Futility

by William Gerhardie

  “Chekhov,” he said at last, “is a great artist.…”

  I walked home with them to their datcha along the dark and muddy road—it had been raining while we were in the theatre—Nina clinging to my arm.

  III

  IT WAS ON ONE OF THOSE LONG, HAPPY EVENINGS which it had now become my custom to spend regularly at their large, luxurious flat in the Mohovaya in St. Petersburg, that I was further initiated into the domestic affairs of the Bursanov family.

  They had been sitting silently for a time. Nina seemed sad; Sonia and Vera sulky. It was twilight, but no one had thought of switching on the light. No one would dance. I played the piano for a while, and then stopped.

  “What is the matter, Nina?” I asked.

  She was silent, and then said in her childish open manner, “Oh, Papa and Fanny Ivanovna.”

  “What have they done?”

  “They are always quarrelling, always, always, always.”

  I paused, hating to appear intrusive.

  “You know,” she said in that half humorous, half serious way she had of speaking, and then paused a little, and then decided to have it out.

  “Papa and Fanny Ivanovna are not … legally married.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “How did you know?”

  “I suspected it.”

  “Did Vera tell you?”

  “I didn’t!” cried Vera in loud protest. She was fourteen, but tried to look two years older, and indeed succeeded. “I’d never dream of telling such a thing.”

  She was shocked and angry at the unjust accusation so provokingly flung at her. It had seemed to me for some time past that there was no love wasted between Vera and her two elder sisters. Vera was different.

  “We can’t stand this any longer,” said Sonia. “I am sick to death of their quarrelling. Day and night, day and night.… If they’d only stop at least when we have guests. But no, they are worse than ever then.”

  I could bear her out there—that is, if I were really classed as a guest. For I was, rather, what Nikolai Vasilievich called “svoy chelovek,” one of the family, so to speak, and in my presence Nikolai Vasilievich and Fanny Ivanovna certainly let themselves go. They were like cat and dog. There was no mercy shown, no gallantry displayed. Nikolai Vasilievich gibed at her, imitating her murderous Russian with a malicious skill that set the room shrieking with laughter. Fanny Ivanovna, her white face flushing in patches of unwholesome pink, would writhe with pain, and, having gathered her forces, give back as good as she got. Nikolai Vasilievich would snatch out some isolated word that she had mispronounced and, adding some pepper of his own, would fling it into the audience of friends and strangers that he had asked to dinner, and so pluck out the sting at her expense.

  “I’m sick of home,” Sonia said. “I shall run away.”

  “How can you run away?”

  “I’ll marry and run away.”

  “No one will marry her,” said Vera from her perch in the far corner.

  Nina sat mute, wearing her natural expression, half serious, half ironic.

  “What do they quarrel about?”

  Nina looked up at Sonia. “Shall I tell?”

  “Of course.”

  “Aha!” Vera cried maliciously. “Aha!”

  “You shut up!” said Sonia.

  Nina looked vaguely at the window.

  “Papa wants to marry again.”

  The rustle of Fanny Ivanovna’s approach was heralded through the air.

  She appeared.

  “Andrei Andreiech!” she cried. She always greeted me in this way, with acclamation. “How d’you do!”

  “How dark! Nina! Vera! Sonia! Why don’t you light up the elektrichno!”

  “How many times, Fanny Ivanovna,” said Sonia sternly, “have I told you that it is not elektrichno, but elektrichestvo?”

  “Ach! It’s all the same.”

  “It’s not all the same, Fanny Ivanovna.”

  “Andrei Andreiech! What news?”

  “None, I am afraid, Fanny Ivanovna.”

  “Has Nikolai Vasilievich come?”

  “You know he never comes,” said Sonia, “and yet you always keep supper waiting.”

  “I’m tired of waiting for Papa,” Nina said petulantly, lying back on the sofa and swinging her pretty legs.

  “He is later and later every day,” came from Vera’s perch. “Fanny Ivanovna, I’m hungry.”

  Sonia was really angry. “I would rather he didn’t come at all, than just come to sleep here. Let him stay there, Fanny Ivanovna. Let him!”

  “Ach! I think he might still come if we waited a little longer. Are you very hungry, Andrei Andreiech?”

  “Say yes! Say yes!” cried the three sisters. I was amazed at this open display of hostility towards their own father, especially from Sonia. I understood the look in Fanny Ivanovna’s eyes.

  “No, Fanny Ivanovna,” I said, “not at all.”

  “Well, then we’ll wait just a little longer. He promised to come.”

  There was a ring at the bell.

  “It’s Nikolai Vasilievich!” cried Fanny Ivanovna.

  But Nina shook her head. “Papa never rings so timidly. It must be Pàvel Pàvlovich.”

  The three sisters sprang off their perches and dashed into the hall.

  “Ah!” we heard Sonia’s voice.

  “Who is it?… Kniaz?” shouted Fanny Ivanovna.

  “No,” came the answer, “the other one.”

  “Oh, the Baron. They are both Pàvel Pàvlovichi,” sighed Fanny Ivanovna as though the fact distressed her; but it was really because she disapproved of them both that she sighed.

  Baron Wunderhausen as barons do in Russia, came from the Baltic Provinces, spoke Russian and German equally well, excelled in French, knew English, was polite, cunning and adaptable to any circumstances, had big calf’s eyes, was habitually somewhat over-dressed, twenty-five years of age, and had a billet in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. He came regularly every evening, made love with his eyes, and we danced.…

  We danced, and then had supper, having given Nikolai Vasilievich up as we gave him up regularly every evening after waiting for him for two hours. His absence annoyed everybody, for they suspected where he was.

  “I am going away,” said Nina as she danced with me.

  “Going away? Where?”

  “To Moscow,” she said, looking up. She had a wonderful way of looking up at you when she danced. She had a charming way of speaking quietly, enigmatically, half humorously, half lovingly.

  “For always?” I cried in dismay.

  In answer she held up two fingers behind my head which was supposed to give me the appearance of a horned devil, and laughed. I revelled in her laughter.

  “For how long?” I asked.

  “Two months.”

  “Why?”

  “To see Mama.”

  “I didn’t know you had a Mama in Moscow.”

  “I have,” she made the obvious answer and I smiled, and she laughed and again held up the devil’s horns.

  “What is she doing in Moscow?” I asked, and felt it was a somewhat silly question.

  “Living,” she replied. And it seemed to me that she blushed. And for some reason that blush seemed to tell me that there, too, there was trouble.

  “Who are you going with?”

  “Vera. She is going back for good. Mama wants to keep her.”

  “Aren’t you sorry?”

  “No.”

  “Good God!” I cried.

  “I am sorry to leave Sonia.”

  “But you are coming back to her?” I asked anxiously.

  “Yes, but I am sorry to leave her, all the same. I am sorry to leave Fanny Ivanovna,” she added.

  “And Papa?”

  She reflected a little. “No,” she whispered.

  “And whom else?” I persisted, smiling into her eyes and trying to press my own claims.

  “I won’t tell,” she said.

  “
When are you going?”

  “To-morrow morning. We only decided last night, Fanny Ivanovna and I,” she said quietly, “that I should go.”

  “To take Vera to Moscow?”

  She smiled enigmatically. We danced two rounds before she answered.

  “That’s what we tell Papa.”

  I looked at Sonia, as she passed us with her partner, “hesitating” marvellously. She made a moue at me and smiled. I knew that she was happy. The Baron danced with that characteristic air of his which conveyed that it gave him pleasure to give pleasure.

  IV

  I SAW THEM OFF NEXT MORNING IN THE DESOLATING atmosphere of the Nicholas Station on a cold November morning. They were wrapped in heavy furs. The men had turned up the collars of their shubas against the biting frost. There was snow on the platform. We walked up and down quickly in order to warm our feet. Nikolai Vasilievich presented a pitiable sight with his pince-nez all blinded with snow, his moustache frozen, and his nose, reddened by the cold, protruding from his turned-up collar.

  “Nina,” he said.

  “Yes?” She turned round.

  “Don’t go.”

  “I must.”

  “You won’t come back. She will keep you.”

  She shook her head.

  “Don’t go, Nina.”

  “Don’t go,” I said.

  She stood thoughtful, in indecision.

  “Don’t, Nina,” cut in Nikolai Vasilievich.

  She did not answer.

  “Nina,” he said again.

  “No, she must,” intervened Fanny Ivanovna. “This is all nonsense! She will go and come back quickly. Won’t you, Nina?”

  “Yes,” said Nina.

  She turned to me and slipped her hand under my arm. “I won’t let you go,” she said petulantly. “You’ll have to come with me.”

  “You know I can’t.”

  “I won’t let you go.”

  “Nina,” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “Come here.”

  I took her aside.

  “Nina, will you marry me?”

  She looked flippant and humorous and yet there was just a trace of seriousness in her look.

  “Yes.”

  I felt relieved—oddly as I might feel if I had just concluded a satisfactory business transaction.

  The second whistle went, and with the other passengers they boarded the train. Nikolai Vasilievich came up to her to say good-bye and probably thought he might chance it once again.

  “Don’t go, Nina. Nina!”

  “I shall come back,” said Nina.

  Then they all said good-bye to Vera, and no excess of emotion was displayed on either side.

  “Good-bye!” was said again. Then the train moved, and they waved handkerchiefs.

  V

  I CALLED ON THEM ONE EVENING IN NINA’S absence and chanced to find Fanny Ivanovna alone. Nikolai Vasilievich, as ever, was out. Sonia had gone to see a friend.

  “Sit down, Andrei Andreiech,” she said. “I am always doing needlework, as you see.…”

  I took a chair.

  “I do it.… It is extraordinary, Andrei Andreiech. I thought I would do it so as not to think, but it’s just the very work to make you think. And so I gave it up and began reading in order to forget, in order not to think, and I found, Andrei Andreiech, that I could not read because I had to think. I think all day and night. Ach! Andrei Andreiech.”

  And I knew that she was going to confide in me.

  “Ach! Andrei Andreiech! Andrei Andreiech! If you only knew.…”

  She glanced behind her at the door to make sure that nobody could hear her.

  “Ach! Andrei Andreiech!”

  I waited patiently for her to begin.

  She said “Ach! Andrei Andreiech!” several times more and then began. She spoke in marks of exclamation.

  “I suppose you know, Andrei Andreiech, that I am not Nikolai Vasilievich’s … legal wife?”

  “I know,” I said.

  “How did you know?” she turned on me.

  “I suspected it.”

  She paused.

  “Well, now that you actually know so much, I feel that I must tell you everything, if only in fairness to myself. But don’t tell the children. They would be shocked if they knew that I had told you.”

  “No,” said I.

  “Ach! Andrei Andreiech, you know.… You know.…” She suddenly plunged into her native German, the foreign Russian tongue being inadequate to express her overflowing feelings, but now and then, quite unintentionally, she would employ some Russian word that came handy to her, that in her excitement she could not be bothered to translate as she proceeded to unload her feelings—an urgency too long deferred.

  “Andrei Andreiech!” she said again and again in a kind of appeal to my sense of justice. “Sie sollen wissen that I met Nikolai Vasilievich in Switzerland, in Basel, when he was there on a cure, after he had separated from his wife. He was very handsome. He is still very handsome, ach! much too handsome. You would not think that he was fifty-three.… Ach! Andrei Andreiech, I have so much, so very much to tell you that I don’t really know where to begin.…

  “Well, I met him. I knew that he was married; he told me so himself from the first. He was always straight and honourable and above-board. He said that he had separated finally from his wife and expected to get a divorce, and that I was to come to Petersburg with him and wait till he got his divorce, and then we were to be married at once. You see, we loved each other.” She looked at me.

  “Quite,” I said.

  “I must tell you here,” she continued, “more about myself and my feelings and desires at that time. I belong (I hope you will forgive me for saying it, but it is a salient point in my tragedy) to a very proud family indeed. My father and all my brothers were officers in the German Guards. Soon after my father’s death we lost all our money. I had to set out in search of a livelihood because I, as the eldest sister, had to ensure that my sisters’ education was not interrupted and that it should be possible for my brothers to remain in the army. I had a good voice and … I went on the stage, into musical comedy. And, Andrei Andreiech, curious, is it not, that in spite of the fact that I and I alone kept the whole of our family—my sisters, my brothers, my aged mother, my grandfather, my grandmother and two of my aunts—they were ashamed of me. You see, I became almost what you would call ‘a star.’ I don’t want you to misunderstand me. I shouldn’t have said that they were ashamed of me. That is misleading. They were ashamed of my profession, as I was myself, of course. I understood them. I revelled in my sacrifice. I was young, good-looking then. Don’t look at me now, Andrei Andreiech. I have changed through suffering and age. Then, suddenly, I was seized by a craving for decency, respectability. You see, no woman really knows what it means to be respectable until she’s had to give it up. I thought: if only I could marry a man who was respectable and rich, who would be willing to support my family! My heart craved for the title, the status, of a married woman because that title was denied me.

  “And then came Nikolai Vasilievich.

  “I loved him. Love was thrown into the bargain. It was unexpected, irrelevant. And then love became salient, supreme, altogether dominating; and as I realized how I loved him, so I realized that my family, my sacrifice and all that this had once meant to me, were but of secondary importance in the face of my love. Love was some greater thing—altogether greater. And Nikolai was rich. He owned a large house in Petersburg and had gold-mining concessions in Siberia. But that seemed a minor point. He was to get his divorce and then we would be married.

  “We came to Petersburg and immediately got busy with the divorce. He visited lawyers. His friends and relatives all intervened and gave him advice, some in favour of a divorce and others against it. I did not at that time know what a hopeless, cruel and heartbreaking thing a Russian divorce really is. Nikolai’s wife did all she possibly could to prevent his getting a divorce. Eisenstein, the man she ran away with
before Nikolai Vasilievich and I met, had no money. He was a Jew dentist, with no practice. They succeeded in proving to Nikolai Vasilievich’s satisfaction—I never quite followed the case—that if he asked for a divorce he would be compelled to plead guilty and so lose the children; and Nikolai Vasilievich was determined to keep the children. On my advice, Andrei Andreiech. I had begged of him, entreated him, insisted on it. ‘Divorce or no divorce, you must keep the children, Nikolai,’ I said. I knew that they would be spoilt, their lives marred and wasted, if they fell into the clutches of their mother and that Jew dentist. Yes, I insisted on it, Andrei Andreiech, even if it meant that there was to be no divorce. And what that cost me!…

  “For I hadn’t told my people in Germany that Nikolai was married at the time. I didn’t want to add further injury to their pride. I thought it would be a matter of a few weeks and that then Nikolai and I would be married, and all would be well. How could I know? How could we know?

  “We had the children—and what sweet girls they were—but no divorce. Nikolai sent money to his wife regularly every month, so as to keep the children; and so I lived with him just as if I were his wife, and indeed few people knew that I was not. We lived very happily. He sent money to my large family in Germany, regularly every month, and naturally they thought that I was married to him. How could I tell them that I was not? What did it matter after all, provided that they didn’t know? I felt that it was my duty to sacrifice my personal pride for Nikolai’s children. And such nice, tender, beautiful girls they were too, Sonia and Nina, so loving, so good, so pretty, so obedient, so well-behaved. Every one who saw them said to me: ‘Fanny Ivanovna, what nice children you have. You must be so proud of them!’ I was. And, Andrei Andreiech, I didn’t tell them, you know, that they were not my children. It may have been wrong of me; but I did not. I was really so proud of them, Andrei Andreiech, and as I had sacrificed the divorce for them … it made me feel as if they were my own.

  “Nikolai was still always sending money to his wife to keep her quiet. She always threatened to make a nuisance of herself. She wanted the money, too—badly indeed, because that man Eisenstein she lived with wasted her money in speculation on the Stock Exchange. Often she would demand money in excess, and when Nikolai refused, she would come up to Petersburg, enter our house, or go to their school and carry the children off to Moscow and keep them there with Eisenstein. Once she even threatened to bring a case against Nikolai Vasilievich on the ground that he had run away from her with me, if you please! She was tired of Eisenstein, who had spent all her money and proved a dismal failure in dentistry, and, I think, she was anxious to get back to Nikolai. I was in the way, you see. So what do you think she did? She spread stories about me. She said I was a German governess in her household and had beguiled Nikolai into running away with me. She spread this tale among our friends and relatives each time she came up to Petersburg.”