Futility (12 page)

“There was, sir. I saw it myself.”

“I don’t mind the dog so much. Cats I hate. But I can’t stick the rat. Why did you tell me?”

I did not answer this.

“Can’t find them, sir,” I said, rising.

“They’ve gone, I hope,” said the Admiral.

“They’ve hidden themselves somewhere, I think.”

“Damn them! I shan’t be able to sleep all night.”

“Good night, sir,” said I.

The Admiral could not sleep. I heard him get out of bed and fumble with his stick beneath the furniture. I think the uncertainty of the whereabouts of the animals disturbed his peace of mind. Then I heard him creep into bed, and all was still. I could just hear the rain drum against the window-pane; and I thought that by now the cat had probably eaten up the rat.

NIKOLAI VASILIEVICH WAS TO CALL FOR ME AFTER lunch. At lunch there were many guests, and the conversation was necessarily political. I was impatient, for Nikolai Vasilievich might call at any moment; and the entire scheme of “Intervention” seemed to me, in my mood of acute expectancy, singularly unimportant. I watched the Admiral who in
his serious, deliberate way looked straight into his principal guest’s eyes and listened very earnestly and nodded with approval, while the guest, a Russian General, was talking arrant nonsense. In that stiff and martial attitude common to a certain type of Russian officer (who assumes it as it were in proof of grim determination) the guest was saying: “All these complaints about arrests and executions by the loyal troops—I decline to take them seriously. In the present wavering state of mind of the population you can’t guarantee that there won’t be people who will complain because the sun shines in the daytime only and not at night as well.”

The Admiral gave an emphatic nod; and at a glance I could see that he had classed his guest as a “good fellow.” The Admiral, I may explain, divided the world into two big camps: the humanity that he called “good fellows,” and the humanity that he called “rotters”—and there you are! Simple. (As a matter of fact, he used a substitute for this last word, but I am afraid the original is unprintable.) But while the guest was being engaged by General Bologoevski, a quiet silver-haired British Colonel took the opportunity of telling the Admiral in his quiet silvery manner the conclusion he in his quiet silvery mind had quietly arrived at after interviewing for many months innumerable Russian officers. “I am afraid,” said he, “that whenever you come to examine very carefully a Russian officer’s scheme for the restoration and salvation of his country, it invariably boils down to giving him a job.”

And at a glance I could see that the Admiral had classed the fellow as a “rotter.”

I forget the substance of the conversation of that lunch, which stands out in my memory merely on account of its coincidence with the day on which I met the family; but I remember how a remark of General Bologoevski’s, that he understood
the Bolshevik commissaries never washed, lit up the Admiral’s face with ominous glee, and one could guess at sight that he condemned the Bolshevik commissaries.

About two o’clock Nikolai Vasilievich called for me. We drove uphill, the driver flogging his two horses with unwarranted zeal. The day was bright, but the roads were muddy from the flood overnight. As we arrived, another cab drove up at the porch, and from it emerged Fanny Ivanovna and Kniaz. Kniaz made an insincere attempt to pay the cab-fare; but when Fanny Ivanovna said “It’s all right, I have some money,” Kniaz said “Very well,” and replaced the empty purse in his pocket.…

And for the next few minutes the three-roomed lodging of the little horse was the scene of a happy reunion.

Nina alone was absent from the household. Fanny Ivanovna was much annoyed and tackled Sonia on the subject.

“How do I know where she is?” Sonia remonstrated. Then she smiled and I felt that she knew all right; and then immediately she grew angry, and I felt that after all, perhaps, she did not know.

“We have no means of knowing, Fanny Ivanovna,” said Baron Wunderhausen.

“Pàv’l Pàvlch,” she said, “please don’t annoy me. You annoy me with your inconsequent talk, and I have asked you not to meddle … and to wash your neck.”

“He’s like Uncle Kostia!” Vera cried. “Has a bath once a year—whether clean or dirty.” She was pretty, growing prettier.

Baron Wunderhausen only shrugged his shoulders.

Then the door opened and Nina slipped into the room. I was staggered by her looks. To my mind she was irresistible. When she saw me she stopped dead. “Where have
you
come from?” she asked.

I explained confusedly, and a minute later she dismissed me and my arrival as a thing entirely commonplace, and turned to the others.

“Nina,” said Fanny Ivanovna sternly, “where have you been? I insist on your telling me.”

“And I won’t tell,” said Nina curtly.

“Nina,” I took it up, jokingly but with a sneaking sense of secretive authority resting on our “engagement” of four years ago, “where have you been? I too insist on your telling me.”

She looked at me with the expression that comes over people who are about to put out their tongue at you, and said:

“And I won’t tell.”

“And how do you find us?” Fanny Ivanovna asked. “Have we grown older? I think I have grown older. And Nikolai Vasilievich, too. And Kniaz.”

“No,” I lied. And assuredly the lie pleased her.

“And the children are just the same?”

“The children are just the same,” I agreed. “A bouquet. Three pretty kittens.”

Vera purred like one.

“But you haven’t much room here, have you?” I observed.

“What can we do?” she asked. “The town is packed with refugees. We can’t find anything better.”

“À la guerre comme à la guerre,”
remarked the Baron.

“Still, it is more comfortable than living in an hotel. Sonia, Nina and Vera sleep here on the sofa and the bed we drag out from the other room. The adjoining room is Nikolai Vasilievich’s and mine. The third is Pàv’l Pàvlch’s, the Baron’s. The others have remained at the hotel—I mean Kniaz and Eberheim. I don’t care what Magda Nikolaevna does, but I think she has now found a house. And Uncle Kostia and the rest of them will probably settle at his sister’s, the Olenins. Kniaz comes here for
his meals and spends the day with us … though lately”—she smiled—“he has been going out hunting.”

“Hunting!” I exclaimed, looking at the Prince’s well-shaved chin.

Kniaz passed his fingers between his skinny neck and his stiff collar in a nervous gesture and giggled feebly.

“He’s bought a gun,” said Nina.

“You should see the gun!” Vera cried.

Fanny Ivanovna smiled; and as we settled down to tea Nikolai Vasilievich chaffed Kniaz in his timid, deferential manner. “I went out hunting with him once. It’s a comedy! We see a hare. Kniaz pulls the trigger once—misfire. Pulls at it again—misfire. Pulls at it a third time—and the gun misfires for the third time. When he had pulled the trigger a fourth time there was a terrible explosion; a blaze of fire burst forth from the muzzle; the butt end hit him violently in the shoulder. And when the smoke had gradually dispersed we saw that the hare had evidently escaped undamaged. His instrument of murder was the only victim; and there I saw Kniaz looking at his gun: the trigger and most of the front piece had blown off in the concussion. But there he stood, still holding the instrument in his hands, puzzled beyond words.”

Nikolai Vasilievich looked at Kniaz and smiled kindly, as though to make up by it for any pain that his recital may have caused him.

Nina stretched a plate of sweets to me.

I looked at her interrogatively.

“With your tea,” she said.

“There is no sugar,” said Nikolai Vasilievich apologetically.

“I want to speak to you very seriously,” said Baron Wunderhausen, “about transferring to the English Service.”

“Now that Andrei Andreiech has arrived,” said Fanny
Ivanovna gaily, “we shall be able to get sugar and everything from the English.”

“The English are all right,” said Nikolai Vasilievich. “I always did have confidence in the English. If the English once begin a job you may be sure they’ll see it through. And if the first step is taken and the mining area is liberated, the war will soon be over.”

“I want to speak to you about my special qualifications for transferring to the English Service. I was born and educated—”

“Pàv’l Pàvlch,” cried Fanny Ivanovna, “please don’t interrupt. I want you, Andrei Andreiech, to translate an English letter Nikolai Vasilievich has received from his former mining-engineer, Mr. Thomson. Our English is not quite sufficient, though I’ve understood parts of it.”

I took the letter. Mr. Thomson, writing from an obscure address in Scotland, stated that the after-war conditions prevailing in the west of Europe had frankly disappointed him, and solicited an invitation to be reinstated in his former post as consulting-engineer in Nikolai Vasilievich’s gold-mines.

“It’s such a pity,” Fanny Ivanovna sighed. “Mr. Thomson is such a nice man. And now it seems he is so badly off. It must be terrible for his wife and children.”

“Well,” said Nikolai Vasilievich, “I say this: it’s no use Mr. Thomson coming out here
at present
, while the mines are still in Bolshevik hands. And I don’t want to hold out false hopes to Mr. Thomson, for one can never quite be sure what may happen in Siberia yet. But between ourselves, I may tell you that now that the English have arrived and—well, that this punitive expedition to the mines has been arranged, we have good reason to feel optimistic.”

“Well, let’s hope, let’s hope,” said Fanny Ivanovna.

But the three sisters looked as if they didn’t care a hang
about Mr. Thomson, the English, the mines or anybody else.

“Are you going to the dance?” said Nina.

“Which dance?”

“The Russian one—at the Green School.”

“But it will be Russian dances all the time.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Russian music, too.”

“We can dance fox-trots to krokoviaks, one-steps to march music, slow waltzes to anything you like. You must come.”

I knew I was going, but I liked to be asked, and I resisted lingeringly, to prolong the pleasure.

Of course I was going. Who could have resisted this sliding sidelong look; this shining semicircle of white teeth that revealed itself with each full smile; this lithe, sylphine young body?

The three sisters affected a stationary fox-trot.

The passions were aroused.

“Nikolai Vasilievich! Papa!”

He was dragged, like a resisting malefactor, struggling, to the piano, and made to play his one and only waltz. The Baron claimed Vera. Nina came automatically into my arms. I recaptured some of her familiar fragrance, as we danced between the sofa and round the table, dodging sundry chairs. Sonia stood demurely at the wall, abandoned by her husband in favour of a younger sister, but affecting an unconvincing
moue
of mirth. Then, owing to the shortness and simplicity of the tune, Nikolai Vasilievich’s technique broke down.

“I want to talk to you on this very serious question of transferring to the English Service.” The Baron had come up to me again. And I resorted to the classic answer of doubting whether there was “any vacancy.” “It doesn’t matter
where
,” he
said. “In Persia, or perhaps in Mesopotamia. I can’t serve here any longer.”

We sat silent in the heated room of the little wooden house creaking in the wind, and I felt lost and hidden amid all this sun and fir and solitude around us. Nikolai Vasilievich drank his tea and wondered if the Bolsheviks would hand him back his house and money at the bank, and if the Czechs, as obviously they ought, would compensate him for his loss on the gold-mines. He had great hopes, he said, of the punitive expedition; but there was one aspect—a moral one—that disturbed him greatly. He wondered whether the punitive expedition would turn out to be quite honest and would not do him out of his interests in the gold-mines altogether.

Afterwards he came up to me and said in a weary undertone: “You know, it will be very dull to-night—nothing but Russian dance music. Honestly, it would only spoil your evening if you went.”

“Don’t take any notice of him,” cried the three sisters simultaneously. “It will be very jolly. He’s only thinking of himself.”

“Nikolai!” cried Fanny Ivanovna. “What nonsense! You’ve already promised me to come. You’re their father and it’s your duty to take your children out. I refuse to go alone with them.”

As I entered the brilliantly illuminated ball-room, the three sisters, each claimed by an Allied officer, were fox-trotting, in defiance of the congregation. Nikolai Vasilievich, wearing a dinner-jacket, looked very angry, very lonely and very bored; and Fanny Ivanovna looked ominously triumphant.

“Poor Nikolai Vasilievich!” I said when Fanny Ivanovna and I were alone. “That dinner-jacket of his looks miserable and frightened as though it felt the outrage of being dragged into this mock festivity. It seems to say: ‘What have
I
done?’ ”

“Doesn’t matter. He is better where he is.

“He would only be with that girl of his if I had not insisted on his coming with us,” she added by way of after-thought.

“Zina?”

“
Ach!
Andrei Andreiech! It makes me so ill, so angry to think of it.”

Then Nikolai Vasilievich, ludicrously festive, strolled up to us.

“Well,” he muttered, yawning into his white-cuffed hand.

“Jolly dance,” I said.

“For those who dance,” he retorted in a voice as though I had foully and grievously betrayed him.

Then the music ceased abruptly. The three sisters, scantily and deliriously attired, glided up, and were met with an involuntary critical examination from the eyes of Fanny Ivanovna, who effected a few, to all appearance needless, pulls at their evening-gowns.

“I could hardly recognize Nina with her hair like this,” I remarked aloud.

With sylphine litheness, she slid between me and Baron Wunderhausen to the drawing-room.

“Really, I don’t like the way you’ve done your hair,” I said. “There’s nothing at the front.”