had confided in me again and again, but that was not astonishing, because they confided in every one. Nevertheless, they felt that I was less English than the rest, and rather blamed me in their minds, I think, for being so. I don’t know what it was that suddenly decided Markovitch to “make me part of his life.” I certainly did not on my side make any advances.
One evening he came to see me and stayed for hours. Then he came two or three times within the following fortnight. He gave me the effect of not caring in the least whether I were there or no, whether I replied or remained silent, whether I asked questions or simply pursued my own work. And I, on my side, had soon in my consciousness his odd, irascible, nervous, pleading, shy and boastful figure painted permanently, so that his actual physical presence seemed to be unimportant. There he was, as he liked to stand up against the white stove in my draughty room, his rather dirty nervous hands waving in front of me, his thin hair on end, his ragged beard giving his eyes an added expression of anxiety. His body was a poor affair, his legs thin and uncertain, an incipient stomach causing his waistcoat suddenly to fall inwards somewhere half-way up his chest, his feet in ill-shapen boots, and his neck absurdly small inside his high stiff collar. His stiff collar jutting sharply into his weak chin was perhaps his most striking feature. Most Russians of his careless habits wore soft collars or students’ shirts that fastened tight about the neck, but this high white collar was with Markovitch a sign and a symbol, the banner of his early ambitions; it was the first and last of him. He changed it every day, it was always high and sharp, gleaming and clean, and it must have hurt him very much. He wore with it a shabby black tie that ran as far up the collar as it could go, and there was a sense of pathos and struggle about this tie as though it were a wild animal trying to escape over an imprisoning wall. He would stand clutching my stove as though it assured his safety in a dangerous country; then suddenly he would break away from it and start careering up and down my room, stopping for an instant to gaze through my window at the sea and the ships, then off again, swinging his arms, his anxious eyes searching everywhere for confirmation of the ambitions that still enflamed him.
For the root and soul of him was that he was greatly ambitious. He had been born, I learnt, in some small town in the Moscow province, and his father had been a schoolmaster in the place—a kind of Perodonov, I should imagine, from the things that Markovitch told me about him. The father, at any rate, was a mean, malicious, and grossly sensual creature, and he finally lost his post through his improper behaviour towards some of his own small pupils. The family then came to evil days, and at a very early age young Markovitch was sent to Petrograd to earn what he could with his wits. He managed to secure the post of a secretary to an old fellow who was engaged in writing the life of his grandfather—a difficult book, as the grandfather had been a voluminous letter-writer, and this correspondence had to be collected and tabulated. For months, and even years, young Markovitch laboriously endeavoured to arrange these old yellow letters, dull, pathetic, incoherent. His patron grew slowly imbecile, but through the fogs that increasingly besieged him saw only this one thing clearly, that the letters must be arranged. He kept Markovitch relentlessly at his table, allowing him no pleasures, feeding him miserably and watching him personally undress every evening lest he should have secreted certain letters somewhere on his body. There was something almost sadist apparently in the old gentleman’s observation of Markovitch’s labours.
It was during these years that Markovitch’s ambitions took flame. He was always as he told me having “amazing ideas.” I asked him—What kind of ideas? “Ideas by which the world would be transformed.... Those letters were all old, you know, and dusty, and yellow, and eaten, some of them, by rats, and they’d lie on the floor and I’d try to arrange them in little piles according to their dates.... There’d be rows of little packets all across the floor..., and then somehow, when one’s back was turned, they’d move, all of their own wicked purpose—and one would have to begin all over again, bending with one’s back aching, and seeing always the stupid handwriting.... I hated it, Ivan Andreievitch, of course I hated it, but I had to do it for the money. And I lived in his house, too, and as he got madder it wasn’t pleasant. He wanted me to sleep with him because he saw things in the middle of the night, and he’d catch hold of me and scream and twist his fat legs round me... no, it wasn’t agreeable.On ne sympatichne saff-szem. He wasn’t a nice man at all. But while I was sorting the letters these ideas would come to me and I would be on fire.... It seemed to me that I was to save the world, and that it would not be difficult if only one might be resolute enough. That was the trouble—to be resolute. One might say to oneself, ‘On Friday October 13th I will do so and so, and then on Saturday November 3rd I will do so and so, and then on December 24th it will be finished.’ But then on October 13th one is, may be, in quite another mood—one is even ill possibly—and so nothing is done and the whole plan is ruined. I would think all day as to how I would make myself resolute, and I would say when old Feodor Stepanovitch would pinch my ear and deny me more soup, ‘Ah ha, you wait, you old pig-face—you wait until I’ve mastered my resolution—and then I’ll show you!’ I fancied, for instance, that if I could command myself sufficiently I could just go to people and say, ‘You must have bath-houses like this and this’—I had all the plans ready, you know, and in the hottest room you have couches like this, and you have a machine that beats your back—so, so, so—not those dirty old things that leave bits of green stuff all over you—and so on, and so on. But better ideas than that, ideas about poverty and wealth, no more kings, you know, nor police, but not your cheap Socialism that fellows like Boris Nicolaievitch shout about; no, real happiness, so that no one need work as I did for an old beast who didn’t give you enough soup, and have to keep quiet, all the same and say nothing. Ideas came like flocks of birds, so many that I couldn’t gather them all but had sometimes to let the best ones go. And I had no one to talk to about them—only the old cook and the girl in the kitchen, who had a child by old Feodor that he wouldn’t own,—but she swore it was his, and told every one the time when it happened and where it was and all.... Then the old man fell downstairs and broke his neck, and he’d left me some money to go on with the letters....”
At this point Markovitch’s face would become suddenly triumphantly malevolent, like the face of a schoolboy who remembers a trick that he played on a hated master. “Do you think I went on with them, Ivan Andreievitch? no, not I... but I kept the money.”
“That was wrong of you,” I would say gravely.
“Yes—wrong of course. But hadn’t he been wrong always? And after all, isn’t everybody wrong? We Russians have no conscience, you know, about anything, and that’s simply because we can’t make up our minds as to what’s wrong and what’s right, and even if we do make up our minds it seems a pity not to let yourself go when you may be dead to-morrow. Wrong and right.... What words!... Who knows? Perhaps it would have been the greatest wrong in the world to go on with the letters, wasting everybody’s time, and for myself, too, who had so many ideas, that life simply would never be long enough to think them all out.”
It seemed that shortly after this he had luck with a little invention, and this piece of luck was, I should imagine, the ruin of his career, as pieces of luck so often are the ruin of careers. I could never understand what precisely his invention was, it had something to do with the closing of doors, something that you pulled at the bottom of the door, so that it shut softly and didn’t creak with the wind. A Jew bought the invention, and gave Markovitch enough money to lead him confidently to believe that his fortune was made. Of course it was not, he never had luck with an invention again, but he was bursting with pride and happiness, set up house for himself in a little flat on the Vassily Ostrov—and met Vera Michailovna. I wish I could give some true idea of the change that came over him when he reached this part of his story. When he had spoken of his childhood, his father, his first struggles to live, his life with his old patron, he had not attempted to hide the evil, the malice, the envy that there was in his soul. He had even emphasised it, I might fancy, for my own especial benefit, so that I might see that he was not such a weak, romantic, sentimental creature as I had supposed—although God knows I had never fancied him romantic. Now when he spoke of his wife his whole body changed. “She married me out of pity,” he told me. “I hated her for that, and I loved her for that, and I hate and love her for it still.”
Here I interrupted him and told him that perhaps it was better that he should not confide in me the inner history of his marriage.
“Why not?” he asked me suspiciously.
“Because I’m only an acquaintance, you scarcely know me. You may regret it afterwards when you’re in another mood.”
“Oh, you English!” he said contemptuously; “you’re always to be trusted. As a nation you’re not, but as one man to another you’re not interested enough in human nature to give away secrets.”
“Well, tell me what you like,” I said. “Only I make no promises about anything.”
“I don’t want you to,” he retorted; “I’m only telling you what every one knows. Wasn’t I aware from the first moment that she married me out of pity, and didn’t they all know it, and laugh and tell her she was a fool. She knew that she was a fool too, but she was very young, and thought it fine to sacrifice herself for an idea. I was ill and I talked to her about my future. She believed in it, she thought I could do wonderful things if only some one looked after me. And at the same time despised me for wanting to be looked after.... And then I wasn’t so ugly as I am now. She had some money of her own, and we took in lodgers, and I loved her, as I love her now, so that I could kiss her feet and then hate her because she was kind to me. She only cares for her sister, Nina; and because I was jealous of the girl and hated to see Vera good to her I had her to live with us, just to torture myself and show that I was stronger than all of them if I liked.... And so I am, than her beastly uncle the doctor and all the rest of them—let him do what he likes....”
It was the first time that he had mentioned Semyonov.
“He’s coming back,” I said.
“Oh, is he?” snarled Markovitch. “Well, he’d better look out.” Then his voice, his face, even the shape of his body, changed once again. “I’m not a bad man, Ivan Andreievitch. No, I’m not.... You think so of course, and I don’t mind if you do. But I love Vera, and if she loved me I could do great things. I could astonish them all. I hear them say, ‘Ah, that Nicholas Markovitch, he’s no good... with his inventions. What did a fine woman like that marry such a man for?’ I know what they say. But I’m strong if I like. I gave up drink when I wished. I can give up anything. And when I succeed they’ll see—and then we’ll have enough money not to need these people staying with us and despising us....”
“No one despises you, Nicolai Leontievitch,” I interrupted.
“And what does it matter if they do?” he fiercely retorted. “I despise them—all of them. It’s easy for them when everything goes well with them, but with me everything goes wrong. Everything!... But I’m strong enough to make everything go right—and I will.”
This was, for the time, the end of his confidences. He had, I was sure, something further to tell me, some plan, some purpose, but he decided suddenly that he would keep it to himself, although I am convinced that he had only told me his earlier story in order that I might understand this new idea of his. But I did not urge him to tell me. My interest in life had not yet sufficiently revived; it was, after all, none of my business.
For the rest, it seemed that he had been wildly enthusiastic about the war at its commencement. He had had great ideas about Russia, but now he had given up all hope. Russia was doomed; and Germany, whom he hated and admired, would eat her up. And what did it matter? Perhaps Germany would “run Russia,” and then there would be order and less thieving, and this horrible war would stop. How foolish it had been to suppose that any one in Russia would ever do anything. They were all fools and knaves and idle in Russia—like himself.
And so he left me.
On Christmas Eve, late in the evening, I went into a church. It was my favourite church in Petrograd, rising at the English Prospect end of the Quay, with its white rounded towers pure and quiet and modest.
I had been depressed all day. I had not been well, and the weather was harsh, a bitterly cold driving wind beating down the streets and stroking the ice of the canal into a dull grey colour. Christmas seemed to lift into sharper, bitterer irony the ghastly horrors of this end endless war. Last Christmas I had been too ill to care, and the Christmas before I had been at the Front when the war had been young and full of hope, and I had seen enough nobility and self-sacrifice to be reassured about the true stuff of the human soul. Now all that seemed to be utterly gone. On the one side my mind was filled with my friends, John Trenchard and Marie Ivanovna. The sacrifice that they had made seemed to be wicked and useless. I had lost altogether that conviction of the continuance and persistence of their souls that I had, for so long, carried with me. They were dead, dead... simply dead. There at the Front one had believed in many things. Here in this frozen and starving town, with every ghost working against every human, there was assurance of nothing—only deep foreboding and an ominous silence. The murder of Rasputin still hung over every head. The first sense of liberty had passed, and now his dirty malicious soul seemed to be watching us all, reminding us that he had not left us, but was waiting for the striking of some vast catastrophe that the friends whom he had left behind him to carry on his work were preparing. It was this sense of moving so desperately and so hopelessly in the dark that was with me. Any chance that there had seemed to be of Russia rising from the war with a free soul appeared now to be utterly gone. Before our eyes the powers that ruled us were betraying us, laughing at us, selling us. And we did not know who was our enemy, who our friend, whom to believe, of whom to take counsel. Peculation and lying and the basest intrigue was on every side of us, hunger for which there was no necessity, want in a land packed with everything. I believe that there may have been very well another side to the picture, but at that time we could not see; we did not wish to see, we were blindfolded men....
I entered the church and found that the service was over. I passed through the aisle into the little rounded cup of dark and gold where the altars were. Here there were still collected a company of people, kneeling, some of them, in front of the candles, others standing there, motionless like statues, their hands folded, gazing before them. The candles flung a mist of dim embroidery upon the walls, and within the mist the dark figures of the priests moved to and fro. An old priest with long white hair was standing behind a desk close to me, and reading a long prayer in an unswerving monotonous voice. There was the scent of candles and cold stone and hot human breath in the little place. The tawdry gilt of the Ikons glittered in the candle-light, and an echo of the cold wind creeping up the long dark aisle blew the light about so that the gilt was like flashing piercing eyes. I wrapped my Shuba closely about me, and stood there lost in a hazy, indefinite dream.
I was comforted and touched by the placid, mild, kindly faces of those standing near me. “No evil here....” I thought. “Only ignorance, and for that others are responsible.”
I was lost in my dream and I did not know of what I was dreaming. The priest’s voice went on, and the lights flickered, and it was as though some one, a long way off, were trying to give me a message that it was important that I should hear, important for myself and for others. There came over me, whence I know not, a sudden conviction of the fearful power of Evil, a sudden realisation, as though I had been shown something, a scene or a picture or writing which had brought this home to me.... The lights seemed to darken, the priest’s figure faded, and I felt as though the message that some one had been trying to deliver to me had been withdrawn. I waited a moment, looking about me in a bewildered fashion, as though I had in reality just woken from sleep. Then I left the church.
Outside the cold air was intense. I walked to the end of the Quay and leaned on the stone parapet. The Neva seemed vast like a huge, white, impending shadow; it swept in a colossal wave of frozen ice out to the far horizon, where tiny, twinkling lights met it and closed it in. The bridges that crossed it held forth their lights, and there were the gleams, like travelling stars, of the passing trams, but all these were utterly insignificant against the vast body of the contemptuous ice. On the farther shore the buildings rose in a thin, tapering line, looking as though they had been made of black tissue paper, against the solid weight of the cold, stony sky. The Peter and Paul Fortress, the towers of the Mohammedan Mosque were thin, immaterial, ghostly, and the whole line of the town was simply a black pencilled shadow against the ice, smoke that might be scattered with one heave of the force of the river. The Neva was silent, but beneath that silence beat what force and power, what contempt and scorn, what silent purposes?
I saw then, near me, and gazing, like myself, on to the river the tall, broad figure of a peasant, standing, without movement, black against the sky.
He seemed to dominate the scene, to be stronger and more contemptuous than the ice itself, but also to be in sympathy with it.
I made some movement, and he turned and looked at me. He was a fine man, with a black beard and noble carriage. He passed down the Quay and I turned towards home.
About four o’clock on Christmas afternoon I took some flowers to Vera Michailovna. I found that the long sitting-room had been cleared of all furniture save the big table and the chairs round it. About a dozen middle-aged ladies were sitting about the table and solemnly playing “Lotto.” So serious were they that they scarcely looked up when I came in. Vera Michailovna said my name and they smiled and some of them bowed, but their eyes never left the numbered cards. “Dvar... Peedecat... Cheteeriy... Zurock Tree... Semdecet Voisim”... came from a stout and good-natured lady reading the numbers as she took them from the box. Most of the ladies were healthy, perspiring, and of a most amiable appearance. They might, many of them, have been the wives of English country clergymen, so domestic and unalarmed were they. I recognised two Markovitch aunts and a Semyonov cousin.
There was a hush and a solemnity about the proceedings. Vera Michailovna was very busy in the kitchen, her face flushed and her sleeves rolled up; Sacha, the servant, malevolently assisting her and scolding continually the stout and agitated country girl who had been called in for the occasion.
“All goes well,” Vera smilingly assured me. “Half-past six it is—don’t be late.”
“I will be in time,” I said.
“Do you know, I’ve asked your English friend. The big one.”
“Lawrence?... Is he coming?”
“Yes. At least I understood so on the telephone, but he sounded confused. Do you think he will want to come?”
“I’m sure he will,” I answered.
“Afterwards I wasn’t sure. I thought he might think it impertinent when we know him so little. But he could easily have said if he didn’t want to come, couldn’t he?”
There seemed to me something unusual in the way that she asked me these questions. She did not usually care whether people were offended or no. She had not time to consider that, and in any case she despised people who took offence easily.
I would perhaps have said something, but the country girl dropped a plate and Sacha leapt upon the opportunity. “Drunk!... What did I say, having such a girl? Is it not better to do things for yourself? But no—of course no one cares for my advice, as though last year the same thing....” And so on.
I left them and went home to prepare for the feast.
I returned punctually at half-past six and found every one there. Many of the ladies had gone, but the aunts remained, and there were other uncles and some cousins. We must have been in all between twenty and thirty people. The table was now magnificently spread. There was a fine glittering Father Christmas in the middle, a Father Christmas of German make, I am afraid. Ribbons and frosted strips of coloured paper ran in lines up and down the cloth. The “Zakuska” were on a side-table near the door—herrings and ham and smoked fish and radishes and mushrooms and tongue and caviare and, most unusual of all in those days, a decanter of vodka.
No one had begun yet; every one stood about, a little uneasy and awkward, with continuous glances flung at the “Zakuska” table. Of the company Markovitch first caught my eye. I had never seen him so clean and smart before. His high, piercing collar was of course the first thing that one saw; then one perceived that his hair was brushed, his beard trimmed, and that he wore a very decent suit of rather shiny black. This washing and scouring of him gave him a curiously subdued and imprisoned air; I felt sympathetic towards him; I could see that he was anxious to please, happy at the prospect of being a successful host, and, to-night, most desperately in love with his wife. That last stood out and beyond all else. His eyes continually sought her face; he had the eyes of a dog watching and waiting for its master’s appreciative word.
I had never before seen Vera Michailovna so fine and independent and, at the same time, so kind and gracious. She was dressed in white, very plain and simple, her shining black hair piled high on her head, her kind, good eyes watching every one and everything to see that all were pleased. She, too, was happy to-night, but happy also in a strange, subdued, quiescent way, and I felt, as I always did about her, that her soul was still asleep and untouched, and that much of her reliance and independence came from that. Uncle Ivan was in his smart clothes, his round face very red and he wore his air of rather ladylike but inoffensive superiority. He stood near the table with the “Zakuska,” and his eyes rested there. I do not now remember many of the Markovitch and Semyonov relations. There was a tall thin young man, rather bald, with a short black moustache; he was nervous and self-assertive, and he had a high, shrill voice. He talked incessantly. There were several delightful, middle-aged women, quiet and ready to be pleased with everything—the best Russian type of all perhaps, women who knew life, who were generously tolerant, kind-hearted, with a quiet sense of humour and no nonsense about them. There was one fat red-faced man in a very tight black coat, who gave his opinion always about food and drink. He was from Moscow—his name Paul Leontievitch Rozanov—and I met him on a later occasion of which I shall have to tell in its place. Then there were two young girls who giggled a great deal and whispered together. They hung around Nina and stroked her hair and admired her dress, and laughed at Boris Grogoff and any one else who was near them.
Nina was immensely happy. She loved parties of course, and especially parties in which she was the hostess. She was like a young kitten or puppy in a white frock, with her hair tumbling over her eyes. She was greatly excited, and as joyous as though there were no war, and no afflicted Russia, and nothing serious in all the world. This was the first occasion on which I suspected that Grogoff cared for her. Outwardly he did nothing but chaff and tease her, and she responded in that quick rather sharp and very often crudely personal way at which foreigners for the first time in Russian company so often wonder. Badinage with Russians so quickly passes to lively and noisy quarrelling, which in its turn so suddenly fades into quiet contented amiability that it is little wonder that the observer feels rather breathless at it all. Grogoff was a striking figure, with his fine height and handsome head and bold eyes, but there was something about him that I did not like. Immensely self-confident, he nevertheless seldom opened his mouth without betraying great ignorance about almost everything. He was hopelessly ill-educated, and was the more able therefore from the very little knowledge that he had to construct a very simple Socialist creed in which the main statutes were that everything should be taken from the rich and given to the poor, the peasants should have all the land, and the rulers of the world be beheaded. He had no knowledge of other countries, although he talked very freely of what he called his “International Principles.” I could not respect him as I could many Russian revolutionaries, because he had never on any occasion put himself out or suffered any inconvenience for his principles, living as he did, comfortably, with all the food and clothes that he needed. At the same time he was, on the other hand, kindly and warm-hearted, and professed friendship for me, although he despised what he called my “Capitalistic tendencies.” Had he only known, he was far richer and more autocratic than I!
In the midst of this company Henry Bohun was rather shy and uncomfortable. He was suspicious always that they would laugh at his Russian (what mattered it if they did?), and he was distressed by the noise and boisterous friendliness of every one. I could not help smiling to myself as I watched him. He was learning very fast. He would not tell any one now that “he really thought that he did understand Russia,” nor would he offer to put his friends right about Russian characteristics and behaviour. He watched the young giggling girls, and the fat Rozanov, and the shrill young man with ill-concealed distress. Very far these from the Lizas and Natachas of his literary imagination—and yet not so far either, had he only known.
He pinned all his faith, as I could see, to Vera Michailovna, who did gloriously fulfil his self-instituted standards. And yet he did not know her at all! He was to suffer pain there too.
At dinner he was unfortunately seated between one of the giggling girls and a very deaf old lady who was the great-aunt of Nina and Vera. This old lady trembled like an aspen leaf, and was continually dropping beneath the table a little black bag that she carried. She could make nothing of Bohun’s Russian, even if she heard it, and was under the impression that he was a Frenchman. She began a long quivering story about Paris to which she had once been, how she had lost herself, and how a delightful Frenchman had put her on her right path again.... “A chivalrous people, your countrymen”.... she repeated, nodding her head so that her long silver earrings rattled again—“gay and chivalrous!” Bohun was not, I am afraid, as chivalrous as he might have been, because he knew that the girl on his other side was laughing at his attempts to explain that he was not a Frenchman. “Stupid old woman!” he said to me afterwards. “She dropped her bag under the table at least twenty times!”