I understood now why Nikolai Vasilievich sympathized so heartily with the people in the play.
VII
THAT EVENING I REMEMBER AS AN EVER-deepening initiation into the very complicated affairs of the Bursanov family. It had been raining again, and the washed cobbles on either side of the street looked clean and shining as if newly polished. For once Nikolai Vasilievich was at home, but he had gone into his study, and, sitting at the piano, I could not help listening to what was said in the room.
“But Mama does want a divorce herself, Fanny Ivanovna,”—from Nina.
“She didn’t before,” said Fanny Ivanovna.
“She does now,” said Nina.
“I wonder why?”
“I don’t really think, Fanny Ivanovna, that you have any right to know that.”
“She can’t have a divorce, anyhow,” said Fanny Ivanovna. “And I have asked you to make that clear to her.”
“You see,” said the girl of fifteen, “Mama has her own point of view. She doesn’t look at things from your point of view. Why should she?”
“Why should she …” repeated Fanny Ivanovna. And there was a long pause.
“I’ve done what you asked me,” said her ambassador, shrugging her pretty shoulders.
I stopped playing.
Nikolai Vasilievich came back and we sat down to dinner, and amongst us appeared Vera. I was to understand her presence a little afterwards. The atmosphere was tense. No doubt they had all been discussing the family tangle. No doubt Nikolai Vasilievich and Fanny Ivanovna had been shouting and blackguarding each other as usual. But silence reigned for the moment. It was as if they had all been a little overstrained by this uncanny family burden. Then there was a ring at the bell.
It was merely the postman, and the maid brought in a letter for Fanny Ivanovna. So soon as she caught sight of the envelope she got flushed and wildly excited.
“It’s from Germany,” she cried, and something about her flush, about her manner, told us that the letter was a painful reminder of her painful circumstances, rather than a joy. She tore it open, and for some reason the room grew still: all seemed to watch her in perfect silence. And then she fluttered the letter and flushed again, and cried out to Nikolai Vasilievich in a voice of deep sorrow and reproach, as a tear welled up from her eye:
“Listen.… ‘Dear Fanny … and Nikolai!’ And Nikolai! And Nikolai!… Do you hear: And Nikolai!…”
‘Nikolai—i—i—’ echoed with pathetic insistence. It was a sound that rent the heart. Tears flushed her eyes, sobs choked her throat. And for the moment, at all events, they forgot her clumsy stupidities; they felt only how irreparably they had wronged her.
And then, like the announcement of the next act, there was another ring. We heard an unfamiliar voice inquire in the hall if Nikolai Vasilievich was at home. Then the visitor’s card was brought in by the maid.
“No!” said Nikolai Vasilievich, rising very emphatically. “I draw the line there.” And he walked away to his study.
Fanny Ivanovna, her tragedy forgotten in the excitement of the visit, snatched at the card.
“Eisenstein!” she exclaimed.
“Och!” cried the three sisters in disgust.
And then, uninvited, unannounced, Eisenstein walked into the dining-room.
He was a tall, flabby man, with prominently Jewish features, and probably good-looking as Jews of that type go.
“Nina,” he said, looking round. “I want to see Nina. I missed seeing her in Moscow.”
“Yes?” Nina said, “I am here.”
Fanny Ivanovna looked at Eisenstein with scrutiny. I think she could feel no real enmity to this man because he had, after all, run away with Nikolai Vasilievich’s wife—to all appearance a necessary preliminary to her own advent into his life. It was quite obvious that Eisenstein was not in the least seeking a tête-à-tête with Nina, but on the contrary, desired to exhibit his overflowing emotions to as large an audience as possible.
“Nina,” he said, halting in the middle of the room. And I remembered that Eisenstein had been an actor in his youth, a conjurer and ventriloquist. “Nina, she mustn’t leave me. You who have such influence over your mother must insist on that.” And sooner than any one had been prepared for it his body quivered and he wept bitter tears.
“Moesei Moeseiech,” Nina said, “you mustn’t cry. That won’t do at all.”
“Monsieur Eisenstein,” intervened Fanny Ivanovna, rising dramatically, “this is my house and I won’t allow it.”
“You leave him alone, Fanny Ivanovna,” said Nina.
“I can’t bear it, Nina,” he said, coming up to her. “Why must she leave me? Haven’t I always been very kind to her, Nina? She says I speculate. But why do I speculate? For her, Nina.”
“For her!” cried Nina in bewilderment.
But he misunderstood her intonation.
“Why, of course!”
“With her money, Moesei Moeseiech?”
“My dear child, even if it is her money, what of it? I am still doing it for her, trying to get her more. My heart bleeds for her. She has so little money. Your father in his immoral pursuits of other women has forgotten his own wife.”
“Moesei Moeseiech, leave us.”
“But why, Nina?”
“You’re … hopeless.”
“Hopeless? And you say that, Nina. Haven’t I always been a good father to you when you came to live with us at Moscow? Haven’t I always been a good father to you? Now, have I not? Nina, Nina! You alone can stop her.”
“I’ve had too many fathers, Moesei Moeseiech, and I am not sure, if not too many mothers.” She paused. But when he opened his mouth to speak, she rose abruptly, turned on her heel and left the room. Fanny Ivanovna rose a second time.
“Monsieur Eisenstein,” she said, “you have upset everybody. I must ask you to leave my house. I cannot have you exhibiting your domestic difficulties in this strange manner before our friends. We all have our sorrows, but we must keep them to ourselves. They are of no interest to others. Please leave us.” Again she must have thought of him as the man who had delivered Nikolai Vasilievich from his wife. She had a kind look for him, but she was a determined lady.
But for not being put out even by the most determined lady, give me a Russian Jew. Eisenstein looked round and saw Vera in the twilight, mute and hostile, perched up on the arm-chair in the corner …
“Vera! Verochka!” he cried. “You, my daughter—”
“S—s—s—sh!” Fanny Ivanovna hissed like a serpent. “You must not!”
“Must not, why? Why mustn’t I?” he said with that characteristically Jewish intonation. “Why should I be ashamed of my own daughter? You treat me as if I was an outsider and didn’t belong to the family. Why should my daughter be ashamed of me? She is my daughter, and you know it, Fanny Ivanovna.”
Whether this was a revelation to Vera, or only a confirmation of what she already knew or had perhaps suspected, it was hard to tell. She sat there on her perch, mute, aloof.
“Now,” said Fanny Ivanovna, coming up to him with indomitable determination, “you must certainly go.” And he left the room, sobbing.
“How horribly he cried,” said Sonia. I followed her out into the drawing-room. When I returned I perceived that Vera was wiping her tear-stained eyes and telling Fanny Ivanovna who had evidently been consoling her:
“And I had hated him so.… Oh, I still hate him so … so.…” She half sobbed again, wiping her tear-stained face with her little handkerchief. And I thought that I could now discover something Jewish about her pretty features.
And then there was another bell. It seemed that evening that it was one long succession of bells each carrying in its trail some fresh dramatic revelation, as though we had been privileged to witness some three-act soul-shattering melodrama. It was to be a night of bells and sobs.
VIII
THIS TIME THERE WAS A GOOD DEAL OF WHISPERING between the maid on the one hand, and Sonia and Nina
and Vera on the other. Then the three sisters vanished into the hall, and there was more whispering. It seemed that the heavy front door had been only half shut and that they had all gone out on to the landing.
About five minutes later they returned to Fanny Ivanovna, purring round her like three pretty kittens, till Fanny Ivanovna became suspicious. Then they grew still, and a mysterious look came on Nina’s face.
“Fanny Ivanovna,” she said.
“Yes?”
“Will you do something for me, Fanny Ivanovna?”
“I will. You know, Nina, that I will do anything for you, anything—reasonable.”
“I’m afraid you will think it unreasonable, Fanny Ivanovna.”
“What is it?” said Fanny Ivanovna, for some reason looking round at me, as though I were a party to the conspiracy.
Nina looked at Sonia, and Sonia nodded.
“Mama is outside—on the landing. She wants to see you. Will you see her? Please, Fanny Ivanovna, please.”
I understood now why Vera had come back to Petersburg.
“Please!” cried Sonia.
“Please!” echoed Vera.
Fanny Ivanovna rose very swiftly, as if by the swiftness of her movement she intended to intercept at the root that which she considered quite inadmissible.
“No!” she said, colouring highly. “No!”
“Fanny Ivanovna, please!”
“No, Nina, no. It’s out of the question.”
“Oh, Fanny Ivanovna, please!” they entreated her. “She is our mother, Fanny Ivanovna. We can’t have our mother waiting on the landing. After all, she’s our mother.”
“After all,” said Fanny Ivanovna, putting a terrible meaning of her own into these simple words, “after all I am the mistress of this house. True, I have been thrown into the mud and trampled on, told I am not wanted, done away with, about to be thrown into the street like a dog, but while I am here I am the mistress of this flat. After all, I am!” she cried out, almost in tears.
“Very well, then, I will never speak to you again,” said Nina.
The three sisters again vanished on the landing, and whispers were renewed, and Fanny Ivanovna resumed her needlework, her agile fingers, it seemed to me, moving quicker than was their custom.
“The lap-dog …” she whispered, turning her face to me. “The German governess.… Andrei Andreiech, why should I? Why should I?…”
When at last the three sisters returned from the landing, such depressing silence descended upon the room that I thought I would do well to follow the example of the two Pàvel Pàvlovichi and go home. There was no one to see me out this time. As I reached the lower steps of the broad winding staircase I heard the faint sound of a woman weeping. Then I could see a dark silhouette between the large glass double-doors leading out into the dim street. It was also dim in the vestibule. As I came nearer I saw that it was Magda Nikolaevna Bursànova.
My first impulse was to dash upstairs for a glass of water. But the sobs died away at my approach.
It was still raining heavily.
I raised my hat.
“I have sent the porter for a cab,” she said, wiping her tears hurriedly. “I don’t know if he’ll get one now. It’s raining terribly.”
And as we waited, before I knew where I was, she too began her confession.
“You must have heard of me very often,” she said in her gentle, musical voice. She was a very gentle-mannered woman and in her youth she must have been curiously like Nina. She even had, I thought, the sidelong look. “I am sure,” she said, “I shouldn’t like to hear all that you have, no doubt, been told about me.”
Then she added:
“I know you. Nina has spoken of you. But there is one thing, Andrei—I don’t know your——”
“Andrei Andreiech.”
“There is one thing, Andrei Andreiech, that I want to know. Why, why can’t we put our heads together and decide something, help each other, instead of standing on our silly dignities? Heaven knows that we are in a muddle. Heaven knows that we have all of us sinned in our own small way, Andrei Andreiech. I came. I wanted to see her, to arrange things, to have it all out. I want to marry and leave them. I want Nikolai to give me a divorce. Then I will leave them alone. They can all do just as they please. I bear no one any malice. I came, and I was not admitted.… Into my own house, my own flat. It was my flat, Andrei Andreiech. I chose it. I bought the things and arranged them. There isn’t a single thing in here that wasn’t mine. When all is said and done, they are my children, Andrei Andreiech. And I have to wait outside like some low hawker—a tatarin—on the landing … not admitted.…” She was about to sob again, but then thought better of it and replaced her handkerchief.
“But, Andrei Andreiech, to send my own daughter to me to Moscow as a kind of emissary to ask me on no account to grant Nikolai Vasilievich a divorce, so that he should be unable to marry again—I call that low, low.… All this time she has wanted a divorce—reproached me, in fact, for standing in the way. What has it to do with me? If Nikolai really wanted a divorce, how could I have prevented him from getting it?”
“He would lose the children,” I explained.
“Why should he lose the children?” she asked.
“It’s the Russian law.”
Magda Nikolaevna laughed. “Are you a law student?”
“No.”
“I thought not.”
“Why?”
She laughed again. She had, I noticed, a very wicked laugh.
“Andrei Andreiech, you are very, very young, and believe everything you hear. If I am in the wrong and he is in the right, is it likely, I ask you, that under any conceivable law Nikolai should lose the children? It is the one who is in the wrong that loses the children. If Nikolai does not want a divorce because he does not want to lose the children, he knows that he is in the wrong.”
“So you think that is the reason he doesn’t want a divorce?” I said, and then added, “Of course I knew that.”
“Ah, but you didn’t know why he would lose the children by a divorce. If you are logical you must admit that it is so. It’s either so, or—”
“Or?”
“Or Nikolai simply did not want a divorce.”
“Why?”
“Perhaps he didn’t want it.” She shrugged her shoulders and laughed wickedly. “You see, you can’t have it both ways. Either he didn’t want a divorce because he didn’t want to lose the children, in which case he obviously admits that he is in the wrong. Or,” she laughed wickedly, “he merely says so to Fanny Ivanovna, who is stupid and knows no better, because he does not want a divorce … so as not to marry her.”
“But he does want a divorce,” I said.
“Now,” said Magda Nikolaevna. “I suppose you know why he wants it now?”
I nodded, and she nodded in answer—I thought rather significantly. I remembered that it had always been her wish to read for the Bar, but her own life had been too busy and complicated by legal proceedings to admit of the leisure necessary for the pursuit of her hobby.
“You know only half the story, young man,” she said. “You know, for instance, that I ran away with Eisenstein. But you don’t know why I ran away with Eisenstein.”
“I am sure I don’t want to,” I said, “if that is not being very rude.”
“Half-truths are more dangerous than lies,” said she. Here the porter returned with a cab.
She searched in her little bag for a coin, but I anticipated her.
“But you must,” she said. And dragging me after her under the raised hood of the cab and seated therein comfortably she was about to begin a long story, but suddenly checked herself.
“It’s rather absurd,” she said and then laughed softly, which for the moment made her seem to me again curiously like Nina, “that I should be telling you why I ran away with Eisenstein at a time when I ought to be telling you why I have just run away from him.”
“I am going to marry,” she said.
&nbs
p; “Yes?”
“An Austrian, Čečedek. Do you know him?”
“No.”
“Andrei Andreiech,” she said suddenly, as we sat under the dripping roof, bouncing softly over the cobble-stones, “why don’t you go in for law? It’s so interesting.”
And glad of a change of subject I told her why I did not propose to read law. But as we turned on to the Liteiny and began ascending the convex bridge, she bent eagerly towards me and told me in great detail why she had run away with Eisenstein and why she was now running away from him.
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.”
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