XI

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 windowpanes 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 Cecedek. 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 Cecedek 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 Cecedek 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 Cecedek, 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 goldmines 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.⁠ ⁠…