IX

It was a day, I remember, of a peculiar warmth and fragrance, when you could feel that winter has become spring. I was strolling down the Nevski, and upon the wide, lighted splendour of this queen of streets I ran into Nikolai Vasilievich, with a pretty flapper on his arm.

“Andrei Andreiech!”

“Nikolai Vasilievich!”

And we shook hands warmly.

“May I introduce⁠—?”

And I was introduced.

I could hardly recognize him. His careworn look seemed to have deserted him in his dissipation, as if ashamed to accompany him thither. He seemed ten years younger in her presence. He was smarter, bore himself better, seemed actually taller, bigger.⁠ ⁠… Oh, was it at all the same Nikolai Vasilievich who wrangled so furiously with Fanny Ivanovna? This Nikolai Vasilievich was as happy as a schoolboy. But before we had walked ten yards Nikolai Vasilievich was already expatiating on his unhappy family affairs. “Well, well!” he sighed. He rather liked to sigh over his sins; indeed it appeared that his distressing family burdens formed the sole subject of his conversation with this engaging flapper.

“I keep telling Nikolai,” said Zina, “ ‘don’t marry me, don’t. It is superfluous. I love you so much that I am perfectly prepared to live with you⁠ ⁠… just to show you how I really love you.’ What is marriage? A piece of paper. It’s absurd. It means nothing. What do we care? What do I care? I have been reading Verbitskaya’s Springs of Happiness. She seems to agree with me.”

“No,” said her noble lover, “I wouldn’t think of taking advantage of your innocence. Verbitskaya is a fool. It would break your people’s hearts.”

“You are breaking your own people’s hearts, Nikolai Vasilievich,” I ventured.

“Exactly,” rejoined Nick. (He hardly looked old enough to warrant the dignity of “Nikolai Vasilievich.”) “I have broken enough hearts. I don’t want to break any more. I’ve had enough of this heartbreaking business, I can tell you. It is enough to break your own.”

“Your Oscar Wilde,” Zina turned to me, “said that hearts were made to be broken.”

“He also said,” I retorted, “that ‘We all kill the thing we love,’ and, in fact, a few other expensive things of that sort. But it is no reason, I assure you, why you should break anybody’s heart.”

“Exactly,” said Nicholas. “You think it very jolly to live together without being married, don’t you? But you just ask Fanny Ivanovna how she feels about it. No, my child, your Oscar Wilde is a fool.”

Quite automatically we turned into a cinema, the Parisiana in the Nevski, and witnessed the sort of stuff to which an uncomplaining public is still being treated every day and night all over the globe. When Nicholas left the box to get some chocolates Zina put her white-gloved hand on my arm. “I know,” she said, “Nikolai is being made to appear a blackguard by people who misunderstand his complex personality, but I am ready to give my life for him, Andrei Andreiech. Oh, you have no idea what a thoroughly good man he is when he is away from all those petty worries, those mean jealousies, those paltry domestic squabbles, those innumerable families all hanging round his neck, and he, alone, standing up against those legions, yes, legions of relatives and dependents and hangers-on. Oh, don’t laugh. I’m not excepting my own people. Oh, no! I am indeed ashamed, Andrei Andreiech, that it should be so. I had a dream last night. Shall I tell you what it was? It was Nikolai standing high upon a mountain peak, seeking to escape towards light and freedom and finding that he could not, because he was linked to the past. He tried to break the chains, but the past held him, clung to him, a monster with a thousand arms, like that picture in Gogol’s ‘Terrible Vengeance.’ He found the past too strong for him.

“Why can’t he break with the past? Why should the past always hold him? Why should he always bear the burden of these families? Andrei Andreiech! he hasn’t lived yet. For was that life? I want to help him, make him happy, rid him of these petty worries, these mean intrigues. I want to help, to help, to help. But how can I help?⁠ ⁠… I thought, all night I thought out solutions, and then I came to what seemed to me the one reasonable, the only just solution. I proposed that we should commit suicide together. But, Andrei Andreiech, he doesn’t seem to be very keen on it. Poor boy, with all these ugly worries he is becoming horribly materialistic.”

They took me that evening to see Zina’s people. They lived across the river, over on the Petersburg side, a very large family in a small flat. There were innumerable aunts and uncles, sisters-in-law, second cousins, and suchlike relatives, and of course a collection of giggling flappers practising the piano; two ancient grandfathers⁠—the oldest thing in veterans⁠—who had outlived their welcome, whose deaths, in fact, were looked forward to with undisguised impatience and freely discussed at meals; and a middle-aged doctor, his own health no better for his profession, with only a poor practice to support that swarm; and Nikolai Vasilievich, the mine-owner, standing behind them all like a benediction.

In addition there was Uncle Kostia, who, from what I could see, was living on the resources of his younger brother, Zina’s father. Uncle Kostia was a writer. Yet, though he had attained middle age, Uncle Kostia had never published a line. His two departments were history and philosophy, and everyone in the family had the greatest respect for Uncle Kostia and thought him very clever. Later I had occasion to observe Uncle Kostia at closer range. He would wake up extremely late and would then sit for hours on his bed, thinking. He did not communicate his thoughts to anybody else; but all the members of the family took it for granted that Uncle Kostia was very clever. Uncle Kostia rarely dressed and rarely washed. When at length he parted with his bed he would stroll about through all the rooms in his dressing-gown, and think. No one spoke to him because, for one thing, all were frightened of displaying their ignorance in conversation, for Uncle Kostia was very clever, and also, I think, because they were loth to interrupt the flow of Uncle Kostia’s thoughts. At length he would settle down at a writing-table near the window in his brother’s study, and then for a long time Uncle Kostia would rub his eyes. In a languid manner he would dip his pen into ink and his hand would proceed to sketch diagrams and flowers on the margin of his foolscap, and Uncle Kostia would stare long at the window. Perhaps a buzzing fly endeavouring to find an exit would arrest his flow of thoughts, or would promote them⁠—who knows?⁠—but Uncle Kostia would grow very still: and one by one the members of the family would leave the room on tiptoe, and the last one out would shut the door behind him noiselessly. For Uncle Kostia was writing. What he wrote no one knew; he had never breathed a word about it to anyone. All we knew was that Uncle Kostia was very clever. From what I could make out no one had ever seen a line of his writing. But that he thought a great deal there was no question. His life was spent in contemplation. But what it was he contemplated, equally no one knew.

Such was the family to which Nikolai Vasilievich extended his protectorate.

“He is such a really good man,” confided Zina’s mother, a grey-haired, God-fearing old lady. “And to be pursued by those two wicked women both bent on making his life miserable, these cold and heartless daughters who laugh at him⁠ ⁠… their own father! Andrei Andreiech, our lives are muddled up enough, God forgive us, and none of us knows where he is or how he stands or what he is about; but there are things that in our hearts we know we mustn’t do. And for his own daughters to go spying on their father, God forgive me, is the very limit. Just think of it, Andrei Andreiech, just think of it! Last Sunday, Zina tells me, she was about to meet Nikolai in the Summer Garden, and⁠—can you imagine it?⁠—his two daughters⁠—I forget which two⁠—with that Baron of theirs, followed them, pursued them wherever they went, giggling all the while as loud as they could, giggling.⁠ ⁠… Nikolai and Zina were finally compelled to board a tramcar to escape their pursuit. He wept when he came to me, Andrei Andreiech, and I have never seen Nikolai weep before. He said he hadn’t thought it possible of his daughters, Andrei Andreiech.”

After a somewhat sketchy dinner we all decided to go to the Saburov Theatre to see a new play. We proceeded accordingly in seven cabs and settled down in five boxes.

About halfway through the first act I perceived Nikolai give a start and then grow pale. I followed his gaze and then looked straight before me. In a box almost opposite our own sat Fanny Ivanovna, Sonia, Nina, Vera, Kniaz, and Baron Wunderhausen. For some absurd reason I, too, felt guilty and uncomfortable to the last degree, almost as if I had been caught red-handed in some disreputable act. Whether the silly play bored them and they were, like us, disgusted with the characteristic utterances of some well-to-do ex-student in the play holding forth on the disillusionment of life, or whether the sight of the prodigal Nicholas in his congenial surroundings was too much for Fanny Ivanovna; but they all left the theatre before the curtain fell on act two.

Nikolai Vasilievich seemed unusually morose as we drove home that night through the deserted streets of Petersburg. “The most perplexing thing about it all, Andrei Andreiech,” said he, “is⁠ ⁠… well, it’s like that fable of Krilov.” And he quoted the fable with that curious pride that Russians usually take in Krilov’s un-Russian (I think British) common sense, as he instanced the case of the load pulled jointly by the swan, the crab and the pike in their several characteristically individual directions with the distressing result⁠—the moral!⁠—that the load, the fabulist tells us, is today exactly where it was before they had started on their expedition. The paradox of Nikolai’s position was that he had fled from his many family responsibilities to this engaging flapper precisely because of the intolerable burden of so many responsibilities⁠—and had incurred additional ones.